Steam rejected it. Epic pulled it 24 hours before launch. Humble bounced the listing. Here’s how indie horror game Horses turned a surreal “grotesque farming” premise into the most controversial PC release of 2025, and why the bans say as much about storefront policies as they do about the game.
In a year where horror releases are stacked, it is not a prestige sequel or a big‑budget reboot that has dominated discourse. It is an austere, uncomfortable indie set on a rotten little farm, where people live, work and suffer as “horses.”
Santa Ragione’s Horses should have been a small but notable release from a respected studio, the follow up to cult hit Saturnalia. Instead, it has been kicked off Steam, pulled at the last minute from the Epic Games Store, briefly delisted on Humble, and reborn on GOG as a best‑selling cause célèbre. The result is that Horses has become 2025’s most talked‑about banned game rather than just another spooky curiosity.
How Horses keeps getting bounced between storefronts
Horses’ odd journey started with Steam. Valve initially evaluated an early, unfinished build and decided the game would not be allowed on the platform. According to Santa Ragione, Valve declined to revisit that decision even once the final version was complete, leaving the team shut out of the biggest PC storefront before launch.
That would have been story enough, but the game quickly found a new twist. Santa Ragione secured slots on alternative platforms, with GOG, Itch and the Epic Games Store all approving the game. Epic went further and signed off on a final, achievements‑ready build more than two weeks before release. Horses had a public Epic store page, age ratings in place and a clear launch date.
Roughly 24 hours before that launch, Epic reversed course. In an email to the developer, Epic said a fresh review had found that Horses violated its content guidelines. The platform cited “inappropriate content” and “hateful or abusive content,” alleging that the game promotes abuse and animal abuse and contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior that either were not properly rated or should have pushed the game into Adults Only territory.
Epic ran its own IARC questionnaire on the content it believed was present and, according to the studio, that process returned an AO rating. Since Epic does not allow AO games on its store, the decision was framed as a policy requirement rather than a discretionary choice.
Santa Ragione pushed back. The studio’s own prior IARC submission had come back as PEGI 18 and ESRB M, a combination that is about as harsh as mainstream ratings get without crossing into AO. Those ratings were already live on the Epic page. The team says Horses contains four sex scenes, two of which are mostly off‑camera, all pixelated, stylised and without visible genitalia. They argue the game does not celebrate or encourage abuse, whether of people or animals, but is a direct critique of violent and exploitative systems.
The studio appealed Epic’s ruling. The appeal was rejected around half a day later by what appeared to be an automated response, with no clear breakdown of which specific scenes or assets were considered over the line. With only a handful of hours left before launch, meaningful edits were impossible and the Epic release was cancelled.
The knock‑on effect even reached Humble. Because the Humble build was configured around Epic’s version, the sudden removal led to temporary delisting and confusion about whether buyers would receive keys. Humble later confirmed that it still intended to carry Horses once the situation settled, but the damage to visibility was done.
Through all of this, one storefront has been happy to lean in. GOG not only kept Horses up but prominently featured it, with the game rapidly climbing to become the platform’s best‑selling new release. Itch has carried the game without incident. That split alone has thrown a spotlight on how fragmented and opaque PC storefront policies have become, especially when art pushes against comfort.
What Horses actually is: grotesque farming horror
Strip away the drama and you are left with a very peculiar horror game. Horses is not a creature feature or a loud, jumpscare‑driven rollercoaster. It is a first‑person, narrative‑driven horror piece about a farm where people are treated as horses, a place where everyday routines have been warped into ritualised cruelty.
The game unfolds over 14 in‑game days. You arrive at the farm and take on the role of a newly arrived worker, an outsider who must both participate in the system and decide how far they are willing to go along with it. Every morning brings chores: feeding, cleaning, maintaining enclosures and performing the busywork that keeps the operation going. The twist is that the so‑called horses are human beings.
Santa Ragione leans into the clash between pastoral aesthetics and bodily horror. Pens and barn interiors look recognisably agricultural, with tools, troughs and hay scattered about, but the scale and proportions are wrong for animals and unsettlingly right for people. At a distance you see silhouettes that read as livestock. Up close you notice limbs tied in unnatural poses, harnesses digging into skin and the ways bodies have adapted to life on all fours. The game rarely lingers on explicit gore, but it bathes every scene in a slow, suffocating dread.
This is where the “grotesque farming” label makes sense. Farming in Horses is not a system of planting and harvesting resources for your own benefit, but a metaphor for how institutions domesticate and break people down. NPCs talk about yields and productivity, but what they really mean is compliance and obedience. The sense of routine is key. You repeat tasks, navigate the same muddy paths and listen to the same offhand comments from supervisors, until the horror is not just what you see but the way your own actions start to feel automatic.
How it plays: repetition, choice and creeping complicity
Mechanically, Horses sits closer to an experimental narrative adventure than a survival sim, but it borrows just enough structure from management and farming games to keep you grounded. Each day is split into segments. You wake up, receive a list of chores, and choose which to prioritise. Time passes as you move around the farm, so you cannot do everything. There are conversations to have, tasks to complete and small pockets of the environment to explore.
