Featured Image Credit: Santa Ragione
Topics: Indie Games, Steam, PC
Over the years, a lot of games have been banned at the national level by governments fearful of the effect releasing them may have on society as a whole.
Famous examples include Rockstar Games' Manhunt, which featured very graphic violence for the time, but if you return to it today, it just looks like three polygons smushing up against each other.
The point is that, just like any other art medium, games have the capacity to cause controversy and generate fear, even in the ever-enlightened year of 2025.
Now, Steam has taken the drastic step of banning an upcoming indie horror game, throwing the very future of the development studio into doubt in the process.
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Horses is a brand new horror release from Italian indie developer Santa Ragione. The surrealist game does have a pretty weird premise, in all fairness, as you step into the shoes of a man who takes a new job tending to horses on a farm.
So far, so placid. The kicker comes when you get there and realise that the horses are actually naked human beings who are chained up and wearing horse masks, for an as yet unknown reason.
It absolutely looks frightening and bizarre, which is kind of the point, but bear in mind some of the content that has made its way onto Steam over the years, a complete ban feels very harsh.
In an interview with IGN, studio head and co-founder Pietro Righi Riva, said the following, "Steam’s decision came without detailed feedback, and the ban notice did not cite any specific scenes or elements. For months we repeatedly asked what triggered the ban and received no answer. We also offered, unsuccessfully, to change any content deemed unfit, especially since the game was still early in development at the time of submission."
The developer also explained how the build the ban was based on was scrambled together at the last minute, very early in the games development, "We were only about halfway through development and had scrambled together a build that could be played start to finish, solely to satisfy Steam’s request for a playable version to open a Coming Soon page, something we had never been asked for before."
Hopefully it doesn't take long for Steam to do the right thing here and give the horror fans what they want, which is apparently naked people in horse masks.