- Publisher: Santa Ragione
- Release Date: Dec 2, 2025
- Critic score
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Dec 11, 2025Horses is a minimalist first-person narrative adventure that moves with precision through the realm of the uncanny, drawing on the unsettling atmosphere of folk horror. Blending the language of video games with cinematic grammar and touches of grotesque and subtle horror, it delivers a bold and meaningful story about capitalist exploitation and class awareness. Despite its modest scale, Horses turns its limitations into style, offering a haunting, socially charged experience that feels as cinematic as it is interactive.
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Dec 2, 2025Horses is an important video game that aims to scandalize by working within the uncomfortable space typical of provocative art. It has no intention of being harmless: it wants to unsettle you on every level. It is a reflection on the banality of evil, on the anarchy of power, and on how dehumanizing others pushes us to commit atrocious actions. While it evokes the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, it is a highly contemporary work that stages mechanisms power still exploits to undermine our humanity. It is a video game that does not seek approval and has the courage to remind us how easy it still is, even today, to simply follow orders.
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Dec 2, 2025And, indeed, the skuzzy and harrowing Horses gains much of its power through its linearity, shepherding you through your own complicity in a cycle of dehumanization with scarcely an option to offer a word of protest. The lack of meaningful choice makes the very act of playing the game feel practically unbearable, what with players themselves being led forward like animals.
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Dec 2, 2025Santa Ragione delivers a subversive, sometimes shocking, often funny first-person narrative horror that, while perhaps a little insubstantial, remains an engagingly unconventional exploration of some timely themes.
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Dec 2, 2025HORSES isn't a game for the faint of heart, nor those who struggle to be confronted with intensive imagery. It's a rudimentary video game that uses the medium as a vehicle for exploration of intensive themes, which creates an incredibly unsettling and disturbing atmosphere. There may be other horror games that you'd prefer to play, but very few will evoke the kind of disgust and repulsion that HORSES achieves, and evoking emotion is what art is all about.
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Dec 2, 2025Horses is the kind of experience that doesn’t look for compromises and has no interest in pleasing everyone. Santa Ragione plays with incendiary material and does so with a confidence that’s almost disarming. It’s a “small” title, one that inevitably divides, because it demands from the viewer the willingness to look exactly where we usually turn away. And that’s precisely where its value lies: in its ability to dig, provoke, unsettle and, above all, leave a mark.
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Dec 7, 2025HORSES is a provocative, incredibly bold, and unique game that leverages the harshness of its brutal vision to convey a social message that is as heartbreaking as it is painfully relevant. If you can look beyond the surface and overlook the overly simplistic gameplay, what you'll find is a daring title that will stimulate plenty of thought for those willing to grasp its symbolism and allegories.
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Dec 2, 2025Disturbing and outside of any canon: horses is a journey into the loss of innocence.
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Edge MagazineDec 24, 2025Horses is a fascinating work, capable of moments that lodge in the memory, such as the late-game sequence when the projector's whirring finally stops and the tired clomp of footsteps registers to our ears like the sound of freedom. [Issue#419, p.122]
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Dec 19, 2025Much of HORSES' notoriety stems from its 'forbidden' status, but beneath the controversy lies a valid, experimental narrative for adult audiences. It is a worthwhile provocation for those seeking something off-beat, succeeding as an uncomfortable and fleeting audiovisual piece.
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Dec 5, 2025An impressively daring horror experience that pushes the boundaries of what most people would expect from a video game, in terms of subject matter and imagery.
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Dec 2, 2025Horses is a chilling, nerve-shredding short story that propels you through a series of increasingly heinous farm tasks. Sharp writing of morally repugnant characters creates a harrowing atmosphere, which is frustratingly diminished by repetitive activities and unclear signposting that sometimes pull you out of its silent film-like world. Even so, developer Santa Ragione’s admirably bracing vision does well to harness what can make the interactivity of video games so affecting, ensuring you’ll have plenty to think about as the credits roll.
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Dec 8, 2025In terms of striking visual presentation, shock-driven imagery, and overt messaging, it certainly manages to draw attention, but technically, it’s just an average walking simulator.
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Dec 14, 2025It’s not particularly effective at what it sets out to do. It is certainly a harrowing and memorable experience I won’t soon forget, and a standout in 2025 for its imagery alone, but not one destined for the limelight outside of the controversy. It’s ironic that a game tackling the hypocrisy of purity culture and dehumanization of “deviants” would end up in such people’s targets after the initial ban, but reality is stranger than fiction. Horses deserves to be played, but at times feels like a shock-value PETA game that tackles its tougher topics with the subtlety of a jackhammer. To hinge a studio’s success on this game would be risky even if it was on Steam, but I still hope that, to paraphrase the financier’s daughter in Horses, the people at Santa Ragione get to live the rest of their lives as game developers.
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Dec 9, 2025Horses is fine. It’s not particularly trailblazing, but it knows what it’s trying to convey, and it uses a pretty concise visual metaphor to get it across. It is gross to look at, but I only really mind that when its jittery framerate makes me queasy. I don’t believe it is as distasteful as Epic or Steam does, and I still am surprised that something that feels mostly tame and along the lines of an A24 horror film has caused such controversy. If Horses didn’t expose anything we didn’t already know about the dangers of a sheltered, puritanical lifestyle, it at least unmasked Steam and Epic as cowardly companies that can’t be bothered to actually vet the work they’re barring from entry. I wish we could’ve had the conversation those bans sparked about a better game, but Horses, at the very least, is fine enough to have deserved better than being locked out in the rain.
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Dec 4, 2025Though the themes never circle to anything profound, Horses’ power still lies in its moments of discomfort. All you can do is squirm as you’re roped into atrocity after atrocity, forced to participate in a sick ritual led by a man who gets off on controlling others. He makes the rules and everyone in his orbit has to follow them — or else. Put a tool back in the shed after you use it. Eat another piece of meat even if you’ve indicated that you’re full. And absolutely no fornicating! At what point do rules become something that are only designed to give their creator a power trip?
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Dec 2, 2025The complexity here is that Horses is about the sexuality of younger people, even if none of the characters are actually minors. The Farmer is the way he is because of how he was raised - there are doodles and a home video that obviously date back to his early teenage years - and now, he is trying to pass those brutal values onto you. The moral is about how puritanism may reproduce across generations, even when taken to the extent that congress becomes impossible, which necessitates certain other, shambolically crude and fantastical approaches to securing a legacy. That your character is a legal adult is a technicality: the game frames you as a mute child, peering up at the Farmer while eating, struggling to say no by means of emojis and shakes of your head. It's easy to imagine the fable playing out exactly the same way if the protagonist were in their early to mid teens.
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Dec 8, 2025Horses deserves to be played — if for nothing else, than to appreciate the games that do better what Horses failed to do.