You might not immediately recognise the name Santa Ragione, but the independent Italian studio has been creating boundary pushing, award-winning games for over a decade and a half now. It launched into space for 2013's mesmerising ambient puzzler Mirror Moon EP, it took to the Italian countryside for 2016's politically minded Wheels of Aurelia, it fled all manner of horrors in the ancient Sardinian town of 2022's Saturnalia, explored post-Covid trauma in the blistering Italian sun in 2023's Mediterranea Inferno, and it's about to venture into even stranger, darker territory with Horses, an unsettling first-person narrative horror adventure set on a farm whose livestock consists of naked masked humans. But the excitement of Horses' long-awaited arrival on 2nd December has been tempered by more sobering news. After a series of confounding decisions by Valve, Horses is effectively banned from Steam. And unable to reach a significant portion of the PC market, it's highly unlikely to recoup its development costs – meaning Horses very well might be the studio's final game.
Founded by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi in 2010, Santa Ragione's first project, Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, was a physical card game. But after dipping its toes into the digital world with 2011's stylish first-person auto-runner Fotonica, video games are where the studio's focus has stayed. However, its output is anything but traditional. “I [don't think we're] good at competing on established genres,” Pietro tells me as we sit down to discuss Horses' imminent release and its shock Steam ban, “but I think we have a strength in developing experimental things that can prove concepts or push what can be done with the medium a bit.”
As per the studio's mission statement, Santa Ragione's games are designed to evoke a “visceral response” in players, but Pietro goes a little further when I ask him to elaborate. “[I think we have] a desire to make games with meaning,” he says, “that stay with you and make you think about things, make you reflect and ask questions, and that relate to society, to politics, to the human condition, to the real world in a sense that is not just escapism or pure abstraction… I think that's the thing that makes it exciting for the team to work on.”
And the studio's set-up is somewhat unorthodox too. As Pietro puts it, Santa Ragione operates “more like a film production studio, where people kind of come together for a project rather than being there all the time”, often from fields outside video games. Saturnalia's art director, Marta Gabas, for instance, is a film and theatre set designer who had never made a game before. Over the years, however, a “more stable team of five people” has formed at Santa Ragione's core, either working full-time or dedicating the majority of their time to the studio.
But Horses isn't solely a Santa Ragione game. As was the case with Lorenzo Redaelli's Milky Way Prince and Mediterranea Inferno, Horses is actually a co-production, originating from a concept by director Andrea Lucco Borlera – the studio having once again taken a creator under its wing to help make their vision a reality. “It's like we're publishing it, but we're really producing it,” Pietro explains. “For these sort of externally directed games… it was a feeling of, ‘Okay if I don't do this, if I don't help this person make this, probably no one else would.' Not because the game doesn't deserve it, but because they don't have the connections we have to take responsibility in turning this into something… We wanted to empower these authors to turn their ideas into actual distributable, complete produced packages that could be sold. And that means that while they did a lot of work in the writing, the directing, the scene set-up, there's a lot of work that was from our main team to turn all that into a game that was playable.”
This confluence of wildly differing disciplines and experiences, combined with the studio's boundary pushing outlook, has led to some remarkable games. But Horses – which uses the horror genre to explore themes of guilt, repression, power dynamics, and our role in systems that impose rules – might well be the studio's last project thanks to Valve's refusal to distribute it on Steam. It's a story that begins prior to Horses' official unveiling in June 2023, when it was set to receive significant exposure during IGN's Summer of Gaming showcase. In preparation for the big reveal, Santa Ragione submitted Horses' Coming Soon page to Steam for review – a routine but important step (Steam wishlist data can be critical when trying to secure a publisher). This time, however, things were different.
Valve's lengthy response time was, as Pietro puts it, “not usual”. Looking back, he believes Horses' mature content declaration, combined with the uncensored rear nudity in its submitted screenshots, may have caused Horses to be flagged for further investigation. However, it was Valve's next request – to see a build of the full game and a play-through guide before it would consider approving Horses' Coming Soon page – that the studio found particularly puzzling.
Ordinarily, Pietro explains, a developer wouldn't be expected to submit a build to Steam until a couple of weeks before launch. The request, he says, is “unheard of… especially since normally when games do their Coming Soon page they're very far from being finished.” Even so, with Horses' unveiling looming, Santa Ragione complied. “We rushed to make that version and submit it,” Pietro recalls, “and then weeks pass and the day is getting closer and I'm sending emails in panic.”
But Horses' approval never came. Instead, one day before the game's big reveal, Santa Ragione received an automated message from Valve stating Horses would not be approved for distribution on Steam and could not be resubmitted. The ‘why' came as a shock to the studio. “While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us,” Steam's automated response read, “we found that this title features themes, imagery, or descriptions that we won't distribute. Regardless of a developer's intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor. While every product submitted is unique, if your product features this representation—even in a subtle way that could be defined as a ‘grey area'—it will be rejected by Steam.”
