The controversy surrounding the surreal horror game Horses only seems to add to the game's mystique. Stores like GOG and Itch.io, which sell horses despite being banned from platforms like Steam and Epic, now list the game as a number one bestseller. At least one store also appears to have changed course on the ban as Humble put the horses back up for sale.
Italian developer Santa Ragione describes Horses as “a mysterious first-person horror adventure that blurs the line between reality and the darkest corners of your imagination.” The focus is on a shocking image: a farm full of people, naked except for a horse mask covering their faces, all treated like livestock.
HORSES is currently the best selling game on GOG 😱
— @santaragione.com (@santaragione.com.bsky.social) 2025-12-03T22:59:31.127Z
So what's so terrible about all this controversy in the first place? Valve at the time of the 2023 ban, they told the developer that “we will not distribute content that we believe depicts sexual behavior involving minors” and no resubmissions “even with changes” will be accepted.
“We believe the ban may have been triggered during Steam's original submission by an unfinished scene on the sixth day in which a man and his young daughter visit a farm,” explains Santa Rangione. “The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game, “horses” are people wearing horse masks) and must choose which one. What follows is an interactive dialogue sequence in which the player leads, as if he were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition caused the flag to appear.”
In the final version of the game, the developers “changed the character in the scene to a twenty-something woman to avoid contrast and, more importantly, because the dialogue presented in the scene, which deals with social structure in the world of HORSE, works much better when spoken by an older character.”
Santa Ragione invested two years of development and $100,000 to develop Horsesand expected that the studio would “most likely” fold unless the game was put on Steam, which remains the largest seller of PC games today and the main lifeline for most indie games. Obviously, the hype surrounding the ban had the opposite effect on this game – but future developers working on sensitive topics who can't count on support on this scale may still have reason to be wary of Valve's policies.
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