Horses has become the current face of the fight against video game censorship and what gets to be art. After getting banned from Steam and the Epic Game Store, the narrative horror game has become a bestseller on GOG.com, and has brought gamers of all stripes together in support of it. But as a game, Horses doesn’t deserve all this — neither its bans nor, after playing it myself, all the glowing praise.
Horses is a collaboration between indie studio Santa Ragione and Italian filmmaker Andrea Lucco Bolera. Bolera wrote the game and acted in and directed the FMV cutscenes that are interspersed throughout, while the developers at Santa Ragione worked on the technical aspects. It’s a brief experience, taking roughly three to four hours to complete. But though it’s mercifully short, by the end I was desperate to be done with it.
In Horses, you play as Anselmo, a 20-year-old layabout sent to a farm for two weeks by his father to learn the value of good old-fashioned hard work. Guided by the farm’s overbearing owner, Anslemo is tasked with a number of chores that you complete with the simple click of a mouse. Watering the garden, feeding the dog, and tending to a herd of the titular horses — naked humans with horse masks permanently affixed to their faces with a collar. Over the course of 14 days, Anselmo gets to know the horses, their master, and just how much suffering he – and by extension the player — can take.
In all the conversations about this game, from how its ban from Steam and Epic is ruinous for art and gaming, to Horses’ merits as a narrative horror experience, I haven’t seen much talk about how funny it is. Having read the extensive content warning and knowing some of the nasty surprises the narrative had in store, my first visceral reaction to the game was laughing out loud.
Examining the graveyard revealed dead equines named Bojack and Artax. After the farmer, the next character you meet is a dog and, naturally, you can try to pet him. I thought it was uproariously funny that the developers of something as bleak and upsetting as Horses still felt beholden to the unwritten game development rule of “if dog, must pet.” Although this one growls at you if you try, and well… he’s also a human in an animal mask.
The first seven days passed in hilariousness enhanced by the FMV action and the lofi graphics, animations, and interactions all of which I found charming. Whenever the farmer talks, the game zooms in on his face as his lips conform around teeth that don’t move. When Anselmo wants to express an opinion or make a choice, you have to pick between a thumbs up or down button or smiley faces that resemble the pain charts you see in hospitals while his unblinking face bobs or shakes with your choice. In a horse race against the farmer, using the WASD keys to move created a leaning motion as though the human under me was realistically responding to a grown man’s weight on his shoulders.
I even found the explicit stuff funny. And because of some of the game’s design choices, these moments aren’t graphic at all. Sex between horses looks like two mannequins ragdolling their pixelated junk against each other while barely making a sound. When you catch the farmer late one night watching his dog and a horse go at it, his jerky motions clearly indicate he’s supposed to be masturbating. But because of the limitations of the animation (and his chastity cage), his hands just wildly clip through his abdomen. This is the game proscribed from Steam while the aforementioned Sex Standing features uncensored closeups of full penetration, moaning and all.
But as much as the unintentional hilariousness of Horses disarmed me, it brutally undercut the message of the game. Horses randomly going at it are supposed to reinforce how the thoroughness of their dehumanization has reduced them to their basest, most animalistic instincts. But the use of animations and graphics that were revolutionary when the Dreamcast was new transformed those moments of horror to comedy. That’s not to say we as humans don’t often laugh when we’re supposed to be horrified, or that a more serious, realistic design would be better (good lord, no). But frontloading the funny created an ironic distance between me and the more appropriate emotions the rest of the experience is trying to evoke.
As every new day ticked by, moments of escalating brutality started to appear like jump scares. Rather than disturb me, it felt like watching a comic wear the same bit into the ground. One of the least effective narrative devices is shock for shock’s sake and though I’m confident that was not the intention, that’s what it feels like.
I got bored quickly. That might be exactly what the director was going for, highlighting that when there’s so much ugliness around you, you can’t help but relegate it to background noise. But that only happens when you have no choice (or choose to do nothing) and this game was designed to give the player very little choice. In some of the moments when Anselmo actually gets to say “no,” he’s made to do whatever anyway. How am I supposed to sit in the uncomfortable tension of what my action or inaction has caused, if my participation was pre-determined by the game’s code? A more interesting game would have let me make my own decisions and forced me to live with the consequences. But as the game is, I’m forced to live with the consequences of playing it.
Steam banning Horses, though it’s resulted in all this positive attention, is still a tragedy. Eventually the attention will fade and the gaming community will move on to a new cause du jour, leaving Horses on platforms that have much less reach than Steam. I’m glad I played it. Horses deserves to be played — if for nothing else, than to appreciate the games that do better what Horses failed to do.
Horses is out now on GOG.com, Humble, and itch.io.