It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
Grotesque and surreal 'farming simulation' Horses has been banned from the Epic Games Store on the eve of release, a couple of years after a work-in-progress version of the game was rejected by Valve. In an alleged statement to developers Santa Ragione, the Fortnite makers explain that they've found the game to be in contravention of policies against "Inappropriate Content" and "Hateful or Abusive Content". Given that, according to Santa Ragione, Epic have had access to a build for two months and had already approved the game for publication on their store 18 days before launch, the whole thing feels like a frantic response to Valve's claims about the unfinished build, which Epic presumably haven't seen.
One of the first "moving pictures" ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of "chronophotographs" of horses and riders, including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge's work thanks to Jordan Peele's film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner's Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.
Muybridge - who, incidentally, murdered his wife's lover, which doesn't seem wholly irrelevant here - captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge's breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex - and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.
Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia developers Santa Ragione have announced that they will "wind down operations and face a high risk of closing the studio", following Valve's refusal to allow their upcoming horror game Horses on Steam, PC gaming's largest digital storefront by some distance. They say they have the funds to support and update Horses after launch for around six months, but claim they "will not be able to start new projects unless Horses somehow recoups its development costs without access to more than 75% of the PC gaming market".
Santa Ragione's horror game, Horses, getting banned on Steam with only vague reasons to back up its ban was an additional tally on the year for Valve getting mixed up in controversy regarding what it allows and what it doesn't allow on Steam. Epic Games Store, seemingly, felt out of the loop, so it decided to join the fray by also disallowing Horses to release on its digital storefront, even though it was previously slated to arrive alongside launches at GOG, Humble, and Itch.io today, December 2, 2025. The difference, however, is typical of the difference between Epic Games Store […]
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Earlier today, Humble followed in the hoofprints of Steam and Epic by yanking bafflingly controversial art game Horses from its digital shelves – in this case after the storefront had already made it available for purchase. Now, mere hours later, Humble has relisted Horses.
IGN’s Rebekah Valentine broke the news, which was immediately met with a collective “Huh.” Aftermath reached out to Humble for more information but did not receive a reply as of this publishing.
Speaking to Aftermath, Santa Ragione co-founder and director Pietro Righi Riva said that Humble temporarily pulled Horses to reevaluate it, but found no reason to set that decision in stone.
"In short, their team saw the press coverage and temporarily delisted Horses to reevaluate it," Riva said. "After a full review they determined that while the content is heavy, nothing in the game warrants removal from their store."
"We are grateful to Humble for having reconsidered and for taking the time to check out the game, although I wish they had informed us that this process was ongoing!" he added. "We are happy that it has been resolved with the game being back on the store, and we wish Steam and Epic would also reconsider their stance based on the actual game contents."
Horses, which contains censored nudity and adult themes like sexual assault and slavery, remains banned on Steam and Epic. This despite the fact that it is far tamer than many widely distributed films and on level even with some popular games. Santa Ragione, the award-winning indie studio behind Horses, has categorized this sudden lack of access to PC gaming’s largest consumer bases as an existential threat and railed against what it describes as “preemptive censorship.”
Meanwhile, let’s have a quick look at what else Steam is stocking these days (warning: NSFW). Phew, no double standards here.
Horses can be purchased on Itch, GOG, and now, once again, Humble.
AftermathNicole Carpenter
Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione's first-person narrative horror Horses has received a last-minute ban from the Epic Games Store. Epic was one of several storefronts confirmed to have approved a build for release when news of Horses' ban from Steam emerged, but it has now reversed its decision, citing what Santa Ragione calls "broad and demonstrably incorrect claims".
One thing that's probably got a bit lost in all the controversy preceding Horses' release is the fact it's surprisingly funny. Its humour is pitch black, yes, and its comedic moments often dance on a knife's edge between laughter and revulsion, but writer and director Andrea Lucco Borlera's first-person narrative horror - his debut game, created in close collaboration with Saturnalia developer Santa Ragione - is a fascinatingly singular vision. It's singular enough, in fact, that it's not an easy thing to effectively describe, but if you can imagine a sort of thematic reinterpretation of Animal Farm by way of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo on one side, and a meme-able Garry's Mod video on the other, then Horses gleefully oscillates between them, landing somewhere in the middle.
