From a letter to Valve Corporation’s CEO Gabe Newell, lightly edited.

Dear Mr. Newell,

Steam has been my main source for games for over twenty years. I am disheartened that you chose not to publish Santa Ragione’s recently released game, Horses.

I’ve read some substantive critique; Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun’s among them. I have also read Santa Regione’s discussion of the ban. I bought Horses on Itch and played it through; I found it enjoyable and thought provoking, though not transformative. I was surprised to find a much tamer experience than I had been led to believe. I am particularly concerned that Steam found this title dangerous enough to ban it.

Is Horses unsettling? Yes, though you would see far worse in popular horror films. I find Hostel or Saw gut-wrenching to near-unwatchable; Horses felt almost cute by comparison. It is nowhere near Argento’s classic Suspiria or Aster’s harrowing Midsommar, which deals with similar themes. The game’s pixelated censorship, silly animations, and cutting away from its worst moments comes across as coy, even camp. I suspect this is intentional: the game is in large part concerned with authoritarianism and the reproductive dynamics (in all senses) of cinema and games themselves. It is also concerned with complicity: one’s choices to voice disgust or approval have apparently no impact on the story. Its four explicit themes—laid out in the embedded narrative of a VHS tape you must watch and decode to progress—are the repression of violence, religion, chastity, and silence.

Steam has long been willing to publish works engaging with brutal dehumanization and authoritarian violence. Games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs or SOMA depict humans involuntarily warped, both physically and mentally, beyond recognition. Where Horses is agrarian, Amnesia is industrial, but both focus on the subjugation of labor by the powerful. Valve’s own work has not shied away from horror; Half Life 2 is entirely about the visceral subjugation of political and bodily autonomy. Valve gave us the headcrab and the stalker—both instances of forcible objectification—and the game’s camera shies away from neither.

What, then, makes Horses unpublishable? Surely not violence, or you’d have pulled half the Steam catalogue by now. It can’t be body horror: I flinched far more at Dead Space 2’s eyeball scene. Could it be nudity? Half Life 2’s stalkers are fully nude and completely uncensored; I find the image of their mutilated bodies far more visually disturbing than the titular horses. Is it sex? Steam publishes the wildly popular Cyberpunk 2077, which has no shortage of breasts, vaginas, penises, and first-person sex scenes. It also depicts rape, torture, murder, and young men hooded, restrained, and tortured as livestock on a farm. Could Horses be at fault for flagellation? Surely not; Steam published Robert Yang’s charming Hurt Me Plenty, where players directly spank a simulated consensusal partner. Is it complicity in authoriarian abuse? Lucas Pope’s highly-regarded Papers Please, also on Steam, puts players in the increasingly disturbing role of enforcing a fascist state’s border. It too contains pixelated nudity and violence.

I love cute, safe, and friendly games; Astroneer is my jam! And as an adult, I also enjoy challenging, even harrowing narratives. For me, Horses falls somewhere in the middle—one might call it the Animal Farm of fascist horror parables. I think Steam ought to publish it, and more transgressive works as well.

Yours truly,

Kyle Kingsbury