Horses Review — Ugly Derby

This review contains discussion of rape, mutilation, torture, abuse, slavery, and references to Catholicism.

This review contains spoilers for the events of Horses.

Horses was originally Andrea Lucco Borlera’s final project as a Cinema, Television and Multimedia student at Università Roma Tre in 2018. The game was shown off at the 2019 IndieCade and A MAZE. events, and even got a nomination for “The Most Amazing Game” at A MAZE. Borlera wanted to expand and distribute the project, but he had no luck with publishers until a fruitful meeting with Pietro Righi Riva, producer at Santa Ragione, and his former game design lecturer at IULM University.

Horses has been derisively compared to a student film, perhaps in part because it basically is an expanded student project sponsored by a sympathetic teacher, even though Borlera graduated 7 years ago and is a teacher himself now. (Talk about the slow pace of game development!) Student films have a bad reputation as is, but worse, Horses is one of those pretentious European art films, and even worse, it’s a video game pretending to be a film, and worst of all, it has the audacity to just be decently okay despite bearing aesthetics commonly perceived as self-important. That would be the limit of the expectations placed on Horses if it met its destined fate as one of those games you buy in a bundle and get around to eventually or never. Breaking even on small-time games through bundles is the business that kept Santa Ragione afloat for 15 years.

Valve ruined that relative stability with two actions in 2023: they denied Santa Ragione Steam keys for their 2022 game Saturnalia, so they couldn’t sell it in an off-Steam bundle, and they banned Horses from releasing on Steam, making it impossible for Santa Ragione to get funding from an external publisher. Horses, a $50k project to help out a novice game designer, quickly became the last hope to keep the company operating. Riva borrowed another $50k from friends to finish and publish Horses, but how could they sell an already niche game to the small fraction of the PC audience that doesn’t use Steam?

The only promotional move left to Santa Ragione was to sell Horses as a game banned for being too transgressive, which of course it is, as a matter of historical fact. This approach got an audience for a game that may have been otherwise overlooked, but that audience came with inflated expectations for how profound Horses should be, as if the game had a responsibility to justify its own rejection by Valve. Art gets censored even when it’s less than a deeply affecting classic. Did you know that one of the most challenged books in the United States is the Captain Underpants series? Both Horses and The Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants deserve to be widely accessible, unburdened by the impossible expectation that they will blow your mind.

Thus, despite its cultural weight as a prominent example of video game censorship, and the flashpoint for a good week or two of discussion of Steam’s unjust policies before that got swept away by The Game Awards, I tried to approach Horses with the same open-minded neutrality as I would any $5 game that is buried somewhere deep in my Itch library. Horses indeed did not blow my mind, but it’s a pretty decent first-person adventure that made me feel a few things.

20-year-old protagonist Anselmo has been sent by his mean dad to work on a farm for 14 days, so he can learn about the real world and cease his trivial academic pursuits and bug collecting. The farm is populated by enslaved, brainwashed humans who are naked except for their animal masks: a bunch of horses and one dog. A single Farmer operates the place, but sometimes his friends will come over too, such as the Priest, the Veterinarian, and the Businessman and his daughter.

Some days Anselmo does a list of farm chores in a manner reminiscent of Adios. Other days involve a single scene or objective. Generally, Anselmo’s available actions are tightly restricted. Every item in his inventory has exactly one use in one place. The Farmer’s commands are clear, and quickly become routine. The Priest gives Anselmo a speech about the importance of certainty as he delivers some more trafficked humans to the farm.

Anselmo cannot verbally respond in a conversation, but he can express approval or disapproval about what others say to him or ask him to do. Anselmo and the Farmer’s abuses of the enslaved horses will continue regardless of Anselmo’s approval or disapproval. Sometimes, a horse can even become an inventory item, complete with an inspection screen where they rotate at 600km/h at the slightest mouse movement. That’s the kind of power Anselmo has over them, as a slave overseer. He is a very good little fascist, even if he frowns about it.

