Santa Ragione criticized Tim Sweeney’s digital platform after it also sidelined the game that became the center of a minor controversy at the end of the year.

On December 2, Epic Games decided at the last minute to ban the controversial Horses ahead of its planned release. The pre-release build had previously been approved, while Valve had banned it from Steam the week before. This was a major blow to the developer of Horses, Santa Ragione, a small Italian studio that suddenly found itself excluded from the two largest PC game storefronts. In a recent interview with Game File, largely focused on the Epic Games Store’s 2025 growth data, Steve Allison, managing director of the Epic Games Store, said the company likes Santa Ragione but added that the “Adults Only” rating was a decisive factor regarding Horses appearing on the store. Santa Ragione did not take this remark well and responded with a firm rebuttal on Bluesky:

“Epic Games made demonstrably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and did not share the alleged Adults Only IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal. They do not ‘love’ our studio, they effectively erased us. The fact that the game does not deserve an Adults Only rating is evident from full playthroughs widely available on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from its distribution on the Humble Store,” the studio wrote.

According to Santa Ragione, Horses received PEGI 18 and ESRB M ratings through the IARC system, not an “Adults Only” classification. The game itself is deliberately disturbing. The story takes place on a farm where the titular horses are actually naked humans who constantly wear horse masks and are treated entirely as animals: they are fed like livestock, kept in stables, forced to plow, raced, and ridden. Horses is presented in a grim, black-and-white psychological horror style, and the player must take part in daily routines and increasingly unsettling tasks that normalize this ongoing dehumanization. The game includes sexual violence, mutilation, and torture, with the symbolic horses punished by beatings and castration if they have sex with each other.

The game, currently available on GOG, itch.io, and the Humble Store, is supported by its backers and developers, who argue that it does not warrant an “Adults Only” rating and that, while disturbing, its content is not as explicit as the sexual animations seen in more popular, widely distributed titles.

Source: WCCFTech, Game File, Bsky