Horses
Thoughts on the game, and the right-wing geopolitics trying to restrict it
The games platform Steam recently refused to sell the new game Horses, by Santa Ragione. Further, Steam stated they would never reconsider that stance, even if the game was changed to remove any elements they didn’t like. Nor would Steam explain why they were blocking it. I thought all that was rather weird and unfair in itself. So I bought the game elsewhere, to make my own mind up.
Here is some background:
It got me thinking about a lot more than just the game itself.
First, some global context.
Delisting Of Games, And Back-door Censorship
US payment providers have increasingly been pressuring vendors of creative media (books, comics, games or film) to restrict what they sell. And, as with most things American, the restrictions don’t apply to media that include violence: no, that’s fine. Kill thousands in a computer game? Go ahead. But natural nudity? “No, won’t someone think of the children!” The US and UK governments are hypocritical like that. If they really cared about children they wouldn’t defend and deify royals and presidents known to have associated with paedophiles and sex traffickers. According to US and UK establishments, it’s fine to abuse young people for sex if you are rich and powerful.
The payment providers, in line with US government policies, also don’t like anything by, or for, LGBT people, and are increasingly trying to make it unsellable. Many LGBT games have already been delisted. The payment providers also object to anything labelled as “adult,” even if it is perfectly legal.
Here is some background on this:
Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material
Valve point to Mastercard restrictions as the payment firm deny influencing adult game removals
How payment networks control the definition of acceptable sex in videogames
And, as we would expect, the shitty UK government supports whatever the US wants to do:
It is a form of censorship, but spun so that the payment providers claim nothing dodgy is going on. It works by them setting penalties and restrictions on what transactions they will allow, but in vague enough terminology that no one is certain. So companies err on the side of safety as they don’t want to lose the ability to be paid. And suddenly you have thousands of perfectly legal games being delisted.
And It’s also About Control
So there are elements of right-wing US prudishness and hypocrisy. But along with everything else going on right now, it’s not a coincidence. It’s part of a pattern, of governments increasing surveillance of civilians and seeing just what they can get away with. All in the name of entrenching their power and preventing the people they are meant to serve from having any way of challenging their actions. It’s why Snowden and Assange were persecuted and hounded by the US government for revealing its crimes. Rather than own up to the crimes and stop doing bad things, the US decided to punish those who tell the truth or reveal all the things the US should not be doing. And there’s a pattern there which we’ll see again.
One example of the control is with the US taking over TikTok after pro-Palestine news trended, because the US didn’t like young people being able to discuss the truth, and see that Israel (an “ally” of the US government) was committing genocide. The US government wanted to be able to control what young people see.
It’s an underlying reason why Australia recently blocked access to most social media for all children and young teenagers. And other Western nations with connections to genocide and war crimes are keen to follow suit.
It’s connected to the same reasons for the UK blocking access to chunks of the web and social media for young people, using flawed authentication systems which also stop adults from accessing the same content. Systems which are, at best, clunky and introduce massive levels of security risk (such as providing scanned copies of irreplaceable documents like passports, which are used in identity theft); or broken and easily-fooled AI systems with their own security implications.
But, since the US is pushing for AI as a dodgy deal with tech companies, the UK and others are also falling into line and encouraging it, regardless of environmental and ethical considerations.
So all these moves globally are connected. Partly puritanism, partly state limitation of access to social the media to control narratives and help push propaganda, forcing people to go to state-influenced establishment media. Then the governments and corporations they work with can continue genocides and war crimes without people knowing. Australia, the US, and the UK are often in lockstep when it comes to growing authoritarianism, mass surveillance and fascism.
Some good writers on topics like Western attempts to take control of the narrative are Caitlin Johnstone and Jonathan Cook.
The US want to control everyone’s access to tech and the media. It also wants to be able to use its control of US-based global finance and communication to force individuals, nations and organisations to obey it. We saw that in brutal reality when the US cut access to emails and finance for staff at the United Nations and International Criminal Court in order to hinder the UN’s work:
Cut off by Their Banks and Even Iced Out by Alexa, Sanctioned ICC Staffers Remain Resolute
UN calls for reversal of US sanctions on Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese tells Al Jazeera US sanctions have made her ‘non-person’
The US blackmails the International Criminal Court to protect war criminals
This is the US using its power to treat those who oppose war crimes worse than if they were the ones committing war crimes. That’s how fucked up it is. Good people being punished by those committing genocide. And these nations complicit in genocide are the same nations which have committed past genocides. The UK. The US. Australia. Europe.
We are not, and never were, the good guys.
The US is a rogue state, which ignores international law and does what it wants. Sadly, the snivelling sycophants in charge of countries like the UK don’t dare criticise the US or try to stop them. The “politicians” would rather keep yapping to gain the role of favoured US pet.