Initially, the studio was perplexed. Valve's automated response did not point to specific scenes or elements that might have triggered the ban. Nor, says Pietro, would Valve elaborate on its rejection, despite repeated requests for clear answers in the months that followed. “Did they think that the protagonist looked too young?,” he ponders, “Did they think that the horses look too young? Did they think that some of the actors in the live-action sequence looked young?” In a lengthy FAQ detailing the ban, now available on its website, Santa Ragione notes all characters in Horses are “clearly older than 20 years old, as communicated by their appearance and through dialogue and documents that you will encounter in the game.” It also stresses Horses is “not pornographic” and was “never [intended] to arouse”, instead using “challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion.”
For Santa Ragione, the vagueness of Valve's rejection – and its refusal to offer further “detail, review, or guidance on what to change or remove” – continues to be a point of deep frustration. If the company had been willing to elaborate on the ban, says Pietro, Santa Ragione would have happily worked to address concerns.
And nearly 18 months on, the studio still isn't certain what triggered the ban – which, Pietro notes, occurred long before Steam's recent adult games purge. However, the studio now suspects a work-in-progress scene from day six of Horses' narrative (the game follows the player across 14 days as they work as a hired hand on the farm where the “horses” are held) might be the culprit. In the early build reviewed by Valve, day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked “horse” while it's led by the player. “The scene is not sexual in any way,” the studio notes in its FAQ, “but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag.” And crucially, as Santa Ragione's creative vision evolved during development, the young character was changed into a twenty-something woman. “Both to avoid the juxtaposition,” it explains, “and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.”
“I'm 99 percent sure if we didn't do the [early] submission back then and [Valve only] saw the finished build,” Pietro continues, “it wouldn't trigger any particular scrutiny really.” And notably, the final version of Horses has been reviewed and approved for distribution across numerous other PC storefronts, including the Epic Games Store, GOG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io. And while Horses won't be launching on consoles due to porting costs, Pietro says the console makers who've seen Horses have said they'd be “happy to have the game on [their] platform”. However, despite Horses' acceptance elsewhere, Valve's apparent refusal to permit a resubmission in order to review the now-complete game and distribute the game on Steam means Santa Ragione faces a difficult future. As Pietro puts it, the ban means Horses has effectively been denied access to 75 percent of the PC gaming audience, seriously hampering its ability to find additional funding and recoup its costs.
“We've always made experimental games that have managed to kind of break even and fund the next project,” he explains. “We never had a breakthrough hit… but we built a pipeline that was somewhat predictable and allowed this to work.” That pipeline heavily relied on access to Steam and the ability to sell games in bundles, but Valve's policies around how it distributes keys to developers (Santa Ragione says the company now “withholds keys from indie developers who do not meet undisclosed sales thresholds”) created a “perfect shitstorm” where suddenly both mechanisms had disappeared. “I couldn't find finishing funds because nobody wants to invest in a game that can't come out on Steam,” Pietro continues, “and at the same time, we were denied keys for Saturnalia, which I had a big bundle lined up for and which was going to give us enough money to cover for the development of Horses. [And] it was like, okay, this has become completely unsustainable.'”
The bitter irony for Pietro is that Santa Ragione has “never gotten this much interest from third parties” as it has for Horses. “We had multiple publishers actively coming to us,” explains Pietro, “and be like, ‘Hey, we want to make this game.'” And many of those big publishers were initially unperturbed by Steam's ban. “The main reaction,” he recalls, “was, ‘Leave that to me… I know everyone at Valve, let me figure it out', and so they'd take the game, and a month later they'd come back and be like, ‘No, you're fucked. Bye.'” And seemingly nothing will get Valve to budge. “We've tried everything,” Pietro continues. “I was already in touch with a real human being [at Valve] since our first onboarding on Steam… but they were like, ‘I'm sorry this happened… I don't have insights on the reasons for the ban. I've brought your plea to the review team and they've declined to re-review and their decision is final.'”
Pietro says he also spoke with people in the industry who “really respect the work we've been doing” and who're “way more influential and respected than I am” in a desperate effort to understand Valve's perspective. “They've all tried, even within Valve, to get meetings, to get responses, and nobody could help us.”
Valve's attitude continues to mystify Pietro. “It's clearly something with the game, but I don't know what,” he says. “Is it the visual style? The politics? The message? What is it about this that provoked such a reaction? But to be honest, I'm thinking it was just someone having a bad day and being like, ‘No, this is not coming out.' And no one's going to challenge that decision because [of the flat way Valve is] structured. It's a theory, I don't know. Because otherwise I can't justify the fact it won't just tell us more specifically why Horses is not acceptable… It's extremely frustrating and also fucked up… a system that allows that is broken.”
Prior to the Steam ban, Santa Ragione had invested €50,000 into Horses' development, but with Valve apparently unwilling to shift its position and publishers bailing as a result, all traditional funding avenues were eventually exhausted. “That's when I basically went to my friends and was like, ‘Hey, can you lend me €5,000?',” Peitro continues. “And I did that until I got the €50,000 we used to finish the game… loans from people that care for me and the team and the project who are willing to basically risk… so that the game can be made.”
