A disturbing art game Steam does not want
Horses is a new art horror game from developer Santa Ragione that has already made waves for reasons that go beyond gameplay. Valve rejected the game from Steam years before its planned release and refused to clarify why or allow an updated build. With Steam acting as the dominant PC storefront, that decision sparked a fresh debate about censorship and what kinds of interactive experiences are allowed to reach players.
Horses is clearly designed to provoke. You play as Anselmo, a young man sent to work for two weeks on a farm populated by naked humans wearing horse masks. The game leans hard into disturbing themes like fear, repression, inherited violence, societal control and extremely unpleasant depictions of sexuality and abuse. There is slavery, murder, suicide, assault and even a scene where Anselmo helps castrate someone.
Visually, Horses borrows heavily from film. It uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, black and white presentation, silent film style title cards instead of voice acting and bursts of live action footage to increase its uncanny tone. The result is intentionally rancid and uncomfortable, making it very easy to see how it collided with Steam’s vague rule against content that exists mainly to shock or disgust.
The controversy raises a key question for PC gaming: should a major storefront be able to quietly block lawful but disturbing games without explanation, especially when those games are clearly using horror and shock as artistic tools rather than simple exploitation?
Gameplay, routine and where Horses stumbles
Beyond the content debate, Horses is interesting for how it uses game structure. The experience starts with a strong sense of routine. On Anselmo’s first day, the farmer gives strict instructions about daily chores. You must feed the dog, put tools back in their proper place and follow a clear checklist.
Knowing how brutal the farm’s secrets are, this simple routine quickly becomes important. As a player, you feel a real fear of upsetting the farmer, and the dull tasks start to act as a fragile comfort. Each morning you wake up, eat breakfast, grab the ladle, scoop slop and feed the dog. In a world full of horror, the repetition of chores becomes the one solid thing you can rely on.
This is where Horses shows its potential as a game rather than a film. Watching a character repeat their routine in a movie is different from actively performing that routine yourself. By making you carry out the same tasks over and over, the game could have created a powerful rhythm of safety and boredom that later gets shattered by violent or shocking events.
However, Horses does not fully commit to this idea. The ability to do your chores is removed fairly early, and the game stops using repetition as a design tool. The presence or absence of routine elements like the ladle becomes an obvious signal that something unusual is about to happen, which makes surprises feel more like scripted theater than real disruptions to your control.
In its second half, Horses speeds up dramatically. Instead of letting you move through familiar loops, the game pushes Anselmo along a narrow track from one disturbing setpiece to another. The pacing feels more like a ride than an interactive experience, with little room to pause, think or regain your bearings. You are not so much playing the game as having it happen to you.
This is odd given the clear influence of art house cinema, where boredom and long stretches of quiet are often used on purpose to make moments of violence or shock hit harder. Horses is willing to confront the player with disgust and fear, but it seems afraid that lingering too long on routine would risk losing their attention.
The result is a game with strong imagery and some genuinely haunting scenes but a shaky argument for why it needed to be interactive. Its best idea, the use of chores and repetition to build unease and attachment, is cut short just when it could have become most powerful.
PC storefront power and uncomfortable games
The debate around Horses and Steam is not only about one game but also about how PC gaming handles controversial topics. Valve’s content rules are broad and subjective, which means a small group of people inside a massive platform can quietly decide that a particular game is too much and simply block it. When the same company operates what is effectively a monopoly storefront for PC games, those private decisions have outsized impact.
Horses absolutely contains material designed to disturb the player, but that is often the point of serious horror and art. The experience is not meant to be fun in a traditional sense. Instead, it asks players to willingly stay with discomfort, disgust and sometimes boredom in order to process the larger themes behind what they are seeing.
By banning the game without transparent reasoning, Steam has drawn more attention to Horses than it might otherwise have received, while also reinforcing worries that PC developers do not really know where the lines are. Games that explore topics often reserved for film and literature can find themselves shut out of the biggest marketplace even when they are legal and clearly acting in an artistic context rather than as cheap shock content.
Horses is not a perfect game. Its mechanics do not always support its ambitions and its strongest structural ideas are underused. But it is a serious attempt to use the tools of interactive media to approach the same uncomfortable spaces that cinema and books have explored for decades. As conversations continue about PC storefront power, game censorship and what topics interactive art is allowed to tackle, Horses is an important case study in both the possibilities and current limits of the medium.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/theres-more-to-horses-than-the-steam-ban-the-controversial-horror-game-is-a-great-example-of-how-games-can-effectively-borrow-from-film-and-how-they-can-also-stumble/
