There's More To Horses Than The Steam Ban: The Controversial Horror...

After playing Horses, I found it fascinating, but it didn't take its juxtaposition of mundane chores and extreme violence far enough.

Steam's (two-year-early!) rejection of developer Santa Ragione's new art horror game, Horses, and Valve's subsequent refusal to clarify what triggered the ban or allow Santa Ragione to submit an updated build, has unfortunately overshadowed what's interesting about the actual game.

By provoking controversy, Horses has clearly done part of its job as a work of art, although after playing it, I was disappointed that it didn't fully take advantage of its potential as a game. It's visually strong and thematically coherent, and a fascinating attempt to explore topics and tones in games that have often been reserved for film, but it struggles to integrate the experience of the player in a way that doesn't distract from its point.

In Horses, you play a young man, Anselmo, who's sent to stay and work for two weeks on a farm. The farm is populated mainly by naked humans wearing horse masks. Bad things happen on the farm. To be extremely blunt about Horses' themes: this is an intentionally disturbing game about fear, repression, inherited violence, and societal control. It deals with sexuality frankly, unpleasantly, and often. There's also slavery, murder, suicide, normal assault (not just sexual), and a scene in which Anselmo helps castrate someone.

Horses borrows heavily from the language of film—4:3 aspect ratio, black and white color scheme, with silent movie-style title cards instead of spoken dialogue and flashes of FMV—but also it makes liberal use of in-engine awkwardness to add to its uncanny effect. I would describe its vibes as "rancid" and its appeal as "your mileage may vary."

So it's not surprising that Horses ran afoul of Steam's vague content policy, which among other things forbids material intended to "shock or disgust". The question is not whether Horses contains shocking, disgusting material—it does! this is the point of the game—but whether it is a storefront's place to censor the expression of these things. The point of art, after all, is to provoke emotion.

The fact is, with a set of rules as loose as Valve's, all Horses needed to do to get banned was make someone behind their opaque corporate wall uncomfortable. It clearly did this. That is a rousing testament to the achievement of the game. Horses will make you uncomfortable. It is an itchy piece of art, one that gets you shifting uncomfortably in your s

Source: PC Gamer