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HORSES PC Critic Reviews
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75
Metascore Generally Favorable
positive
6 (75%)
mixed
2 (25%)
negative
0 (0%)
Showing 10 Critic Reviews
Dec 2, 2025
Santa Ragione delivers a subversive, sometimes shocking, often funny first-person narrative horror that, while perhaps a little insubstantial, remains an engagingly unconventional exploration of some timely themes.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
HORSES isn't a game for the faint of heart, nor those who struggle to be confronted with intensive imagery. It's a rudimentary video game that uses the medium as a vehicle for exploration of intensive themes, which creates an incredibly unsettling and disturbing atmosphere. There may be other horror games that you'd prefer to play, but very few will evoke the kind of disgust and repulsion that HORSES achieves, and evoking emotion is what art is all about.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
And, indeed, the skuzzy and harrowing Horses gains much of its power through its linearity, shepherding you through your own complicity in a cycle of dehumanization with scarcely an option to offer a word of protest. The lack of meaningful choice makes the very act of playing the game feel practically unbearable, what with players themselves being led forward like animals.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
Regarding his film, Pasolini said that "to scandalize is a duty." Art must be scandalous, unafraid of censorship, because it exists to open eyes, to unveil what is hidden, to show what society would like to conceal. The poet and director taught us that a work that serves as a starting point for reflection for the viewer—or, in this case, for the video game player—must not be complacent or harmless; instead, it must challenge them. Because only in crisis do we find the courage to look without turning away. Horses works precisely within this uncomfortable space: there is no reassuring distance between the one inflicting the harm and the player; we are not allowed to take refuge in passivity. The responsibility for our actions is ours, even when they are imposed by the video game, so as not to evade the questions about what it truly means to obey, to participate, to be complicit. To carry out orders.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
Horses is the kind of experience that doesn’t look for compromises and has no interest in pleasing everyone. Santa Ragione plays with incendiary material and does so with a confidence that’s almost disarming. It’s a “small” title, one that inevitably divides, because it demands from the viewer the willingness to look exactly where we usually turn away. And that’s precisely where its value lies: in its ability to dig, provoke, unsettle and, above all, leave a mark.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
Disturbing and outside of any canon: horses is a journey into the loss of innocence.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
Horses is a chilling, nerve-shredding short story that propels you through a series of increasingly heinous farm tasks. Sharp writing of morally repugnant characters creates a harrowing atmosphere, which is frustratingly diminished by repetitive activities and unclear signposting that sometimes pull you out of its silent film-like world. Even so, developer Santa Ragione’s admirably bracing vision does well to harness what can make the interactivity of video games so affecting, ensuring you’ll have plenty to think about as the credits roll.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 5, 2025
An impressively daring horror experience that pushes the boundaries of what most people would expect from a video game, in terms of subject matter and imagery.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 2, 2025
The complexity here is that Horses is about the sexuality of younger people, even if none of the characters are actually minors. The Farmer is the way he is because of how he was raised - there are doodles and a home video that obviously date back to his early teenage years - and now, he is trying to pass those brutal values onto you. The moral is about how puritanism may reproduce across generations, even when taken to the extent that congress becomes impossible, which necessitates certain other, shambolically crude and fantastical approaches to securing a legacy. That your character is a legal adult is a technicality: the game frames you as a mute child, peering up at the Farmer while eating, struggling to say no by means of emojis and shakes of your head. It's easy to imagine the fable playing out exactly the same way if the protagonist were in their early to mid teens.
FULL REVIEW
PC
Dec 4, 2025
Though the themes never circle to anything profound, Horses’ power still lies in its moments of discomfort. All you can do is squirm as you’re roped into atrocity after atrocity, forced to participate in a sick ritual led by a man who gets off on controlling others. He makes the rules and everyone in his orbit has to follow them — or else. Put a tool back in the shed after you use it. Eat another piece of meat even if you’ve indicated that you’re full. And absolutely no fornicating! At what point do rules become something that are only designed to give their creator a power trip?
FULL REVIEW
PC
