Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione
Released: 02/12/2025
Completed: 04/12/2025
Completion: Finished it.

“Artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support . . . works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.”

–Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a 1974 debate as quoted by Naomi Green in their essay “Salò: Breaking the Rules”.

Horses has been out for exactly a week, and I’m certain that if you’re reading this you’re already sick of the discourse (damn my adherence to schedule!) We actually raced through the talking points in record time, to be honest, it was barely a couple of days before we got the “well, you know, it’s actually not that good/what’s all the fuss about really” essays. Milking horses in real life is impractical and low-yield, and here we’ve reached the point where we’re drawing dust.

However, that doesn’t really change the material facts of the matter: irrespective of quality, Horses is an artistic work that has been de-facto banned from the two major storefronts–due to opaque processes and without recourse. I’ve written about this happening before–in fact this year–when Cara Cadaver’s VILE: Exhumed was banned from Steam (and then released for free) due to what appears to have been a misunderstanding of that game’s use of real footage as pornography and the wider context of morality policing by payment processors. 

Interestingly, Santa Ragione are at pains to point out that this ban occurred in June 2023(!) and that it “has nothing to do with the recent restriction on adult content pushed by payment processors.”

There’s an urge to try and uncover the reasoning for the ban, but it’s to stumble about in the dark. Santa Ragione concentrate on–as much of the discourse has–that an unfinished sequence in a version “scrambled together” for early submission featuring a child riding on the back of a naked woman triggered the ban, but after the ban of VILE: Exhumed, I’m not so sure that (even benign) FMV footage or payment processors as a factor can’t entirely be ignored as, at least, a supplemental reason to keep the ban enforced. In particular with the ban from Epic, who didn’t choose to ban the game until December 1st(!) with the stated reason that they don’t sell AO rated games¹ (despite Santa Ragione’s protestation that Horses had received PEGI 18 and ERSB M ratings) it smells to me like a simple pre-emptive decision to avoid controversy that could lather up into the kind of issue with payment processors that could affect their bottom line. It’s just easier.

So really, it’s not so much the specific reasoning for the ban that matters², but the context: that we exist in a world where art not cannot exist without being a commodity–Santa Ragione cannot merely hope that people experience their art, but that they purchase it–and where wide access to that commodity is tied to an oligopoly (if we’re being kind to the Epic Games Store) or monopoly (if we’re not) who have absolute power over the market. It is satisfying to poke at the hypocrisies of a storefront like Steam, but it is, ultimately, a problem of capitalism.

If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’re probably sick of me saying things are capitalism’s fault. Well, they are, and the interesting thing about Horses is that this issue of commodification under the ultimate power of an opaque system is critiqued by the work itself. And this has echoes with another piece of Italian art which I have seen paid lip-service to in other essays on Horses: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom.

Pasolini is a complicated figure with a huge legacy, though one that has been somewhat narrowed in the popular imagination due to the reputation of Salò (his other transgressive works like Teorema don’t really get a look in) which, unfortunately, I’m not going to help. What’s important here is that Salò existed as a work contemporary to 1970s Italy, an era of intense political turmoil only “post-fascist” in so much that it came after the fall of both Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic (which forms the setting for Salò), and in a period where Pasolini was concerned with the “new facism” of neo-capitalism.

In an era where art is being flattened into a homogenous, global product, it is important to understand Santa Ragione as human creators whose cultural specificity does not necessarily line up with the enforced Western (American) default, and that is reflected in this era also obviously being of great importance to Santa Ragione. Their game Wheels of Aurelia–itself embroiled in a delisting controversy–is set in this period, and movies such as Il Sorpasso (1962) and Rabid Dogs (1974) clearly inspired it. There is no such clean line of inspiration between Salò and Horses but I see a continuation of thought between them.

The thing about Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom is that its reputation precedes it. Portraying, as it does, the the torture, rape and murder of teenage victims by four powerful fascists and their collaborators, it generally features high on not just “most scary” and “most disturbing” lists but “movies you should never watch” lists, and continues to be banned in some countries. But if taken merely as a series of images, in 2025 it really isn’t… that bad. Would it be able to feature on the Criterion Collection if it was? I’m not so sure. Watching it now, you wonder what Pasolini would have made of the internet, and in particular the sea of easily accessible pornography where you can see the participants of things that the fascists of Salò could not perceive. If Salò was to rage against the idea that fascist dehumanisation was being continued via the commodification of the body and ultimately captures the mind, what would he make of the masses willingly³ performing online what was once considered unwatchable? More disturbing things are streamed online from bedrooms in middle America than we ever see in Salò. Indeed, in Salò Pasolini uses a cold, distant gaze to implicate us; could he have perceived a future where not just the camera is drawn so close, but the audience can tip to push things ever further?

