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Horses is an absolutely cursed horror game from the creators of SaturnaliaAnother noxious artgame for the stable
Another noxious artgame for the stable
Image credit:Santa Ragione
Image credit:Santa Ragione
The premise is that you’re a harried young man who must spend 14 summer days helping out on a farm, which harbours a terrible mystery. As the curtain rises, you walk up to the gate and bid good day to the Farmer, who is perhaps the worst thing in a game that “features scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery (mutilation, blood), depictions of slavery, torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, and substance abuse”.
Horses - Exclusive Trailer | Black Summer 2023Watch on YouTube
Horses - Exclusive Trailer | Black Summer 2023
The Farmer occupies a point on the Uncanny Valley I would approximately date to the normalisation of 3D lip-synching animations in the early noughties, back when videogame cutscenes were truly unholy artefacts and fuel for youtubehaiku. His eyes are frail and unblinking faceted orbs in a face of sour cream, with deeply worrying wrinkles and fissures that, you somehow sense, travel the entire length of his body. His body is a bulbous and spindle-edged dollop of mashed potato stuffed into a creased vest and trousers.
The other occupants of the farm are hacked from the same vein of digital ghoulishness. There’s a dog which is essentially a floating head poking out of a blackbox kennel, its eyes rolled comically to one side, neither dead nor alive. The titular horses, meanwhile, are the soiled and suffering love children ofGarry’s ModandPathologic. They’re naked people with horse heads and pixelated gonads. You first encounter them jammed into a pen that doesn’t allow them to sit, and are promptly invited to ride one around the farm, racing the Farmer in third-person view. Not long after, there’s a depiction of a suicide and the task of disposing of a body, carried out in the same perfunctory, A-to-B fashion as pulling carrots. It’s safe to say that Horses doesn’t have much in common withStardew Valley.
Image credit:Santa Ragione
You might also say that Horses doesn’t have much in common with, say, Horizon: Forbidden West or GTA 6 or any other glossy photorealistic blockbuster in which characters look and move with more-than-lifelike splendour. The thing about visuals such as those is that they often hide a lot of ugliness -colossal overwork, for example, or the fact thatyour horse in the original Assassin’s Creed is actually “a twisted fucked up human skeleton”, to quote former Ubisoft developer Charles Randall.
I’m not going to launch into a(nother) lecture here about the buried evils of triple-A software development, not least because I have to run off now and see a comparatively restful game set in historic Iceland. But I do find it invigorating to play a game like Horses, which takes the specific varieties of ugliness only videogames are capable of and leaves them proudly on the surface.
