Naked people with horse heads for their noggins. Nightmares so vividly surreal they blur into reality. An uncanny farmer who never blinks and forbids you from ever entering his room. If it feels as if I’m trying to describe an untitled, yet-to-be-revealed A24 film, that’s because Horses often feels like one. Like most games in Italian developer Santa Ragione’s experimental catalogue, it defies easy categorisation.
Horses was born from an image that entered director Andrea Lucco Borlera’s mind when he was studying film at the Università Roma Tre, he says. “I had an image of naked people that act like animals and are led by impulses, with horse masks on their heads.” At first it felt like an idea for a movie inspired by Jan Švankmajer’s phantasmagorical 1968 film, The Garden – but instead, the first-time developer turned it into a game unlike anything else you’ll play this year.
At the beginning, you are greeted by an enigmatic farmer who agrees to employ you, a young man on the brink of his 20s, as his helping hand for 14 days, starting out by tending his garden and dining with him. True to the spirit of silent films, all dialogue in Horses appears in title cards. Play is blended with live-action clips that Borlera shot and edited himself: “In the beginning this was a solution to a technical problem, but I’m pretty happy about the result because it’s more original now.”
Before long you are given a more uncomfortable task: ensuring that Primo and Jolly Jumper, some of the male horse-people on the farm, don’t get too excited around the fillies. However, things quickly take a darker turn as you discover one of them hanging from a tree. “Oh no … Not again!” is the farmer’s response – and we’re only on day one. Borlera says that the surreal situations will only ramp up over the rest of the fortnight, becoming “more problematic and intense”. The game’s hefty content warning (“scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery, depictions of slavery, torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, and substance abuse”) would make Gaspar Noé proud.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Horses is an outlandish pitch on the outskirts of taste from an inexperienced game director, it almost didn’t happen. Borlera was shot down by publishers again and again, until a chance encounter with Pietro Righi Riva, the co-founder and director of Santa Ragione, who also happened to be his former game design lecturer at IULM University in Milan. (Another alumnus of the course is Lorenzo Redaelli, creator of Santa Ragione’s critically acclaimed visual novel, Mediterranea Inferno.)
“I was at the point of giving up. But then I met Pietro,” Borlera recalls. “I explained my work, and then he invited me to his studio, where we talked about Horses.” Riva liked his game from the beginning, when it was still a barely playable course project, and the meeting was a success. “Basically he told me: ‘I’m not sure if it will sell well, but it should exist. Let’s make it happen.’”
Playing the demo, it’s easy to see why Horses was a difficult pitch – but you can also see why Santa Ragione saw something promising in Borlera’s vision. It’s unpredictable and jagged, playing like a haunted arthouse farming sim. I, for one, am grateful that Horses exists. Gaming would be more boring without projects like it.