Indie Horror Game Horses Banned From Steam, Studio at Risk

Horses, the unsettling indie horror title from Santa Ragione, has now officially been released on the Epic Games Store, GOG, Itch.io, and the Humble Store. Even with its launch across these platforms, the game is still excluded from Steam, and the studio says that this ongoing ban continues to jeopardize its survival.

The situation began in 2023 when Santa Ragione sent Valve an early playable version of the game. Steam requested a fully functional build before allowing a Coming Soon page, a requirement the team had not previously encountered. With development only halfway complete, they prepared a rough start-to-finish build for that purpose. Steam rejected it immediately, but no explanation was provided. For months afterward, the studio sought clarification, asking what prompted the decision and offering to alter or remove anything Valve found unacceptable. They received no specifics, no references to particular scenes, and no opportunity to revise the build for reconsideration.

The only hint came from the automated content review, which linked to Steam’s onboarding guidelines and restated the platform’s position that it does not distribute material that “appears” to involve sexual conduct with a minor. Santa Ragione insists Horses contains no such material. All characters are older than 20, communicated through appearance, dialogue, and documents within the game. The studio also maintains that the project contains nudity and sexual elements solely to create tension, not for erotic aims, and addresses themes including trauma, puritan values, authoritarianism, and moral responsibility.

The developers believe Valve’s decision may have stemmed from one sequence included in the 2023 submission. That version depicted a man visiting the ranch with his young daughter. In the scene, the girl wants to ride one of the “horses,” which are actually nude adults wearing horse masks. The player would guide an adult woman by a rope while the girl sat above her on the woman’s shoulders. The studio emphasizes that the framing was not sexual but acknowledges that the appearance of a child involved in such a scenario might have caused concern. The scene was later rewritten to replace the child with a woman in her twenties, a shift that also improved how the scene’s dialogue fit within the game’s world. Even after the revision, Steam did not re-evaluate the ban.

Efforts to reach former Valve contacts provided no additional clarity, and the studio says it was informed that the specific grounds for the ban could neither be retrieved nor disclosed. Meanwhile, every other storefront reviewed the game without raising comparable concerns. Epic Games Store requested only that certain store-page screenshots be revised to remove nudity before approving the game. GOG, Itch.io, and the Humble Store all accepted it without issue. Console partners who saw early builds raised no concerns, and Horses secured both ESRB and PEGI ratings. According to the studio, the sole factor delaying console porting is a lack of available funding.

The game itself is intentionally harsh. It follows a young man working a seasonal job on a remote farm where “horses” are actually naked human beings restrained in a yard and treated like livestock. Promotional materials and demo footage show the masked humans enduring physical control, humiliation, and propaganda while carrying visitors on their shoulders or being fed carrots. The experience forces players to either comply with the system or disrupt it, both of which appear deeply unsettling.

Santa Ragione’s background includes a long list of experimental and award-recognized projects. Their tabletop title Escape From The Aliens In Outer Space earned a nomination for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. MirrorMoon EP was shortlisted for the Independent Games Festival’s Innovation Award in 2013. In 2024, the studio published Mediterranea Inferno, which received the Independent Games Festival Excellence in Narrative Award. Horses, directed by Andrea Lucco Borlera, continues that focus on unconventional Italian creators.

Financially, the team faces severe pressure. Santa Ragione initially invested $50,000 into Horses when they signed the project. They expected revenue from their earlier game, Saturnalia, to help recover that investment, but sales fell short of expectations. They also arranged a major bundle opportunity for Saturnalia, but Valve declined to issue Steam keys, again without a detailed explanation, which forced the bundle’s cancellation. Soon afterward, Santa Ragione learned that Horses had been banned from Steam, preventing them from securing a publisher or partner. According to the studio, the lack of a Steam release rendered the project nonviable in the eyes of funders. After two years of searching for support and attempting to overturn the ban, they finished the game using private financial help from friends.

The developers estimate they would need to sell “tens of thousands” of copies across non-Steam storefronts to break even. They have reserved enough funding to maintain the game for six months with updates and fixes. In anticipation of potential closure, team members have already arranged additional work. Pietro Righi Riva plans to continue his roles in teaching, consulting, and curation, while Borlera is pitching new projects independently.

Riva says he wants Valve to offer clear and consistent mature-content policies for creators working with adult themes. They point out that Steam hosts explicit pornographic titles that simply include disclaimers stating all characters are over 18, while non-pornographic works, such as Horses, can be rejected without further review. Their FAQ contrasts this with mainstream streaming services, where controversial films and directors are common, and argues that the disparity suggests Steam does not treat games as artistic works on equal footing with film.As a final appeal, Santa Ragione urges developers to work collectively toward transparency from Steam. “I know developers are understandably scared of voicing their complaints about Steam, but I hope we can collectively ask for better conditions to make our work more viable and more creatively free,” Riva says. He points out that a tiny number of companies now control nearly all avenues of game distribution, carrying responsibility for both commercial sustainability and the cultural growth of the medium.