The chores give the game its rhythm. You might be instructed to lead a “horse” out to pasture, wash down a stable, administer feed or restrain someone whose behavior is no longer considered acceptable. These tasks use simple first‑person interactions like picking up items, manipulating levers, opening and closing gates or guiding an NPC along a path, but the framing makes them uncomfortable. Very quickly, routine button presses start to feel less like neutral game inputs and more like a conscious decision to participate in harm.
Outside of chores, you seek out conversations. The farm’s hierarchy is mapped through dialogue. Supervisors preach discipline and tradition. Co‑workers deflect with gallows humor or sink into numb resignation. The “horses” themselves, when they are allowed to speak, offer fragments of backstory and metaphor. Santa Ragione uses these exchanges to sketch a history of the farm as an institution, hinting at how its rules grew more dogmatic and extreme.
Exploration is limited but deliberate. Short side paths lead to shrines, family relics and forgotten outbuildings that shed light on the ideology underpinning the farm. Notes and environmental details draw lines between personal trauma, religious puritanism and authoritarian politics without naming any specific real‑world group. You start to see how the farm’s cruelty has been justified to the people who run it, and how they in turn have convinced themselves that they are keeping order, not committing atrocities.
Player choice emerges through small decisions rather than big branching menus. You can follow orders to the letter or cut corners, comply with punishments or try to quietly defy them, engage honestly with NPCs or parrot company lines. These choices tilt relationships and subtly alter scenes in later days. There are multiple endings, and they are less about winning or losing than about what kind of person your character has become by the time the two‑week cycle ends.
The horror itself is slow burn. Jump scares are rare, and when they come they are grounded in the farm’s logic rather than cheap shocks. Instead, the game leans on the unease of repetition and escalation. Early tasks feel “just” uncomfortable. By day ten, the same motions take on a much darker tone, because you understand what they are part of. The grotesque visuals, muffled sound design and intimate first‑person view combine to make even mundane actions like closing a gate or tightening a strap feel ominous.
Why Horses became the banned game of 2025
None of the above would ordinarily suggest an automatic place on a no‑fly list. Horses is violent and disturbing, but sits roughly in the same content range as other adult horror games that pass through mainstream storefronts with a Mature or 18 rating. Its sex scenes are brief and heavily stylised, and much of its horror is thematic. The key difference is not that Horses is uniquely explicit, but that it is unusually confrontational about who is allowed to inflict and rationalise harm.
The farm is a tidy metaphor, but it is not subtle. It mirrors how institutions take people’s bodies and labor, wrap them in rhetoric about tradition or purity, and then punish anyone who steps out of line. The game is explicitly critical of puritan values and hypocrisy. It points fingers upward at systems of power, not downward at their victims. In a climate where platforms are increasingly wary of appearing to host anything that could be framed as sexual or abusive content, that combination of bodily horror and moral accusation is a hard sell.
The result is a kind of ratings whiplash. Industry‑backed bodies like PEGI and the ESRB looked at Horses and said it fits within existing 18 and M categories, signaling that it is intense but not beyond the pale. Individual storefronts, each applying their own opaque thresholds and automated checks, came to much harsher conclusions. When Epic’s internal IARC pass labeled the game Adults Only, the rules of the store effectively turned that into a ban, regardless of what external ratings said.
That disconnect has turned Horses into a flashpoint. To developers, it is a worrying example of how a single misfire in a platform’s internal process can shut a game out of huge portions of the market. To players, it has become a litmus test for where they stand on the line between consumer comfort and artistic risk. To storefronts, it is an uncomfortable reminder that content guidelines designed to be simple and safe on paper can look inconsistent or censorious in practice.
Ironically, the controversy has given Horses a larger audience than it would likely have found on its own. On GOG, the game surged to the top of the new‑release charts, as curious players sought out the horror game that powerful platforms did not want to touch. Coverage that might have been a handful of niche reviews has turned into full‑throated debates about censorship, ratings and the role of games that make players complicit in ugliness.
Beyond the bans: why Horses is worth paying attention to
It would be easy to treat Horses primarily as a cautionary tale about storefront policy, but focusing only on where it is sold undersells what the game is actually doing. Santa Ragione has built a horror experience that understands how powerful repetition and routine can be when you are trying to say something about systems rather than monsters.
By framing its world as a farm and its victims as horses, the game gets under your skin without needing constant shock. It asks uncomfortable questions about work, obedience and the stories people tell themselves to survive inside cruel institutions. The moments that stay with you are not the censored sex scenes that caused so much trouble for rating forms, but the quiet beats: a co‑worker telling an offhand joke about a horse that “would not listen,” a supervisor praising you for efficiency after a scene you found unbearable, the way a once‑familiar chore feels intolerable by the final days.
As horror, Horses is effective not because it is the most graphic game of 2025, but because it is one of the most pointed. As a case study in how digital storefronts handle difficult art, it is already a landmark release. Bans and delistings may have made it infamous, but the real reason Horses is worth talking about is that once you step onto that farm and start doing the work, it becomes very hard to shrug it off as just another spooky game.