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PayPalFrom Andrea Lucco Borlera / Santa Ragione, HORSES has proven to be a highly controversial title with both Epic Games and Steam banning its release. However GOG, Humble Store and itch.io have all decided to keep it. Although, Humble Store briefly decided to stop the release they did actually put it up.
What actually is the game? Their explanation from the press details: "HORSES is a 3-hour first-person horror adventure set over fourteen days on a rural farm, where you work as a summer hand under a cryptic farmer and follow “a few rules” that unravel into increasingly surreal, unsettling tasks. As the sun sets and the facade of tranquility crumbles, you decide whether to keep to the safe path or venture into the farm’s hidden depths. The game blends interactive scenes with live-action intermissions, monochrome visuals, and silent-cinema title cards, with unique gameplay events each day. It's a game about the burden of familial trauma and puritan values, the dynamics of totalitarian power, and the ethics of personal responsibility."
The situation with it is a quite confusing, and to explain it a fair bit the developer has put up a lengthy official statement and FAQ. So far it seems both Valve and Epic Games have refused to actually clarify exactly why they have chosen to ban the game on their stores, making it all the more puzzling. Like many other games and media, it has some subjects in that some may find uncomfortable but there's plenty of games with far worse out there and live and Steam too.
The launch trailer is below:
Direct Link
This is another case of issues with Steam keys too, as Santa Ragione say they were hoping to include their previous game Saturnalia in a game bundle. However, according to them, Valve have placed new rules on key requests too:
Steam has recently begun refusing to grant developers keys for their own games. In the absence of clear rules or guidance, Valve led developers for years to believe they could request keys as needed, building communities and businesses outside Steam while still creating value for Steam users. It now withholds keys from indie developers who do not meet undisclosed sales thresholds. Our multiple requests for keys for our previous game, Saturnalia, were denied without any specific criteria we could work toward to resolve it. As a result, we have been unable to include the game in bundles we had planned to help recoup development costs for our next project, HORSES. This policy shift was never communicated and has been applied retroactively to existing titles. Developers and partners are understandably reluctant to speak publicly or challenge Steam, since as a de facto monopoly it holds disproportionate control over our business.
It's not entirely clear what recent rule change they mean, as Valve publicly changed the rules way back in 2023 where you can see what changed via SteamDB to place certain limits.
Santa Ragione believe the removal from Epic Games and Steam, along with the above issue resulting in funding issues, may cause their studio to close. Hopefully it will find success on the other stores where HORSES is now available.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Last edited by vic-bay on 5 Dec 2025 at 12:37 pm UTC
However I don't understand why this story only became public 2-years later, why Valve refused to release the patched game and why EGS chickened out. If you play the game now there is nothing deserving a ban.
Quoting: amataiA horror movie with the same scene that got the game rejected by steam would have caused its authors to be sent to jail, though.It would not. As a concrete example, Lars Von Trier's "Antichrist" (2009) (nominated for the "Palme d'Or" at the Cannes Film Festival and shown uncut in both the UK and the US - a far cry from your jail scenario) features a graphic intercourse scene between two naked adults, showing a toddler present and watching them in the same room. That is a far more explicit scene than the one in "HORSES", which - again - features no scenes with any children and never contained any scenes where a child was shown in connection with anything sexual.
Would you kindly stop pretending that the game at any point featured sexualisation of a minor, without any evidence to support this? It makes it very hard to discuss the actual topic at hand if we also have to pause to consider unfounded scenarios as if they were facts.
I am talking of the scene that have caused Horses to be rejected by steam and was then removed. Your sentence
and never contained any scenes where a child was shown in connection with anything sexual.is incorrect according to Horses faq.
I may be biased due to the cultural context. France went from very tolerant to mixing sexuality with minor to extremely hostile in the last few years due to a storm of chocking revelations and high-profile cases. There was way worse than Antichrist dating from 2009. The opinion have shifted sharply and a film with a similar scene would struggle to be projected at Cannes in 2026. I have read a ton of testimony of survivors of abuse that were published in the press, so the subject become touchy for me.
The points that I tried to pass, maybe badly as I'am not a native English speaker was that the rejection of the game that was sent to steam is unsurprising considering steam rule which are, in my mind, very relaxed.
The debate did go on should steam rules be even more relaxed. But the debate I expected is whether Steam should provide a second chance with its selection process. And I think that it should not in such a case. If they really wanted to ship the scene, they should have followed steam rules and provided a patch like most Japanese eroge.
Quoting: amataiThen let's agree to disagree.We're not disagreeing, as this is not a question of opinion, but of facts.
I am talking of the scene that have caused Horses to be rejected by steam and was then removed. Your sentence
and never contained any scenes where a child was shown in connection with anything sexual.is incorrect according to Horses faq.
I may be biased due to the cultural context. [...]
You keep saying that there was sexual content involving a minor, without providing anything to back it up.
Being biased does not mean you get to misrepresent the actual events; what you could claim is that the description of the scene in question makes you uncomfortable, but not that the scene contained things that there's no evidence for or indication of.
And, once again, now you're claiming that the Horses FAQ states something that it absolutely does not.
This is not bias or difference of opinion, it is just plain lying.
If you want to argue that nudity equals sexual content, or discuss the cultural landscape of current France, then go right ahead, but let's stick to the facts, shall we?
Spoiler, click me
The scene had no artistic value according to the faq, so the devs removed it as it was detrimental to their narration and it cause their game to be rejected by steam (it is only implicit in the faq so you may dispute the causality there). And now they are capitalizing on their wrongdoing for marketing.
A lot of submitters will submit something very against the rules, then when you ask them to remove it, submit something slightly against the rules, and they're doing that to figure out their limitations and where you actually draw all the lines. This will happen over and over, sometimes re-reviewing ten or twelve times. Oftentimes, they'll ask you for a point by point violation listing and will sealion your moderation and submission teams to death just trying to get the most past you.
In this case, I don't know if that's what the studio behind HORSES was doing, but I do know that a lot of places have decided that if you fail the first time for a set of specific reasons, you do not go to the front of the queue for re-reviews, and in some cases you may not even be allowed a re-review. What I also don't know is whether the scene described (young girl riding a naked woman like a horse) was actually what crossed the line, or even if the scene as described is what was actually submitted. We only have the studio's word on that, and they've insisted that Valve hasn't said why they were banned. And yet, they ALSO say they removed the scene and requested a re-review. That there is an inconsistency in their story, and digging any level deep shows a large number of these inconsistencies going back with this studio.
By no means do I think Valve is a "great company" or that they're doing wonderful things for the world, but I do think we're intentionally being misled here by the studio and I think their timelines of events do not mesh with how the flow of time in reality works.
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