Late in Horses, Anselmo must solve a real genuine adventure game puzzle that requires some actual thought. It’s easily the strongest part of the game, a mechanical representation of Anselmo escaping the rigid directives of the Farmer and finally thinking on his own. This sequence is followed by the game’s most impressive aesthetic achievements: a visual representation of oppressive sound in a way I’ve never quite seen before, and a sublime silence when Anselmo finally conquers it.

Let’s talk about the aesthetics a bit, since they’re generally more effective than the writing or gameplay. Horses is styled as a black-and-white 4:3 silent film (particularly in conversation with the classics of Luis Buñuel), complete with intertitles and the ever-present sound of a spinning projector. The occasional additional sounds are odd and unsettling: chicken noises when you cut your chicken dinner, wet nibbles and gulps as you eat, the buzz of a fly as you carry horse shit to the manure pile. When music appears it is loud and discordant, or ironically comedic.

The scratchy silent film aesthetic was extra crunchy for me, because I had to turn the resolution down to 720p to get a playable framerate. The low resolution, film artifacts, and stark lighting combined made the environments look more real, similar to the VHS sequence in Resident Evil 7. These realistic environments are contrasted by the clearly artificial character models, with their strange expressions, leathery skin, and plastic hair. Equally artificial is the digital pixelation effect to self-censor parts of the screen. Breasts, genitals, and even ass are pixelated. Wounds are pixelated too. This effect reminds me of the pixelated corpses in the camcorder-style Kane & Lynch 2, and just as in that game, the intentional censorship suggests a more disturbing image than a detailed texture could.

The film aesthetic is accompanied by split-screen, picture-in-picture, and transparent overlay effects reminiscent of Alan Wake II. These effects often appear suddenly, and the whole of Horses is filled with impressively sharp editing that is rare to see in a video game. Dialogue involves uncomfortable sudden close-ups like Pathologic 2, and every line is emphasized by the intertitle format.

The live-action FMV always feels like a jarring intrusion. It pointedly avoids clear depiction of humans, and the abuse of horses never happens in FMV. Typically it highlights some kind of quick act of physical labor, be it scooping slop into a bowl, watering crops, or chopping wood. This made it difficult for me to fully sink into the routine of farm chores, as if I was feeling Anselmo’s ambient discomfort with the pen of enslaved horses always nearby. These FMV shots are very zoomed-in, just like the conversations. It seems that Anselmo is a guy who really pays attention to what he’s looking at.

I’ve painted a dour picture so far, but Horses is pretty good at inserting moments of dark comedy into its surreal horror, such as a sharp cut to Anselmo’s blood-covered face after a horse offers to make him feel good with her mouth.

The horses are horny, you see. These are people whose deep-seated sexual appetite persists even through their brainwashing. Fornication, specifically the Catholic understanding of fornication as sinful consensual heterosexual sex between unmarried people, is the primary crime that these horses have been punished for. No, homophobia is not a theme of this game, nor are other forms of sexual persecution. Horses zooms in on the religiously-motivated dehumanization of heterosexuals who have casual sex.

Sex is always in the specific form of heterosexual penetration from behind, an implicitly animalistic position known as “doggy style” in English and pecorina (“sheep style”) in Italian. Indeed, the horses fuck so dispassionately, to the point of comedy, that seeing them feels like seeing dogs going at it: a thing to chuckle at and be on your way. Well, I’d chuckle and be on my way. The Farmer tells a story about how his father made him castrate a dog because it was humping everything too much. Later, Anselmo finds the Farmer’s drawings about his father killing two actual horses for fornicating.

The Farmer likes to get drunk and go out at night wearing a chastity belt and a horse mask. The mask marks him as a fornicator, that is to say an animal, for indulging his sexual urges: to masturbate to the enslaved horses by rubbing himself just outside his chastity belt. Sometimes he gets the Priest to punish him in this outfit. 

The Farmer’s anti-fornication position is rooted in Catholicism and childhood trauma, and his verbalized grievance is appropriately childish and pathetic: he thinks the horses are making fun of him by fornicating. He punishes male and female fornicators with equal harshness; this is not the kind of nominal pro-abstinence that praises boys for scoring while harshly punishing girls for failing to guard their virginity. The Farmer calls a misbehaving horse a “bitch”, but notably avoids the words “slut” or “whore”, despite the fact that he is talking about sexually promiscuous people.

