Horses review

Projecting

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/9_Vo1s2hi.png?width=690&quality=85&format=jpg&dpr=3&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“A naked man in a horse mask, holding a sign that reads “Fritz”, from black-and-white horror game Horses. - 1”>

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

• Developer: Santa Ragione
• Publisher: Santa Ragione
• Release: December 4th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: GOG , Humble Bundle , Itch
• Price: $5/£4
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

One of the first “moving pictures” ever created is a moving picture of a horse. In the late 1870s, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge produced a series of “chronophotographs” of horses and riders , including the famous 12-frame sequence Sallie Gardner at a Gallop. I know about Muybridge’s work thanks to Jordan Peele’s film Nope, which considers the historical erasure of Sallie Gardner’s Black jockey, whose identity is disputed. Another thing that easily gets overlooked when considering these images is their contribution to the practice of horse-breeding.

Muybridge - who, incidentally, murdered his wife’s lover, which doesn’t seem wholly irrelevant here - captured the images after many years of tinkering with shutters, triggers and emulsions, but they were commissioned by the industrialist Leland Stanford, founder of the university of the same name. Stanford kept racehorses, and wanted a more precise understanding of their movements, with the obvious wider motive of being able to raise more champions; nowadays, gait analysis by means of video capture is commonplace among breeders. Muybridge’s breakthrough in terms of photographic reproduction is thus an important development in control of equine reproduction. To stretch that point a little, you could argue that the moving picture has always been a way of disciplining sex - and one animal may seem much like another, once reduced to a quantity of frames.

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

Those lineages combine in Santa Ragione’s ugly and disquieting artwork Horses, which explores how bodies are constrained, operated and degraded by media technologies that range from early silent movies all the way to the grotesque and choppy sorcery of videogames. Released today, the game has been rejected by Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming storefront, on the grounds of being an obscenity, based on an earlier, work-in-progress version that isn’t publicly available for review. This is both a potential financial disaster for Santa Ragione, and a torturous performance of the gameworld’s own inhibitions.

Save for some title screen footage of a pink and green meadow, Horses unfolds in shades of rickety grey. Starting the game, you catch glimpses of a film projector. It gasps to life, and from there on, everything you see implicitly emerges from that projector. You hear its soporific whirr throughout, lifted fleetingly by music that includes tracks redolent of modern horror movies, and mock-jaunty asides that recall the live piano accompaniment for older silent films. The world is otherwise soundless, which is welcome, because if Horses were fully audible it would consist mostly of screaming.

Horses entangles these cinematic devices with the workings of what could almost be a first-person Stardew Valley . It takes place on a 3D farm estate about the size of the average FPS multiplayer map, with a house, a paddock, a vegetable garden, a rolling cornfield, and an overpopulated graveyard. You are a harrowed young man of around 20, sent to the Farm by your parents to make something of yourself over two weeks of honest labour.

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

There are the rudiments of a conventional farming sim here - an inventory bar, tool icons and the suggestion that plants actually grow between visits - but the presentation keeps yanking you back into the realm of cinema. Dialogue is delivered by title cards. Actions such as watering the potatoes are illustrated by scratchy live footage. Sometimes you hallucinate, and the reassuringly false digital world films over with vistas of rippling, fleshy horses. There’s a kind of kinky antagonism here. Rather than being complementary in the triple-A sense of “cinematic visuals”, or working around limited resources for digital modelling and animation, it’s as though the older technologies of representation were repeatedly frustrating the younger.

The game’s “horses” are similarly at odds with themselves. They are naked and branded male and female human slaves in horse masks, their genitals, breasts, and arseholes blurred out so as to perform a double brutalisation - at once stripping them bare, and pixelating them in disgust.

The depiction of the “horses” recalls the actual treatment of slaves throughout what we are pleased to call civilization, but there are also ironic references to how certain videogame conventions perform bodily subjection, in echo of Leland Stanford’s designs for the emerging technology of chronophotography. One day, you’re sent to round up two stray “horses”. This involves adding them to your hotbar inventory like items, via the button prompt “tame”. In the process, you’re shown a rotatable T-posed character model, a spectacle familiar from countless asset libraries. Get it? Tame-posed.

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

The only thing more unnerving than the “horses” is the Farmer. He is how Shrek might appear in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, an ogreish fatberg in creased and bulbous overalls, his eyes diabolically frail and white beneath his screwed-on hat, his teeth slightly bared as he looms over you in dialogue. He is an abomination - but he is also your host, the person who prepares your meals and pins a list of chores to the wall outside. These tasks range from feeding the farm’s “dog” to forcing a “horse” to pull a plough, all performed by clicking on things, with absolutely no “skill” element beyond deciding how much revulsion to express in dialogue with the Farmer. In the process of doing your dailies, you also learn a little more about the situation on the Farm, and naturally, you look for opportunities to misbehave.

Above all else, you are instructed not to let the “horses” have sex, because the Farmer is both horribly lustful and mortally afraid of sex, to the extent that his own desires have become indistinguishable from his terror, and must be handed over to others to perform. When intoxicated after dark, he has his “dog” rape and abuse the “horses” while he himself stands aside in costume and a chastity belt, fumbling at his thighs.

