Major plot spoilers about horses follow. Also here are some perhaps suitable music.
Near the end of Santa Ragione's grotesque horror game Horses, there's a subplot that involves cutting a hole in a wire fence so another character can escape the game's monstrous farm. The escape was foiled, the hole was boarded up, but later, not understanding my goals, I returned and found that the repairs were not completed, the boards did not completely cover the hole. So I skipped.
My explicit goal that day was to enter a locked barn hidden from the main building. At first I thought it was all part of the plan and that I had dug my way to the back entrance. I walked along the fence looking for another crack. But then I looked around and realized that I no longer saw the wall near the Farm, only a couple of strange stone apostrophes. I was wondering if I had actually achieved what I think is your implicit real goal in Horses – to completely abandon the game's means of representation and get rid of simulation entirely.
As I discuss in my reviewHorses explores how image-making techniques become techniques of control, discipline, and cruelty, with the player being both the operator of these technologies and their victim. It draws on the violence inherent in film history: in my review I mentioned horse breeding; I might also mention that almost all film emulsion is made using gelatin derived from bones and skin – while suggesting the vileness of some game design conventions that depict the body as something that can be detailed and subjugated.
The secret villains of this piece may be the camera and the interface, and Horses ultimately delivers on that idea by allowing you to sabotage a huge movie projector. In doing so, the project runs the risk of internal contradiction because the game does not end when you click the reel. For this act of sabotage to be fully resonant, the simulation must fall apart and die the second you close the scissors.
Honestly, I think the giant projector is meant to be a literal object in the plot and setting, as bizarre as it is, and the story really wraps up soon after. You could also argue that the ending is about restoring the game's own technology, rather than just sabotaging it through some token changes to costumes and perspective. This is roughly the conclusion I came to during the review. But maybe it's just image Sabotage is better understood as a “failure” that must be resolved by using one's antagonism more creatively. Perhaps Horses is secretly an immersive simulator – one of those self-loathing shuttlers that always encourages the player to be a naughtier animal, bypassing every intended solution and completely destroying the design.
So grab the leash and break the bars of the cage. I like going off the map in video games because video games can be very frustrating because they keep you inside. This desire blossoms every time Battlefield scolds you for leaving a mission area, and every time a fragile pile of boxes or a mocking cordon denies you access to a curious alley. Luckily, video game worlds are never as solid as they seem. Of course, you can use noclip tweaks and mods, but it's much more satisfying and vindictive to find and implement gaps in the fence without even leaving the game.
You skillfully lean on the texture of the wall, trying to “convince” the simulation that you are moving in an acceptable way, to convince it through some half-felt computer logic that you are already on the other side of the wall, that you must be there because otherwise the numbers won't add up. You engage WASD like a rusty lock, spinning your character around in hopes that an elbow or ankle might pop out. And maybe one time in a hundred the geography softens and you emerge into a terra infirma, a wavering other world where you are “truly” free – where your much-publicized choices in a video game actually matter because the results aren't so predetermined, where navigation is possible but the rules don't fully apply, a realm of tilts and distortions and inversions.
Behind this fence, the agonizing hybrid language of films and horse farming simulators turns into beautiful edges and spots. The Farmer's suffocating gaze is forgotten, and you can finally walk among the farthest trees. These are V-Rally trees, Crash Bandicoot the trees are x-rays of lungs hung along the hillside to hide the abrupt disappearance of the geography behind. Grass and cow parsley push forward boldly for several meters before giving way to downright strange soil, its network of roots and rocks twisting and humping like a blanket draped over surgical equipment.
Moving around gets treacherous because here you finally have to worry about gravity. I looked back at the Farm, small and insignificant among the half-visible walls, and fell from the steep slope onto the bank of the photograph. I've reached the threshold of what I think game developers still call a skybox: the landscape ends with an image of something else wrapped around the navigation plane. “For a penny, for a pound,” I said to myself and threw myself over the edge.
I'm still not sure if I actually broke horses. I ended up literally punching a hole in the fence, which seems a bit intrusive in terms of the noclip strategy. It remains possible that Santa Ragione developed this capability, just as Analgesic Productions created a “prototype” environment in Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. And yet it's good here. No Farmer, no horses, no “horses” to worry about, the projector rattles but aimlessly, the image unchanged. Although I eventually reloaded and finished the game “correctly”, I still have a save with a broken fence, and as far as I'm concerned, my time in Horses ends there.
