[UPDATE - February 8, 2026] Epic Games Senior Communications Manager Brian Sharon reached out to Wccftech to provide Epic's official response to Santa Ragione. You can find it below in its entirety.
Our team played the game and found it violated the Epic Games Store’s Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies. We did a secondary check by filling out the ratings questionnaire for the game ourselves and the content got an Adults Only (AO) rating – which we do not allow on the Store. Because this wasn’t an official submission, we do not have a certificate to share with the team. We did give the developers context around the policies they violated. When they appealed, we reviewed the content again, and let them know the decision was appropriately applied and will remain in place.
[ORIGINAL STORY] On December 2, 2025, we reported that Epic Games had decided to ban the controversial game HORSES at the last minute before its planned launch. They had previously approved a pre-release build, whereas Valve had banned it from Steam the previous week. Needless to say, this was a huge blow for HORSES developer Santa Ragione, a small Italian development studio that suddenly found itself cut off from the two biggest PC game stores.
Now, the controversy has reignited. In a recent interview with Game File that was mainly about the Epic Games Store's 2025 growth figures, Epic Games Store General Manager Steve Allison said that the company loves Santa Ragione, but added that the 'Adult Only' rating was a dealbreaker when it came to publishing HORSES on the store.
Well, Santa Ragione did not take kindly to the comment. Today, they responded with a strong, firm rebuttal via the social network BlueSky:
Epic Games made provably incorrect statements about the game’s content, refused to provide details supporting their claims, and has not shared their claimed AO IARC certificate, which normally includes a link for the developer to appeal. They do not ‘love that studio’, they have effectively ghosted us.
The fact that the game does not deserve an AO rating is apparent from the widely available full walkthroughs on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from its distribution on the Humble Store.
According to Santa Ragione, Horses obtained a PEGI 18 and ESRB M rating through the IARC system, not an Adult Only classification.
The game itself is intentionally quite the gut punch. It's set on a farm where the titular “horses” are actually naked humans wearing permanent horse masks, treated entirely as livestock: fed like animals, stabled, made to pull ploughs, raced, and ridden on their shoulders. Horses is presented in a bleak, black‑and‑white psychological horror style, and the player is forced to participate in daily routines and increasingly disturbing tasks that normalize this ongoing dehumanization. The game also includes sexual assault, mutilation, and torture (the "horses" are punished with beatings and castration if they have sex with each other).
That said, the game's supporters (and the developers themselves) believe that it does not warrant an Adult Only classification, and its content, while disturbing, is not as explicit as, for example, sex animations in more popular games that are normally distributed.
Horses is currently available for purchase on GOG, itch.io, and Humble Store.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
