northPeople with horse heads instead of heads. Nightmares so vividly surreal that they are mistaken for reality. A strange farmer who never blinks and forbids you to ever Entering his room. If it sounds like I’m trying to describe an untitled, yet-to-be-revealed A24 film, that’s because Horses often feels like one. Like most of the games in Italian developer Santa Ragione’s experimental catalog, it defies easy categorization.
Horses was born from an image that crossed director Andrea Lucco Borlera’s mind when he was studying film at Università Roma Tre, he says. “I had an image of naked people acting like animals and letting themselves be carried away by impulses, with horse masks on their heads.” At first it seemed like an idea for a movie inspired by Jan Švankmajer’s ghostly 1968 film The Garden, but instead the first-time developer turned it into a game unlike anything else you’ll play this year.
At the start, you are greeted by an enigmatic farmer who agrees to hire you as a helper for 14 days, starting with tending his garden and having dinner with him. True to the spirit of silent film, all of Horses’ dialogue appears in the film titles. The game is mixed with live-action clips that Borlera filmed and edited himself: “At first, this was a solution to a technical problem, but I am quite happy with the result because it is now more original.”
Before long he is given a more uncomfortable task: making sure that Primo and Jolly Jumper, some of the men who tend to the horses on the farm, don’t get too excited about the fillies. However, things quickly take a darker turn when he discovers that one of them is hanging from a tree. “Oh, no… No… again“How horrible!” the farmer replies, and we’re only on day one. Borlera says that the surreal situations will increase over the rest of the fortnight, becoming “more problematic and intense.” The warning about the game’s content (“scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, bloody images, depictions of slavery, torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault and substance abuse”) would make Gaspar Noé proud.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Horses is an outlandish proposition outside the taste of an inexperienced game director, it almost didn’t come to fruition. Borlera was rejected by publishers time and again, until he had a chance encounter with Pietro Righi Riva, the co-founder and director of Santa Ragione, who was also his former game design professor at Milan’s IULM University. (Another alumnus of the course is Lorenzo Redaelli, creator of Santa Ragione’s critically acclaimed visual novel Mediterranea Inferno.)
“I was about to give up, but then I met Pietro,” Borlera recalls. “I explained my work to him and then he invited me to his studio, where we talked about horses.” Riva liked his game from the start, when it was still a barely playable field project, and the meeting was a success. “He basically told me, ‘I’m not sure if it will sell well, but it should exist. Let’s make it happen. ’”
Playing the manifestationIt’s easy to understand why Horses was a difficult project, but you can also understand why Santa Ragione saw some promise in Borlera’s vision. It’s unpredictable and bumpy, and plays like a haunted, arthouse farming sim. I, for one, am grateful that Horses exists. Games would be more boring without projects like this.