An unsettling indie game about horses keeps getting banned from stores
Horses, a first-person narrative horror game, was banned from the Epic Games Store just hours before it was set to launch on December 2nd. Then, a day after launch, the Humble store banned it as well. The decision shocked the developers at Santa Ragione, makers of the critically respected Saturnalia, as these storefronts were the homes they’d found for their game two years before it was preemptively banned from Steam.
Valve and Epic say Horses violates their sexual content policies. Humble hasn’t yet said why it banned the game after hosting it for several hours post-launch. However, Santa Ragione claims neither Epic nor Valve has clearly explained what exactly in the game is objectionable, and that these decisions have put the studio in peril of shutting down. The back-and-forth has catapulted Horses from a little-known prestige indie title to the next battleground in the fight between game storefronts, indie developers, content policies, and creative expression.
Though all the action kicked off late last month, Horses’ story officially began two years ago. In a lengthy FAQ, the developers explained that in 2023, Horses was rejected during Steam’s review process without explanation. “Steam’s policy grants broad discretion to refuse titles without providing detailed explanations. In our case, they simply stated they could not legally distribute Horses without clarifying why,” the FAQ reads.
In an interview with IGN, Pietro Righi Riva, one half of the team at Santa Ragione, said that the ban might have been caused by a scene involving a man and his daughter visiting a ranch where the titular “horses” are humans wearing horse masks. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, which the player facilitates. “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,” Riva said.
He said that scene was part of a rough demo sent to Steam to satisfy the platform’s request for a playable build so Horses could get a “Coming Soon” page. Riva said that, ultimately, the character was changed in the final build. “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.”
“Our requests for review and appeal were denied over and over.”
The studio stresses that Steam never explicitly explained why Horses was banned nor responded to any of Santa Regione’s follow-up appeals and communications. “For two years we asked for clarifications and a path to compliance, but we were directed to Steam’s general guidelines and our requests for review and appeal were denied over and over,” the FAQ reads.
In November, after Santa Ragione shared Horses’ release date and the reason why it wouldn’t be sold on Steam, Valve finally responded. A statement to gamedeveloper.com read:
“After our team played through the build and reviewed the content, we gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines. A short while later the developer asked us to reconsider the review, and our internal content review team discussed that extensively and communicated to the developer our final decision that we were not going to ship the game on Steam.”
The studio says the Steam ban put the company in financial peril, as it “completely erased our ability to find an external supporting publisher or partner to fund the rest of the game as no one in the industry considers an indie game that cannot be released on Steam to be viable.” Though the developers were able to continue work on Horses through investments from friends, unless the game’s a hit, they say the studio will shut down.
In the two years since Horses’ ban from Steam, Santa Ragione found several new homes for the game, including Itch.io, GOG, Humble, and the Epic Games Store. In a post on X, DRM-free storefront GOG said, “We’re proud to give Horses a home on GOG, giving players another way to enjoy the game. We’ve always believed that players should be able to choose the experiences that speak to them.” Humble, however, banned the game shortly after its launch there and has not responded to a request for comment.
HORSES is currently the best-selling game on GOG