‘I’m not sure if it will sell, but it should exist’: Horses, a surreal Lynchian horror game

Creative director Andrea Lucco Borlera explains how this fever dream of a game came to be and why it's not afraid to get weird

Naked people with horse heads for their noggins. Nightmares so vividly surreal they blur into reality. An uncanny farmer who never blinks and forbids you from ever entering his room. If it feels as if I'm trying to describe an untitled, yet-to-be-revealed A24 film, that's because Horses often feels like one. Like most games in Italian developer Santa Ragione's experimental catalogue, it defies easy categorisation.

Horses was born from an image that entered director Andrea Lucco Borlera's mind when he was studying film at the Universita Roma Tre, he says. I had an image of naked people that act like animals and are led by impulses, with horse masks on their heads." At first it felt like an idea for a movie inspired by Jan vankmajer's phantasmagorical 1968 film, The Garden - but instead, the first-time developer turned it into a game unlike anything else you'll play this year.