An oppressive, grainy black-and-white frame fills the screen and sets an immediate mood of unease and historical dread. Horses, the latest project from developer Santa Ragione, opens by placing the player inside the narrow perspective of Anselmo, a 20-year-old student sent by his parents for a two-week stretch of character-building work on a remote farm.
The setup suggests a game about physical labor and routine tasks. That expectation collapses as soon as the farm’s central mechanic appears: the so-called “horses,” naked human figures forced into expressionless rubber horse masks and locked into metal collars, treated by the farmer as property.
Across roughly three hours, the experience functions less as a playground of branching choices and more as a controlled system for documenting a descent, asking the player to carry out increasingly distressing and degrading tasks through Anselmo’s naive compliance. An explicit content warning precedes play and lists gory imagery, psychological abuse, suicide, and forced participation in immoral acts, making clear that the design aims for maximum emotional confrontation.
The Cinematics of Oppression
Horses first asserts itself through a rigorous, experimental aesthetic that treats every frame as an instrument of pressure on the player. The game adopts the format of an interactive silent film, which keeps events at a strange distance while making individual images feel piercingly direct.
A stark black-and-white palette and a tight 4:3 aspect ratio recall early cinema and historical propaganda reels, and they work together to compress the play space into something airless. Dialogue and Anselmo’s internal thoughts appear on old-fashioned title cards, or intertitles. These textual interruptions cut into the action at key moments and feel physically intrusive, like obstacles that sit between the player and the scene.
The developers lean on unconventional editing techniques including smash cuts, split-screen layouts, and picture-in-picture inserts. The constant cutting and reframing produce a sense of aesthetic friction. High-resolution textures sit beside rough, polygonal 3D character models and the clash between them feels deliberately wrong. The farmer’s face fills the frame in extreme close-ups that amplify his presence and menace. Some actions trigger live-action interstitials, brief pieces of grainy footage that feel detached from the player’s viewpoint and make the experience resemble found media.
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Sound design supports this sense of estrangement. The soundscape stays minimal, with an almost complete absence of expected diegetic noises. In place of natural farm ambience, a constant, oppressive whirring from an unseen film projector runs through every scene. That single mechanical sound adds a feeling of surveillance and isolation and keeps reminding the player that they are watching and enabling a staged document.
Visual and aural choices combine into a distorting lens that makes the rural setting feel tilted away from normal reality. The work’s horror becomes abstract yet intensely forceful, and the presentation makes the subject matter feel inseparable from this specific way of seeing and hearing it.
Systems of Coercion and Complicity
The narrative architecture of Horses is built to enforce player compliance and to expose the logic of power in this small setting. The story unfolds across 14 in-game days. During this span, Anselmo receives a precise list of demands from the farmer. Tasks climb a moral ladder that begins with routine chores such as feeding the farm dog and cleaning stables, then escalates into burials, corporal beatings, and tormenting veterinary procedures.
This regimented structure puts the core themes in the foreground: oppression, subjugation, dehumanization, and the cynical abuse of power. The farm operates as an isolated microcosm in which the farmer’s word functions as absolute moral and legal authority.
Player complicity drives the design. The experience follows a highly linear path. Simple choices appear in conversation or interaction prompts, yet they reveal themselves as superficial, with little effect on the narrative spine. The player, acting through Anselmo, moves along a track that demands participation in the cycle of dehumanization. The absence of meaningful choice generates the game’s psychological dread and creates a sustained feeling of reluctant complicity and powerlessness. Players accustomed to narrative-driven indie games that permit acts of resistance will find that such options are systematically removed here.
Anselmo’s psychological trajectory locks tightly to these constraints. He arrives as a naive outsider and is quickly pulled into a spiral of submission, then settles into the role of silent witness who absorbs the farm’s horrors without external judgment. He becomes a figure of pure reception, caught inside a mental prison shaped by the farm’s rules. Supporting characters reinforce this system. A veterinarian, a priest, and a wealthy businessman all appear as participants in the farmer’s abusive regime, either passively or actively. Their acceptance signals that the society beyond the farm validates the arrangement and deepens Anselmo’s isolation.
Nightmares that interrupt Anselmo’s sleep provide the only structural break from this routine. In these dream sequences, the farmer’s sexual and religious trauma surfaces through raw allegories and dense symbolic images. These nightly episodes pull the player away from the farm loop for brief stretches and create enough emotional distance to start parsing the heavy story, its layers, and its subtext.
Mechanical Repetition and Pacing Faults
The core gameplay loop of Horses relies on simple, repetitive first-person interactions built around item retrieval and basic management. The map stays small and confined to a few key locations, including the tool shed, the house, the pens, and the garden, and the player crosses the same routes again and again.
Repetition grows more pronounced because of a strict inventory rule that allows only two items to be carried at once, which leads to frequent and tedious back-tracking. The mechanical inputs remain straightforward, yet this series of repeated motions can take the edge off the atmosphere when the player loses focus on the narrative escalation for even a short time.
Identifiable problems with pacing and signposting cut into the impact of the story. The low-stakes nature of the physical chores sometimes creates technical friction that weakens the horror. Certain objectives suffer from unclear guidance and simple puzzles drift into confusion. On one in-game day, the task list instructs the player to feed the horses.
Even after performing the obvious action, the next event that should bring new information from the farmer fails to trigger. Progress depends on discovering a specific, non-obvious item through aimless wandering and “pixel hunting.” These stalled moments interrupt the oppressive mood and break immersion in the psychologically punishing scenario. The short runtime, combined with this simplicity and repetition, can blur the cadence of the experience. The concept that underpins it remains strong.
The Review
Horses
Horses is a provocative, technically daring horror experience that utilizes coercive gameplay to explore themes of power and subjugation. The stylized, silent film aesthetic and relentless atmosphere are profoundly effective, demanding introspection. While the repetitive mechanics and occasional poor signposting detract from the pacing, the game’s success lies in its uncompromising, deeply felt narrative vision, creating a short, unforgettable descent into moral paralysis.
PROS
- Highly successful, experimental silent film aesthetic
- Powerful exploration of complicity and oppression
- Unforgettable, intensely disturbing atmosphere
- Strong, deliberate artistic and thematic vision
CONS
- Repetitive core gameplay tasks
- Unclear signposting causes frustrating delays
- Inventory limit encourages tedious back-tracking
- Short runtime magnifies mechanical weaknesses