But what sets Salò apart is that it is not titillating⁴. It is not intended to excite, even shock seems like a side-effect. In fact, it was an attempt to create a work that was indigestible.

“I told myself: I have to react and make products that are as inconsumable as possible. I know it’s utopian, because everything ends up being consumed. At the same time, I know that there is something inconsumable in art, and we need to stress the inconsumable quality of art. Therefore, with all my forces, I will try and produce difficult and indigestible works.”

–Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le Regole Di Un’illisione, as quoted by Simona Bondavalli in their essay “Lost in the Pig House: Vision and Consumption in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile”.

This, for me, chimes all too well with Horses.

Horses is a cinematic game–in that it directly and intentionally references the form of surrealist cinema (which notably, is distinct from Pasolini’s style.) It’s in black and white; almost completely silent (using intertitles for dialogue) and features the continuous sound of a projector. Combined with the farm setting, the game feels like it is set somewhere within Mussolini’s reign, but like Salò, there are anachronistic elements (though they are more apparent: a VHS tape, for example.)

The player takes the role of Anselmo, sent to spend two weeks at a farm to learn the meaning of work. We know nothing about Anselmo–we don’t even know if he knows what’s going on at the farm before he gets there, though he seems unhappy about the prospect of working there either way. The farm–as you certainly know by now–is run by a disturbed farmer who keeps a group of men and women as “horses” by drugging them and locking horse masks onto them. He is supported in this by his “dog”, Fido, similarly a man in a dog mask, and then you, the player as Anselmo, as you do video game farming tasks for him: picking carrots, feeding the dog, chopping wood, before you become increasingly entwined in the control of the “horses.”

As I said above, I do not believe Salò is intended as a direct inspiration, but there are parallels. The first that will come to mind is a sequence in Salò where the victims are treated as dogs, one of whom is harshly beaten when he does not cooperate (although this is a short, stand-alone sequence rather than the victims’ continual state.) More is the parallel of Salò’s men of power: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, who have their parallels in the game’s farmer, businessman, vet and priest. I think it’s unlikely the analogue was intended–the characters are much less deeply intertwined in Horses–but their inclusion as symbols of fascist systems cannot be overlooked.

In the essay Disney, Salò, and Pasolini’s Inconsumable Art, Owen Schalk summarises Pasolini’s “indigestible work” by way of Barthes “suspended meaning”:

“This technique is not meant to expel meaning. Rather, it creates a sense of ambiguity in which meaning is not directly signified and is therefore suspended, refusing to provide the viewer with easily digestible symbols … Rather than producing art with the intention of manipulating consumers through predictable emotional patterns and easily understandable symbols, suspended meaning challenges easy digestibility by introducing deliberately indigestible elements to the work.”

Although I think Horses is widely accepted as a narrative game, I think Horses intended “tactic” is to introduce a game with the signifiers and mechanics of the “farming” genre, which runs the breadth of Stardew Valley to Farming Simulator, in order to maximise the impact of its indigestible symbols. The game implies that it has a daily schedule design with tasks to check off, but discards and warps that at will almost immediately, creating something that frustrates and disconcerts as much as the setting.

And Horses does not–cannot–rely on the dispassionate extremity of Salò to be indigestible. If in Salò we must look directly at the human body, abused, in Horses we must look directly at the uncanny valley, itself a desecration of the human form. There’s been criticism of how goofy a game with such heavy themes looks, but the grotesque puppetry of the horses makes a mockery of them and is as symbolic of their devaluation and dehumanisation.

As an indigestible work I think Horses, like Salò, frustrates. Indeed, it makes me question the suitability of linear narrative video games for it unless designers are willing to push the form further. In cinema, the audience is implicated by their gaze; in games, the player is implicated by their play. Even in a film as indigestible as Salò, we debate and try to bargain with it, hopelessly. Why don’t they refuse? Why don’t they rise up? The film’s only glimpse of a kind of resistance that shakes the fascist’s power comes from a collaborator and only after we’ve seen a succession of the weakest characters turn on each other to save their skin–despite the fact that they are living through something unbearable. Film is very good at making us feel helpless, because there, we are. But games are almost all empowerment fantasies, and the ones that try to break us down so often offer us only the alternative of “the only way to win is not to play” rather than make us collaborators so we can continue even if in misery.

As Anselmo, we must play along whether we want to or not. Every player certainly thinks “well, I’d just leave” but… they can’t. The gate is closed, and there is no escape. Whether or not the stakes for Anselmo exist, at first we don’t feel them without the ability to truly test them. If Anselmo isn’t allowed to escape, let me try. I’ll reload. If Anselmo can walk off the farm whenever he likes, let him. I’ll do it. Make me collaborate, don’t force me to. 