That said, it is only a woman who is the victim of the game’s rape scenes. Megan Farokhmanesh is correct that Horses badly mishandles themes of sexual violence, and that this aspect has been overlooked by critics who characterize Horses as tame because it’s less intense than Salò or Irréversible. I’m going to talk about the details of those scenes now, which I think are both the most shocking and the most poorly-done aspects of the game.

A horse gets raped by the Dog on-screen at oblique angles, while the Farmer watches and masturbates despite his chastity belt. The next morning, Anselmo loads the unconscious horse into the shed to get raped to death by the Veterinarian off-screen. Another horse is blamed for it and Anselmo holds his legs still as the Farmer cuts his dick off with scissors, spraying blood all over Anselmo’s face before he staples the wound shut.

According to the official website, Horses uses challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion. It invites players to examine why something feels the way it does, what it says about the characters and systems at work, and where their limits lie. 

So here is my examination of why this sequence feels crass: it develops the characters who perpetrate the sexual violence, but the horse who gets raped to death is a prop. Her shallow role is only to be a victim of terrible violence. There’s no reaction from her, no additional layer to discuss. We learn about the Farmer’s loophole for his sexual repression: sexual gratification is okay if it’s entirely about dominating others. We learn why the Dog is the best-treated slave: he is willing to be a rapist, while the other horses have consensual sex. We learn why the Farmer trusts the Veterinarian: behind his feigned shock at how poorly the Farmer has treated the horses, he enjoys inflicting terrible violence too.

But I don’t even remember the victim’s name. Essentially, the script participates in her dehumanization.

The horse physically emasculated for these crimes does get an additional layer to discuss. He kneels idly in the field, breathing heavily under his mask, refusing to work the plow. The Dog gives Anselmo multiple attempts to motivate him with either violence or carrots. The emasculated horse does not respond to the carrots, so Anselmo eventually resorts to hitting him, which does get him moving the plow. Here we have a simple but effective portrait of a man with a broken spirit that attempts resistance through inaction, but still reverts to being a horse to escape the acute pain of a whip.

The other two horses with a significant role in the story are Linda, a horse that takes a liking to Anselmo for being a less than completely enthusiastic overseer, and Fiero, a horse that managed to escape the farm. Together, they plot to free all the horses, and recruit Anselmo to their cause.

There is a moment in the middle of this plot that may be a programming error, but I hope Santa Ragione never patches it out. Anselmo successfully makes a hole in the fence for the horses to escape, but the next morning the Farmer has covered the hole with wood planks. Only, those planks are nailed into nothing but air. And you can walk through them.

Here it is: the world outside the farm that Fiero escaped to. There’s nothing out there. Of course there isn’t, because this is a video game and I’m outside the boundaries. Yet the surreality of going outside the boundaries fits perfectly with the surreality of the game-as-intended. As a narrative, Horses is a fable where the social dynamics of the farm represent the social dynamics of the broader world. In the code of the game, the farm is the whole world, and Anselmo cannot escape it any more than you or I can escape the horrors of our world.

Linda and Fiero’s plot ends with an act of radical forgiveness that embraces the animalistic freedom of fornicators, and gives that freedom to the Farmer and Anselmo. Who wants to be a human, when humans are so much crueler than horses? Horses presents the persecution of promiscuity in a simplistic and unrealistic way, which makes it difficult to draw any applicable lessons from. But its heart lies in the right place: against the cruel authority of fathers and priests, and for happiness, free, for everyone, and let no one be forgotten.

Horses is a difficult game to evaluate numerically because it’s mostly okay, has a few high highs, and a big low low. The mishandling of sexual violence is so bad that I would have dropped the game there if I hadn’t committed to this review, and yet the game mostly won me back by the end. A 3/5 can denote a pleasant mid, or it can denote a highly uneven game like Horses that I don’t blame anyone for disliking. However, there is enough good here that I hope Andrea Lucco Borlera gets a chance to do better next time.