Santa Ragione, an Italian indie studio known for acclaimed titles like Saturnalia, Wheels of Aurelia, and Mediterranea Inferno, has developed Horses, a first-person horror adventure set on a secluded rural farm where players take on summer hand tasks involving surreal and unsettling interactions with “horses” that are actually nude humans wearing horse masks, treated as beasts of burden. The 3-4 hour game blends interactive gameplay, live-action FMV intermissions, monochrome visuals, and silent-cinema title cards to explore themes of familial trauma, puritan values, totalitarian power dynamics, and personal responsibility, challenging players to obey the farmer’s rules or subvert the horrifying reality unfolding over 14 days. Horses includes extensive content warnings for 18+ audiences, covering physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery like mutilation and blood, depictions of slavery, torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny, all applied to the human characters or protagonist with no animal harm depicted.
Announced in June 2023 at Summer Game Fest with a trailer, Horses was submitted to Steam shortly beforehand for approval, as the studio planned a release a few months later; unusually, Valve requested a full playable build despite the game being only halfway developed, and Santa Ragione provided an unfinished version. Days before the public reveal, the studio received an automated rejection email stating: “After review, we will not be able to ship your game Horses on Steam. While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won’t distribute. Regardless of a developer’s intentions with your product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor… This app has been banned and cannot be reused. Re-submissions of this app, even with modifications, will not be accepted.” The ban, deemed permanent by Valve’s curatorial team and unrelated to recent payment processor-driven adult content crackdowns, provided no specific scenes or elements cited as problematic, despite months of appeals, requests for clarification, and offers from Santa Ragione to modify or cut content.
Santa Ragione speculates the ban was triggered by an incomplete Day 6 scene in the initial build, where a man and his young daughter (a placeholder model) visit the farm; the girl selects a “horse,” leading to a non-sexual interactive dialogue sequence in which the player leashes and leads a naked adult woman (in horse mask) around a field with the young girl riding on her shoulders, creating a potentially misinterpreted juxtaposition of nudity and a minor. This scene was later redesigned in late 2024, replacing the young girl with a twenty-something woman to eliminate the issue and better suit the dialogue on the game’s societal themes; all characters in the final version are explicitly over 20, conveyed via appearance, dialogue, and documents, and the game is not pornographic but uses subversive, grotesque imagery for artistic tension rather than arousal. The studio emphasizes no content falls into Valve’s described “grey area,” and live-action intermissions (non-nude) were not flagged despite informal early concerns.
Valve later responded publicly, confirming they reviewed the 2023 build after store page concerns prompted a playable check, provided feedback on non-compliance with guidelines, reconsidered upon request after internal discussion, and upheld the final no-ship decision; they did not elaborate further on specifics. Santa Ragione co-founder Pietro Righi Riva called the opaque process “scary, humiliating, and patronizing,” accusing Steam of moralizing censorship via vague policies that favor safe, algorithmic content over artistic freedom, especially as a monopoly controlling over 75% of PC sales, and noted prior issues like denied Steam keys for Saturnalia bundles that hindered funding.
Financially, Santa Ragione invested around $100,000 in Horses—$50,000 initially after partnering with creator Andrea Lucco Borlera, plus friend donations after Saturnalia underperformed—hoping sales and bundles would recoup costs, but the ban erased publisher interest and viability on non-Steam platforms; the studio has funds for only six months of post-launch support (bug fixes, QoL updates) and plans to wind down operations, with closure likely unless Horses sells exceptionally well, as all earnings will repay contributors. Horses will release on PC on GOG, the Humble Store, the Epic Games Store, and Itch.io on December 2, 2025.
Source: horses.wtf
