Look. The game shouldn't have been removed from sale on the other storefronts. There is nothing in this game that is worse than what shows up on the Steam best sellers lists on a daily basis. This doesn't even touch the edginess of those repugnant Sex With You-Know-Who games (kinda funny that I have to censor that to get this review posted, huh?) that is a series now. Horses tries to use the offensive and off-putting imagery to say something and I will never say a game shouldn't attempt to say something. However, Horses is an incompetent, mess of a game with ideas that don't mesh together.
The first thing you'll notice is that the game is presented in a silent film motif. I have seen nearly 200 silent films in the last 5 years and Horses does not understand how silent film works. Silent films were active, they were full of motion and pantomime. Body language and facial expressions was used to tell the stories as much as the intertitles, the cards that display dialog between the filmed scenes. F.W Murnau, one of the most celebrated directors of the Weimar German industry, which may have been making the best films in the world in the 1920s, made films like The Last Laugh and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas with as minimal text as possible. Horses doesn't understand this method of storytelling. Horses has every character stand still or slowly move with boring animation. The text is in title card after title card and so you know someone is talking, there is a close-up of the speakers mouth because it doesn't trust you to figure this out.
The developers aren't required to be interested in the medium of silent film to use the aesthetic but why use it if you're not going to even bother to see how it was used originally? Why the choice at all? I see no purpose to this. I'll admit to liking some of the cuts to the live-action footage. Something about the cut to the soup when you feed the dog is the right kind of unsettling that the game should've aimed for. Instead, we get mostly the usual clichés we see in these kinds of horror games. Oh no, you're walking down the field doing a mundane task but a shocking sound plays and suddenly there's a person hanging from a tree! Oh no! How scary! I wonder if the man running the farm is a bad man! He's shot in shadowy lighting! Oh wow! Deep!
If you've seen the original season of Clone High, there is an episode in which a teenage Joan of Arc, a gothy teenage art school clone version, submits a pretentious art film to a film festival. The show presents it as a parody of the usual art film you see mocked in other places. That's what Horses reminds me of. It clearly want to say something and they made an attempt but it comes off as parody. There is nothing here that you haven't seen before. It's poorly thought out, it's poorly implemented, and it's incredibly juvenile. I wanted to give it a chance and was hoping it was going to be something worthwhile, especially after the controversy but nope. It's what a dumb person thinks a smart person's art horror game would be.
I'm not offended by the content of the game. I'm offended that they thought this would be a worthwhile game to release. It's bad, bad, bad. If the controversy about it being removed from sale on other storefronts wouldn't have happened, no one would've bothered with it. I hate tearing this game apart but dear god, is it just plain stupid. I played Wheels of Aurelia on my Vita years ago and thought that was okay. Not great, but a few good moments. Somehow, the studio regressed to... this. They want to be Pier Paolo Pasolini but they've released something that even Uwe Boll would consider beneath him.
Don't fall for it like I did.
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