Following Valve's decision to ban distribution of developer Santa Ragione's first-person horror adventure on Steam – a move that the studio says seriously jeopardizes its future – the PC store owner responded with a statement providing “additional context”, saying it had “extensively” discussed the request to reconsider its decision before declining to do so.
Italian studio Santa Ragione, whose award-winning works include Saturnalia, Meditteranea Inferno and Mirror Moon EP, is developing Horses in collaboration with director Andrea Lucco Borlera. It is described as a three-hour adventure about “the burden of family trauma and puritanical values, the dynamics of totalitarian power and the ethics of personal responsibility”, and has players take on the role of a rural farmhand over 14 days one summer. The combination of monochrome visuals, live-action intermissions, and interactive scenes is striking, as is its premise, which imagines a world in which naked human “horses” are kept as livestock, but despite the nudity, the studio makes clear that the game is “not pornographic” and “not pornographic.”[intended] excite.”
This is important in the context of this week's controversy. Horses recent release date announcement was accompanied by a message that Steam had refused – after submitting an apparently unusual request to review an early, incomplete build – to sell the game on its platform in 2023, with an automated message informing Santa Ragione that it would not “distribute content that appears on [its] decision to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.”
Santa Ragione says Valve declined to go into detail, leaving it open to speculation that the decision was prompted by a scene that they stress was “in no way sexual” in which a patron's young daughter rode on the shoulders of a female “horse.” As the studio's creative vision has evolved, the daughter has grown into her 20s (all the characters in the game are clearly over 20), but she remains frustrated by Valve's apparent refusal to re-evaluate the finished game for review, despite it now being reviewed and approved for distribution on the Epic Games Store, GoG, Humble Store, and Itch.io.
There's a lot of backstory, and the whole story is even more complex; more information can be found in Frequently asked questions about the Santa Ragione ban on Steam and in our interview with studio founder Pietro Rigi Riva. Notably, however, Valve did not provide comment ahead of Santa Ragione's announcement.
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A week before the announcement of Horses being banned from Steam, Eurogamer asked Valve to respond to specific questions raised in our interview with Santa Ragione, but no response was received by the stated time of publication of the story. However, following yesterday's Horses release announcement and subsequent press coverage of Steam's ban and Santa Ragione's likely closure, Valve provided the media with some “additional context” for its decision, offering some insight into why it requested a review of the unfinished build and stating that it “extensively” discussed Santa Ragione's request to review its ban before handing down the final denial. Valve doesn't reveal details Why it decided not to allow a re-review of the final build and doesn't specify whether Santa Ragione was given a reason for the refusal – the studio claims Valve hasn't been transparent in its communications. Here's Valve's statement in full:
“We tested the game back in 2023. At the time, the developer listed a release date on Steamworks that they planned to release several months later. Based on the content on the store page, we told the developer that we would need to review the build itself. Sometimes this happens if the content on the store page raises concerns that the game itself may not meet our guidelines. After our team reviewed the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback on why we couldn't release the game on Steam, according to our rules and recommendations for registration. Some time later, the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed this in detail and informed the developer of our final decision that we were not going to release the game on Steam.”
Despite Horses being pulled from Steam, it will still be available for purchase through Epic, GOG, Humble storeAnd Itch.io December 2. It costs €4.99/$4.99.