These nocturnal scenes are hard to distinguish from your own dreams, as you fall under the Farmer’s spell. It’s swiftly apparent that he sees you as an heir, to be moulded through graft and other ceremonies of dominance, especially the sharing of food. The three biscuits he bakes you for breakfast are stamped with symbols of the previous day’s obscenities. Gulping all three down is a squeamish little schoolboy rite of acceptance, like humming the melody for a racist nursery rhyme. Shunning them has no penalty, as far as I can tell - you can get by without breakfast - but feels like a dangerous provocation.

The Farmer’s weaponisation of mealtimes notwithstanding, Horses is possibly more revolted by eating than sex, inasmuch as it seems unsure how to contain and punish the sensuality of eating. At dinner you’re treated to sickly accelerated visuals of smacking lips and teeth, with sound effects that never quite match what you’re eating.

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

For most of the game, your agency as player is required only inasmuch as this allows you to be disempowered. Refuse the Farmer - whether it be saying no to a second helping of meat, or declining to castrate a pinioned “horse” - and he’ll jovially insist, and the game won’t let you refuse again. Perhaps the aim is to test whether you’re willing to say no regardless, or perhaps Horses simply needs you to think you have free will, so that it can get off on the thrill of denying you.

The “choices” are about investigating your own impotence, in other words. Later on you acquire a gun, videogaming’s favourite “verb”, but no ammunition. The gun is eventually used by somebody else, and not as a gun. There’s also a “save the damsel” subplot, videogaming’s other classic verb, but this is thwarted and respun as a softcore daydream, with the Farmer rubbing his thighs from the other side of a screen as he watches you abscond with the “princess”.

The above scenario is a reminder of the projector clattering away behind you, the player of Horses. That projector and the Farmer are one and the same abuser. The machine discharges his pious, voyeuristic need to be estranged from his own sexuality, to experience it as a moving picture. The game’s many rapes, beatings and scenes of self-flagellation are appropriately machinic and abortive, the beginning and end of each animation failing to knit. It’s like watching somebody trying to remember how to jerk off, automatic and listless, even subjectless. The suffering isn’t really inflicted by a character, but unthinkingly enacted by the game’s own technology. However vile the pixel-bruised imagery of welts and amputations, the mayhem is always structural and in a bizarre way, disembodied, even dispassionate. It is merely the action of this world. It just… is.

Image credit:Santa Ragione / Rock Paper Shotgun

I wonder if that reflects primary developer Andrea Lucco Borlera’s debts to Surrealist film, which - here and in general - risk being reduced to the commonplace idea of the surreal as simply “weird”. I’m no student of Surrealist cinema, but if I take anything from, say, The Seashell and the Clergyman , it’s that there are no people in those artworks. There are only images carried and convulsed by subconscious flows that are at once revealed and hidden by the camera. In practice, however, this framing doesn’t quite apply to Horses, which does have a plot and individual characters with histories mentioned in scattered letters and dialogue, and there is naturally the risk of too-easy exculpation in the suggestion that the violence is structural, not individual - a risk that needs to be investigated, because individuals as awful as this do exist, and Horses is broadly a story about refusing to become one.

It isn’t just the Farmer: at intervals the Farm has visitors, including a supplier and his garishly made-up adult daughter, all of whom appear comfortable with the carnage, inasmuch as they allow themselves to perceive the violence as violence and the “horses” as people. When the Farmer and his buddies discuss the euphemistic ‘deviancy’ they wish to punish, they refer primarily to religion, but ultimately to the crushing machinery of common-sense morality, what ’everybody knows’. As the supplier’s daughter tells you, while literally riding on the shoulders of a naked slave: “the way they used to live… a lot of people find that unacceptable. I don’t care, personally. But usually, people exhibiting immoral behaviour also have dangerous ideas.”

The supplier’s daughter is a tricky figure because she is both the voice of the censor - her callous remarks an elaboration of Steam’s storewide prohibition on “content that is patently offensive or intended to shock or disgust viewers” - and also, the probable reason for Steam declining to platform the game. Inasmuch as can be told from Santa Ragione’s own account of events, an earlier, work-in-progress build of Horses featured a version of the character the platform holder’s content reviewers deemed to be plausibly underage, with Valve telling Santa Ragione “we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor”.

In choosing to make this fact public before release, and accuse Valve of censorship while defending their game against the charge of child sexual abuse material , Santa Ragione have struck a Faustian bargain. On the one hand, Horses now has a profile it likely wouldn’t have had, if the developers had released it on other storefronts without comment. On the other, the game we have today is haunted by an earlier, seemingly vanished version of itself that is now the subject of widespread speculation - in good and bad faith.

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.

Still, I can only comment on the game I’ve played. “Dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone,” the supplier’s daughter tells you. “Because if the machine jams, everything falls apart.” That’s what bodily reproduction is in Horses - a jamming of the mechanism of audiovisual reproduction that performs this social order, that preserves the abysmal mutant sterility of this awful world. The camera fucks. The participants are props, scenery, special effects.

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Horses

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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