And throughout all this, the team has faced the personal upheaval of finding a way to get by. “We all had to not just find side jobs but find main jobs to work and to sustain ourselves while we were trying to find the finishing funding for Horses,” says Pietro. But even with funding now secured, the lack of access to Valve's platform means there's a strong chance Santa Ragione won't be making any more games. As its FAQ explains, Santa Ragione will be winding down operations after Horses' release and faces a “high risk” of closure.
Pietro admits there's a small possibility Horses might do well enough to save the studio, but he's taking a wait-and-see approach. “I mean, Minecraft, Untitled Goose Game sold very well outside of Steam,” he explains. “But it's very rare, it's very unlikely, and unless something like that happens then [closure is] the most probable outcome. But, I want to see what happens. I want to see how all of this turns out. It doesn't make sense to make a decision before seeing that really, especially since all of us are already doing other jobs to actually live.”
“Managing the studio [which is] likely closing,” Pietro adds, “and the grief that comes with it, and also the expectations for the emotional toll [knowing] we would have to go through this and go public with this, that's been very, very stressful.” When I ask why he's been willing to go through 18 months of emotional turmoil and additional financial risk for Horses, he takes a moment to think. “I mean, on one end, if I'm honest with myself, I could never go to Andrea, the author, and be like, ‘Hey, the game that you worked on for four years and Steam banned it? Bye.',” he replies. “And maybe a part of it is also to show the world that this was an injustice, because I think when people play the game they'll be like, ‘It's fucked up it was banned.' [But also] it's a game that deserves to exist.”
“I think if you're looking for games that make you think new things and feel new things, and that shows a new interactive language to discuss these things, Horses has a lot to give,” he continues. “The way the composition is done; the way we have these live-action intermissions; the way we do picture-in-picture and split-screen; the way we communicate the story and setting… [It's] almost theatrical, all taking place in one space and with this rhythm of days, where each day is a chapter elaborating on the same dynamics and the meaning of violence through these increasingly complex situations… I think if people know what we've been trying to do for the past 15 years, it'll be very obvious how this is a continuation of that exploration… in a genre we haven't tried before… It's scary, it's funny, it's ridiculous, it's disgusting, and it makes you feel a combination of things I don't think other games have done before.”
“I don't think Valve has any interest in games developing as an artistic medium capable of tackling anything complex,” Pietro replies when I ask if he thinks the company's response to Horses is indicative of its broader outlook. “I think it sees games strictly as an entertainment where there is no challenging experimental material… It only becomes interested if [a game] can bring in an audience and demonstrate on its own that it can generate lots of sales… I think this approach is very much incompatible with an art form. And I think this reflects in the way that they handle in general the rules and the processes in the distribution.”
At this point, Pietro seems resigned to the fact there'll likely be no last-minute reprieve for Horses on Steam, but he still hopes some good can come from Santa Ragione's experiences. “I don't want the reaction to be just destructive or negative,” he explains. “Ideally I want this to be a starting point to finding common grounds that ultimately benefits developers.” If nothing else, he hopes the studio's decision to go public might spark a discussion, putting pressure on Valve to clarify its processes and rules. “And maybe next year they push an update to Steam, without recognising anything that's happened, and be like, ‘Hey, we've put together these guidelines that you have to follow and now we support an appeal process for banned games.'”
“I think Valve needs to have clear rules on what's admissible and what is not,” he continues, “with examples and guidance; what's soft pornography – that doesn't affect us but it needs to be part of the process – what's the level of violence and goriness that is accepted on the platform? And then it needs to give a path of compliance that is predictable and explicit, possibly with a human [who can say] no, you can't show this, and we can be like, ‘Okay, we'll change the camera angle, we'll change the shot… we'll do something to get it approved.'”
“We pay [Valve] not just the $100 submission fee, but 30 percent of everything we make as it is,” he continues. “I think [the company] can afford it, and we deserve it, and it would just make the approach more predictable and sustainable.”
And despite Santa Ragione's uncertain future, Pietro's passion for games remains strong. “It's that feeling of untapped potential,” he explains when I ask him what continues to attract him to the medium. “Even before I started, when I was younger, I could tell games could be more,” he says, “and so that's always been the appeal to me, that there's so much space for experimentation and trying new things… I think there's been a regression in terms of how much games have pushed the boundary in the last six to eight years, which I think is partly due to aggregation of budgets, aggregation of distributors and publishing forces, a bunch of things. But I still think there's that space in the medium for it to become much more. And I think the only way to do it is to take big risks, and do weird things.”
Horses costs €4.99/$4.99 and releases via the Epic Games Store, GOG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io on 2nd December. Eurogamer approached Valve for specific comment on numerous elements of this story but the company did not respond in time for publication.
