The video game market is crowded with titles about monsters lurking in the dark, which makes Santa Ragione’s Horses all the more noteworthy for how matter-of-fact it is about its disturbing subject matter. As a lone farmer gives you—a new farmhand called Anselmo—a tour of his property, it’s not long before you come face to face with the “horses” out back: human beings with expressionless equine masks fastened to their heads with a metal collar.
The horses aren’t hidden away in a barn, but rather stand shoulder to shoulder in broad daylight, more than a dozen of them crowded into an unsheltered pen. Their naked bodies are caked in scars, their limbs blackened with dirt, and the initials “C.B.” branded into their skin.
The farmer treats their presence as totally normal, as do all the visitors whom you receive over the 14 in-game days otherwise spent on menial tasks like watering plants, chopping wood, and picking up manure. The horses are fed hay in troughs and used to pull farm equipment, but little else distinguishes them from being naked humans in masks. For one, they stand upright, so that people must ride on their shoulders. And that’s as creepy as it sounds.
The game portrays the enforcement of puritanical norms as its own form of violence and sexual gratification, which aren’t especially novel themes, but the presentation in this case is so arresting as to be transformative. Set in a grainy black-and-white world, Horses unfolds in a style reminiscent of a silent film, so sparing with sound effects and music that the low hum of a film projector is that much more conspicuous. It’s as though the world is muffled, as though you’ve gone numb after trying to close yourself off from its horrors.
Throughout, the game’s silent-film aesthetic comes to feel especially forceful through their association with the subject matter. Intertitles for dialogue and thoughts become jarring and intrusive, particularly in a late sequence where the intertitles cut in so frequently that they obscure your vision and hinder your ability to perform actions.
Periodically, images are eerily overlaid on the first-person camera perspective to draw your attention to them, suggesting something you can’t look away from. Many actions are accompanied by live-action cutaways that depict what the player is doing yet feel detached due to the change in format. To play the game is to feel control being wrested from you.
And, 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.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Santa Ragione.
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