It’s been 18 months since developer Santa Ragione – the hugely acclaimed studio behind the likes of Saturnalia and Mediterranea Inferno – unveiled its unnerving first-person narrative horror Horses. And after a bit of a delay, it finally has a release date, and is launching via the Epic Games Store, Humble Store, GOG, and Itch.io on 2nd December. One storefront is conspicuously absent from that list, however, with Santa Ragione today confirming Horses has effectively been banned from Steam.
For those unfamiliar, Horses, which is being developed in collaboration with director Andrea Lucco Borlera, unfolds across 14 days on a rural farm where players – working as a summer farmhand – must perform “increasingly surreal” tasks. “As the sun sets and the facade of tranquility crumbles,” Santa Ragione teases, “you decide whether to keep to the safe path or venture into the farm’s hidden depths.” The ensuing three-hour adventure blends “interactive scenes, live-action intermissions, monochrome visuals, and silent-cinema title cards” into a tale about “the burden of familial trauma and puritan values, the dynamics of totalitarian power, and the ethics of personal responsibility.” It’s a game Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell called “deeply unsettling” when he played it last year, in no small part thanks to its naked, human “horses”.
But it turns out that even before Horses’ announcement in June 2023, Santa Ragione was grappling with Valve behind-the-scenes. The full tale is a long one, and we’ve spoken with studio co-founder Pietro Righi Riva elsewhere to get paint a clearer picture. The gist, however, is that while Horses has sailed through the review process on all other PC storefronts, it can’t be sold on Steam – effectively denying it access to 75 percent of the PC gaming audience, as Santa Ragione puts it – and leaving the acclaimed studio in a financially precarious position and it now faces closure.
You can read the full, much longer interview with Pietro – about Santa Ragione’s struggles with Valve and his hopes for change at Valve – elsewhere on Eurogamer. As for Horses, it’ll cost €4.99/$4.99 when it comes to Epic Games Store, GOG, the Humble Store, and Itch.io on 2nd December.
