Shortly before the December 2 release of horror game Horses, developer Santa Ragione shared some news: the game would not be available on Valve’s mega platform, Steam. Valve had already banned an early, incomplete version of the game two years ago and offered, according to Santa Ragione, little clarification about why at the time. Then, hours before the game’s release, the Epic Games Store banned Horses as well. A day after the game’s launch, distribution platform Humble removed, and then later relisted, the title.
The public swiftly spoke out against these bans, and community support for the game’s developers has been plentiful. Many pieces have been written online about how the game doesn’t deserve to be shunned by the distribution platforms, and about how the game’s content is relatively tame.
But too few of these pieces engage with the content of the game on a critical level. Horses’ storytelling is clumsy, and its blase treatment of the sexual assaults (plural!) depicted in the game fails to elevate the game beyond more than a lazy commentary of sexual repression.
It’s difficult to untangle the circumstances and controversy surrounding the game’s release from the content of the game itself. As a writer, I think censorship of creative work is Bad. I think Horses has as much right to exist as any other game, and that the power of distribution platforms to ban and delist a game by a small studio should be a concern for everyone.
But the real problem with Horses is not that it’s too audacious for what is clearly intended to be an adult audience. Horses, for all the attention around its banning, is tedious and overreliant on pseudointellectual ideas. It confuses its own pretension for something profound. Even its shock value eventually wears off, making its three hour runtime feel like a slog. Conversations about whether or not it deserves the scandal are ultimately useless and wholly subjective. They’re a smokescreen for a game that, as brash as it is, feels like a bad student film.