admin When all is said and done at the end of Horses‘ With a running time of two hours, Santa Ragione’s horror play feels remarkably unremarkable. The game subsequently entered into a huge storm of controversy banned from PC stores like Epic and Steamand the reasons for that ban are strange, as the specific content listed in the storefronts doesn’t seem to actually exist in the game. Santa Ragione says Valve declined to be on the list Horses in the store due to scenes that show “sexual conduct involving a minor”, but after playing the game I’m not sure what this refers to. Horses is not for the faint of heart, but then again it isn’t.
Horses is grotesque, unsubtle in its imagery, and underneath all the grit, grime and bloodshed it says it something. It’s just not something truly revolutionary. The gruesome imagery paints a fairly straightforward picture of the psychological damage of a forced Puritan lifestyle on the self and society, and even the gritty, PS2-esque aesthetic gets the point across well enough. I just wonder how much we would be talking about it if it weren’t for Valve and Epic’s actions.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even talked about the details of how yet Horses it will happen, but that’s because all those details are less interesting to me than the hypothetical one. Horses stars a young man named Anselmo who is sent by his parents to work on a rural, remote farm in a small town.
That sounds simple enough, until he meets the horses he’s going to care for, who are actually people who have been stripped naked and forced to wear horse masks while acting as if they were a herd of horses. You even ride on their shoulders a few times, much to your chagrin. But it gradually turns out that the disturbing images are a way out Horses to explore how the farmer’s limited sexual growth and gender-negative upbringing have caused him to develop a psychosexual need to control the sexual behavior of others, while finding ways to circumvent the mental and physical chains he has placed on himself.
If nothing else, Horses conveys this quite well, even if it’s not subtle. The farmer comes from a remote town where sexual frustration is imposed on a civilization by a doctrine that preaches that abstinence is close to godliness, and so his entire life has become fixated on something he wants but has been brainwashed into believing he cannot have it. This man’s entire mental and sexual development is chained like a chastity belt, and so he has created an entire company and network to support a farm where he can impose that same self-denial on every poor bastard wandering near his land.
There is a lot of talk about it Horses‘ use of explicit sexual images as reason for ban on the most popular PC stores, but even as it takes the intersection between humanity’s self-imposed religious chains and its animal nature to its horrific extreme, I didn’t find it particularly unnecessary. It was over-the-top, suggestive, and comically heightened in some scenes, but that felt in keeping with the game’s broader aesthetic choices.
Horses is not a good game and its technical presentation is particularly painful. It literally made me sick with its stuttering, jerky whine; it’s pretty ugly, and almost everything about it looks and feels like the work of a team still getting their feet wet in Unity. Still, I’m willing to believe that the ugliness might be a conscious aesthetic, since the ugly nature of the story is perhaps best conveyed in a rough, crude paint job. When people talk inside Horsesthey are given disturbing close-ups as their lips flap, punctuated by silent film-style subtitle cards. Santa Ragione wants this game to feel dirty, and that doesn’t just apply to the subject matter.
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Quote from the back of the box:
“The game your mother was worried about.”
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Developer:
Santa Ragione Game Studio
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Type of game:
Horror game in which you manage a farm while things spiral out of control.
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I liked:
It does a pretty good job of communicating what it’s trying to convey.
Every recording of Horses‘derelict farmhouse is designed to look like a place without real heart, soul or love. It is a small space built solely for use, and since it is not a farm designed for the care of animals, everything in it is small, cramped, hastily built, and only the horses and tools are stored, with no regard for comfort or care. The fact that the game is just plain ugly to look at only helps Santa Ragione convey that sense of emotional desolation. I can almost smell the horrible, blood-stained farm through my computer, while the sound of buzzing flies echoes through my headphones.
My feelings Horses largely boils down to “yeah, that’s probably what they were going for, and it’s delivered in a clear, concise, and effectively raw way.” I understand Horses says at one point, but I don’t find anything particularly powerful about it. It’s striking, but is it? That memorable? Is there anything in this game that’s much more objectionable than the average Ari Aster movie?
There is one moment that has received quite a bit of criticism: a scene where the farmer forces one horse to sexually abuse another so he can watch, pounding on his chastity belt as it happens. This is definitely one of the most gruesome moments in Horsesand most of the game’s worst moments are rooted in some form of sexual violence. Just like everything else in HorsesI don’t feel like I learned much from recording this moment other than that it communicates exactly what it’s trying to do. I don’t agree with the criticism of that Horses The use of sexual violence is just another point on a scoreboard for shock value, because when the game portrays these disgusting acts of violence, I can see how they feed back into the themes of sexual distortion and the psychological effects the farmer’s experiences have had on him. But there is a large dividing fence between understanding and appreciating his reflections on this issue.
Horses is fine. It’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it knows what it’s trying to convey, and it uses a fairly succinct visual metaphor to get it across. It’s gross to watch, but I only mind when the jittery framerate makes me nauseous. I don’t think it’s as unpalatable as Epic or Steam, and I’m still surprised that something that feels mostly tame and along the lines of an A24 horror film has caused so much controversy. If Horses hasn’t exposed anything we didn’t already know about the dangers of a sheltered, puritanical lifestyle, if anything it’s exposed Steam and Epic as cowardly companies that can’t be bothered to actually investigate the work they’re denying access to. I wish we could have had the conversation these bans sparked about a better game, but… Horsesat the very least, is fine enough to have deserved better than being left out in the rain.
