Why Indie Game Horses Keeps Getting Banned, Steam and Epic Take Stance

Over the years, some of our favourite video games have featured some questionable content with many of them begging the question if they would even be allowed to be published in this day and age.

Now it is one first-person horror game from Italian indie developer studio Santa Ragione that has come under fire after its most recent game gets banned on Steam, Epic Games and even Humble (albeit temporarily).

The indie game Horses tasks players with working on a creepy horse farm as part of a two-week summer job.

However, you soon discover that these are not horses at all, but rather naked humans wearing horse masks and although the concept sounds pretty wild on the surface, developer Santa Ragione wrote this game in order to explore themes of abuse and violence.

Whilst Steam preemptively banned the game during its development, Epic Games refused to distribute the game just one day before it was expected to launch on 2 December.

Santa Ragione

This was reportedly due to Horses being in breach of Epic’s “Inappropriate Content” and “Hateful or Abusive Content” guidelines by featuring explicit depictions of sexual behaviour as well as themes related to abuse and animal abuse.

Ultimately, Epic Games judged Horses to have an Adult Only rating, meaning that it could not be distributed on its store.

However, Santa Ragione has stated that its game “does NOT contain explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior".

It adds: "All nudity in the game is completely censored via pixelation.

"The content presented does not in any way promote abuse (including animal abuse). The game is a strong critique of violence and abuse in general.”

The studio has revealed that communication with both Valve and Epic has not been fruitful with it having to deal with automated responses and vague answers.

Is Horses' Controversy Warranted?

That being said, it seems as though the majority of the controversy comes from one scene that follows a man and his young daughter visiting the ranch.

Whilst there, the young girl wants to ride one of the horses and if the player encourages this, the scene will show her riding atop a naked older woman.

However, according to IGN’s Pietro Righi Riva, this scene was changed in the final build with the young girl being replaced for an older woman.

“We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition 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,” its developers shared.

At the time of writing, Horses is available to purchase on both GOG (where it is now a best-selling game) and itch.io.

Additionally, you can visit the official Horses website to download it straight from there.

Whether or not Horses deserves to be banned from multiple storefronts remains to be seen but there is no denying that this controversy has given the small indie title a whole lot of publicity.