“Epic Games Effectively Ghosted Us”, Says Developer Santa Ragione About HORSES Ban

On December 2, 2025, we reported that Epic Game has decided to ban the controversial game HORSE in the last minutes before its planned launch. They had previously approved pre-release development Valve has banned it Steam the previous week. Of course, this is a huge blow to the HORSES developers Holy Reasona small development studio in Italy that was suddenly cut off from the two biggest PC game stores.

Now controversy has emerged again. In a recent interview with Game File that mostly discussed Epic Games Store growth figures for 2025Epic Games Store General Manager Steve Allison said that the company liked Santa Ragione, but added that ‘Adults Only’ Rating is a deal breaker when it comes to publishing HORSES in the shop.

Santa Ragione was not happy with the comments. Today, they responded with a strong and unequivocal rebuttal via the BlueSky social network:

Epic Games made demonstrably false statements regarding the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared the purported AO IARC certificate, which typically includes a link for developers to appeal. They don’t ‘like the studio’, they have effectively scared us away.

The fact that the game does not deserve an AO rating is apparent from the full walkthrough widely available on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from its distribution on the Humble Store.

According to Santa Ragione, Horses earned a PEGI 18 and ESRB M rating through the IARC system, not an Adults Only classification.

The game itself is deliberately made quite interesting. It is located on a farm where the titular “horses” are actually naked humans wearing permanent horse masks, treated entirely as livestock: fed like an animal, kept in a pen, made to pull a plow, raced, and ridden on his shoulders. Horses are presented in a gloomy black-and-white psychological horror style, and players are forced to participate in daily routines and increasingly annoying tasks that normalizes this ongoing dehumanization. The game also included sexual assault, mutilation, and torture (“horses” were punished with beatings and castration if they had sex with each other).

Despite this, the game’s supporters (and the developers themselves) believe that the game does not warrant an Adults Only classification, and the content, while disturbing, is not as graphic as, for example, animated sex in popular normally distributed games.

Horses are currently available to purchase on GOG, itch.io, and the Humble Store.

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