No Escape

Originally this post was going to be about Saltsea Chronicles, Die Gute Fabrik’s beautiful 2023 game about conversation and community after the end of the world, but instead everyone decided to be real fucking stupid about another video game: HORSES, by Italian studio Santa Ragione. The game has been banned from both Steam and the Epic Games Store, and was even removed from Humble Games’ storefront temporarily. There is “discourse” around whether this game should’ve been released at all, due to nebulous concerns over its content and a misinterpretation of what is, imo, a pretty fucking clear statement made by Santa Ragione prior to its release:

We think the ban may have been triggered during the initial Steam submission by an incomplete scene on day six, in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the “horses” are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one. What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they 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 is what triggered the flag. 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.

This has seemingly since been construed as the game having sexual content in it, flagging CSAM monitors, and being outright pornography. None of this is true. After having played the game, I am infinitely angrier that this ever developed into a “controversy” in the first place, and I hold no small amount of contempt for anyone who thinks there’s some grey area here due to the nature of HORSES‘ content, or that Steam and Epic were somehow justified in their decision.

The game is about fascist dehumanization.

That’s it.

The “horses” are people (as alluded to in the quote above) who were caught acting in some “deviant” manner (usually having unmarried sex in the farmer’s forest, though it’s implied that at least a few of the horses were also political dissidents or some other “immoral” element that the broader culture wanted to stamp out). They have been drugged and brainwashed into an animalistic state, their heads stuffed into a rubber horse mask and collared with a heavy metal collar. Everyone who is not a “horse” is complicit in their continued suffering, from the player-character up through the local political, business and religious establishment. Everyone who knows about the “horses,” in other words, who willingly allows the farm to continue existing.

The horses are naked. Sometimes the horses fuck each other. The farmer hates this, because the farmer is himself deeply sexually repressed (to the point where he wears a chastity belt), and if the male horses are caught fucking enough times, they are castrated. You will help with a castration.

It’s a fairly fucking uncomfortable game, thanks in large part to its visuals, but it’s also well within the bounds of what games classically can do – and have done – to reckon with the social reality they exist in. It is a game that understands how interpellation works on a person-to-person level, and why “just following orders” isn’t enough to absolve you of complicity.

And a bunch of folks helped spell out exactly why this game is needed right now, quick as some of y’all were to side with fucking Valve, of all companies. This is some bullshit that never should’ve been a controversy. I am frankly more upset that I had to play HORSES against this bullshit backdrop rather than come to it on my own terms, on my own time. Gamers need to grow the fuck up or all that fucking legitimacy you so desperately crave in the estimation of the broader culture will simply vanish once and for all. “Make games that push boundaries! No, not like that! I just want to feel like war is bad for a second!”

Fucking fools.