On 25 November, award-winning Italian developer Santa Ragione, responsible for acclaimed titles such as MirrorMoon EP and Saturnalia, revealed that its latest project, Horses, had been banned from Steam – the largest digital store for PC games. A week later, another popular storefront, Epic Games Store, also pulled Horses, right before its 2 December launch date. The game was also briefly removed from the Humble Store, but was reinstated a day later.

The controversy has helped the game rocket to the top of the digital stores that are selling it, namely itch.io and GOG. But the question remains – why was it banned? Horses certainly delves into some intensely controversial topics (a content warning at the start details, “physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery, depiction of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny”) and is upsetting and unnerving.

The plot is fairly simple, though it turns dark fast. You play as Anselmo, a 20-year-old Italian man sent to spend the summer working on a farm to build character. It’s revealed almost immediately (so fast in fact, that I let out a surprised “Ha!”) that the farm Anselmo has been sent to is not a normal one. The “horses” held there are not actually horses, but nude humans wearing horse heads that appear to be permanently affixed.

Your job is to tend to the garden, the “horses” and the “dog” (who is a human wearing a dog head). Anselmo performs menial, frustratingly slow everyday tasks across Horses’ three-ish hour runtime, like chopping wood and picking vegetables. These monotonous tasks are, however, interspersed with horrible and unsettling jobs. On day one, you find a “horse” body hanging from a tree and have to help the farmer bury it.

It’s disturbing, yes, but Horses doesn’t show most of these horrors playing out, and when it does, the simplistic, crude graphics dull its edges (when you encounter the farmer whipping a human “horse” and have to throw hydrogen peroxide on her back, the marks crisscrossing her skin are blurry and unreal).

The “horses’” genitals and breasts are blurred out. The enslaved are forbidden from fornicating, but you’ll find that they do that anyway (a simplistic, animalistic depiction of sex), and though you’re forced to “tame” them by putting them back in their pen, it’s just a button press to interact, with no indication of what you’ve actually done to them.

Valve, the company that owns Steam, told PC Gamer that Horses’ content was reviewed back in 2023. “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,” the statement read. “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.”

According to IGN, Epic Games Store told developer Santa Ragione: “We are unable to distribute Horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies.” Santa Ragione alleges that “no specifics on what content was at issue were provided.”

Horses’ gameplay is grotesque, not gratuitous. The horror is psychological and lies in the incongruity of performing menial tasks in a veritable hellscape, while having no idea why any of this is going on. There is barely any sound aside from the constant whirring of a film camera (the game is presented like a mostly silent Italian arthouse film), super-up-close shots of mouths moving as they talk or chew, unsettling character models, the occasional cut to a real-life shot of water pouring in a glass or slop filling up a dog bowl.

There is no explicit gore or violence. You are uncomfortable, frustrated and unnerved throughout, and the horrors of humanity are on full display, but nothing ever threatens to upend your lunch. It is an interesting meditation on violence and power dynamics, but it is by no means a shocking or radical game. The conversation that has ignited around it – about video games as art and the censorship of art – is proving to be more profound than the actual content of the game.