The strange thing is, at its best, Horses does engage with this issue head on. Later in the game, your position as collaborator cemented, a horse will not cooperate. The farmer’s dog gives you an option of how to deal with the horse: to offer, as the cliché goes, the carrot or the stick. Each carrot you offer returns no cooperation and leads to the stick becoming bigger and more dangerous, and the dog angrier. I found myself pleading for the horse to just cooperate, because I knew the next thing I would have to do was beat it. 

Whether or not I truly had a choice over that doesn’t matter, because I willingly gave those carrots. Horses made me not just perform the act of collaboration, but embody it, and it made me feel shame in a way the early game’s railroading does not.

The scene that has received the most commentary however is the scene that Santa Ragione believes caused all the trouble and where Horses shows its hand: when the businessman’s⁵ daughter makes it clear that no one is under any illusions about what the horses are, and that the horses are people who represent a threat to the system.

I think you could argue that this represents a flaw in my argument that Horses is indigestible art; after all, if you spell it out this clearly, isn’t that quite… understandable? But under that criteria, Salò would also fail for making its setting explicit. Even in Salò the victims are not random (one is notably called out as from a “family of subversives.”) But to return to Schalk: “the technique is not meant to expel meaning.”

The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture. 

I chafe at every mention that Horses is “like an A24 horror” considering the formulaic nature of “elevated horror.” I wrote earlier that I wondered what Pasolini would make of modern pornography; I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the Netflixication of cinema, work designed to go down so smoothly you don’t have to engage with it at all. We seemed to have crossed a rubicon where it’s not even that mass culture is inauthentic; it no longer seems to actually exist. The audience is so captured by capital they create viewing numbers to maintain a stock price while themselves receiving no value; a subscription to white noise to fold laundry to.

In this sphere, the value of Horses is that it must be engaged with, and it is ultimately that which makes it a threat to the hegemony of capital. At its best it does not just see the danger of commodification on our body and mind: it makes us feel it, perform it, and, ashamed, intend to refuse it. 

Salò was not banned because of shock value alone. It may be an extreme example, but it suffered extra scrutiny for the same reason works as benign as To Kill A Mockingbird: an audience roused out of its slumber is a dangerous one. In 1975 Pasolini saw a world where the audience had to choke on the indigestible to wake. Horses may be more obvious, more on-the-nose in narrative by interactivity, but in doing so it takes the indigestible and asks the audience to not just wake from choking on it, but to spit it out. 

You may think I’m giving Horses too much credit here–or implying conspiracy in its banning. But the same way that audiences are enveloped by the miasma of capitalism, companies like Steam and Epic are unconsciously risk averse in protection of the numbers. Santa Ragione focuses on the possibility that a little girl riding a naked woman was the reason for the ban; but I wonder if they’ve considered it was what she said that was. That she gave the game away.

“Each of us is a cog in the machine; we must all do our duty so society can function properly. So dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone.”

Will I ever play it again? I’ve already spit it out.

Final Thought: If I find one flaw in my argument, it is that Horses ultimately concludes in a very “video gamey” way. Pasolini famously struggled with the ending of Salò, ending on an abrupt non sequitur after taking things as far as they can go. Horses instead asks the player to engage with an actual puzzle (which comes as a surprise; the solution is also a little vague in game, meaning I can imagine a lot of players get stuck here, and I personally found it annoying to the point of it breaking immersion). It leads to heroic rescue and ultimately escape–one which implies reclamation and reconciliation. Depending on your viewpoint, this hopeful ending either continues the themes as a call to action for the awakened viewer or the kind of satisfying resolution that allows a return to slumber; the indigestible made digestible. The question is, I suppose, as always, what you are willing to swallow.

1. It has been mocked elsewhere but that this rule has an explicit carve out for crypto (“the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology”) is toe-curlingly embarrassing. ↩︎
2. Although after saying all of that I have to also attach Paolo Pedercini’s idea that it might relate to the fact that by just being called “Horses” it contaminates searches to a genre that horse-mad weans would be looking up, like if you called a game “tractors” and it was all about tractors with big floppy dongs flopping about. Hang on, let me get on the asset store… ↩︎
3. I should say supposedly willing here to be specific, but I don’t want to get too far afield of my main point in the moment. I touch on this in my essay on VILE: Exhumed, but there is an irony in that in Salò we can see a crying victim be debased with awareness that the shoot was actually pretty jolly, full of football games and risotto meals, but you really have no way to judge if in even vanilla pornography the performers are willing participants, as capitalism is always a coercive element. ↩︎
4. I would argue it is titillating, intentionally, until the rules are inverted at the villa, but again, I’m in danger of getting lost in the weeds here. ↩︎
5. This character is never referred to as such, and is a designation I’ve made on the statements of his daughter: “My father makes sure that [the farmer’s] business opportunities keep growing.” ↩︎