It’s a good reason to avoid US big tech and finance. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Paypal etc. All are implicated. Some advice:
And so US payment providers are clamping down on things, acting as censors, putting pressure on Itch and Steam to block things. And that’s how we got here, with Steam blocking Horses due to US pressure, just as GOG blocked Devotion due to Chinese pressure. (Buy Devotion here, direct from the developers: it is an excellent horror game!)
The Game: Horses
Here are my thoughts having played and completed Horses.
The game is set in Italy, at an undefined time, in an undefined rural area. Everything is in stark black and white. You play a young man sent to work at a horse farm for two weeks.
The twist is revealed almost immediately, so doesn’t count as a spoiler: the “horses” on the farm are actually abused humans, with unremovable horse masks fastened to their heads. But no one refers to them as humans. The pretence is kept up. They are horses. Property. Animals. They must be fed, or cleaned with a hose. You are pushed to do those duties. You can even ride one.
And as the fortnight goes on, things become more and more grim, the farmer more unreliable, and secrets begin to get revealed.
Humans can do what they want to the “horses”. Just as they can to real horses. All the talk of compassion is just to hide the brutal truths of slavery, which is another of the game’s themes.
And you, as the player, become complicit in this.
Whether the people are forced to become “horses” as punishment from a fascist state, or whether it is just a surreal element of magical realism, we still have the same outcome: horror.
When I completed Horses, I had a good think.
The game isn’t about sex, or violence.
It is about the mindset that dehumanises people. That others them, so they can be killed and exploited. And, further, (in my opinion), about how that is done to other species, and nature.
It’s about oppression and resistance to it. It’s a world taken to the extremes of fascism, racism, speciesism, capitalism, settler colonialism. How evil gets justified and institutionalised. Life becomes product.
As such, I took it as criticism of all the evils of the worst governments. I think of Israel, and how their media, press and government continually refer to Palestinians as “animals”, and have for the 75 years they have been stealing their land for a Western colony, and committing genocide against the indigenous people. As the US did with native Americans, and Australia with Aboriginal Australians. As the British did again and again. As Europe did. All of those nations support, arm and defend Israel’s genocide today, whilst persecuting those who oppose genocide. No wonder US companies won’t publish a game like this.
The game’s setting is basically an obscene, remote, and private farm run by the pervert Donald Trump. The game farmer’s friends (also perverted priests and vets) might as well be Epstein and Prince Andrew. The farm might as well be Epstein’s abuse island.
It reminds me of many other things. The horror of The Tank / La Cisterna (a terrific Italian novel by Nicola Lombardi), crossed with Animal Farm.
The graphics for the countryside are beautiful, often photo-realistic mono that brings to mind the game Betrayer. The figures less so (why are their forearms and legs apparently burnt and scarred?).
It’s the kind of game that should be made, which makes it all the more pronounced that Steam and Epic won’t publish it. Both US outfits which allow endless violence and exploitation in games, but get jittery about sex or a naked human body.
As a result of this censorship I’ll stop buying games directly on Steam, as I stopped buying on GOG when they refused to publish Devotion. I’ll just buy keys from Humble and Fanatical, which means I still get GOG and Steam games, but without any money going to GOG or Steam. And I already avoid Epic.
Horses is worth experiencing, for sure. And it’s worth supporting the developers who tried to do something innovative, resisting authoritarianism in an increasingly authoritarian world.
And as to the “controversy”? The only controversy is that it’s about evil which is in charge of many countries at the moment. Resisting oppressive governments and cultures is difficult. The controversy isn’t the game, it’s the issues above, about censorship and state control and persecution.
Even if it included the scene that apparently upset Steam – of a girl riding one of the “horses” around the farmyard – the whole point is the “horses” are mostly treated throughout as if they are horses. A young girl wanting to ride one isn’t sexual, any more than a woman breastfeeding is sexual. Only if you have some kind of perverted mind would you perceive things that aren’t there.
Where to buy Horses:
PS I’m also an author. You can buy my books, or subscribe to my newsletter. I would be grateful for either. :-)
Thoroughly depressing world situation, thank you for highlighting it in one place.
I'm not a gamer, Karl, but love the idea of confronting the objectification of others, learning how to identify it and then to not participate in it.
Regarding censorship, I decided to make monthly donations to my favourite go to publication, Consortium News -- and when my payments wouldn't go through I called my credit card holder -- a credit union in Canada -- and asked them why. They checked and said that it was being blocked, but that they could remove the block manually and put the payment through, so I had that done.
I reported this to Consortium News, the most reliable news source I know of, and hopefully they followed up.
Here's an article about the founding of Consortium News.https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/09/cn-at-30-why-bob-parry-started-consortium-news/. It's won many awards for journalism, including the Julian Assange Award in 2023.