Between experimentation and identity, an authorial path that finds a new stage in HORSES
For over fifteen years, the Italian development studio Santa Ragione has stood as a presence that resists easy comparison within the broader landscape of game production. Founded in 2010 by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi, the studio has shaped its path far from mainstream market logic, choosing a trajectory that places authorship, experimentation, and an understanding of videogames as an autonomous expressive language at its core.
Santa Ragione has never tried to define a recognizable “genre,” but rather a method: each project responds to a specific formal or thematic need, taking on forms that often differ radically from one another. This protean nature has played a key role in establishing the studio’s reputation as a reference point for an international niche interested in experimental videogames, aesthetic research, and cross-pollination with other artistic languages.
FOTONICA and MirrorMoon EP: space, rhythm, perception
The first title to clearly define the studio’s identity was FOTONICA, released in 2011. The game offers a first-person experience that strips videogames down to their essential elements: movement, space, and speed. FOTONICA avoids traditional narrative structures and instead builds progression through rhythm and bodily perception, placing players in direct confrontation with the physicality of action and the abstraction of its environments.
This initial exploration gave way to MirrorMoon EP, a project that shifts the focus from adrenaline to contemplation. Here, Santa Ragione works with alien spaces, essential geometries, and a deliberately cryptic structure that encourages exploration without providing explicit explanations. MirrorMoon EP reinforces the studio’s interest in ambiguity and in an unguided relationship between player and game world, further strengthening its position within international festival circuits and critical discourse.
Wheels of Aurelia: the narrative turn
With Wheels of Aurelia, Santa Ragione introduces a new dimension into its trajectory: explicit storytelling. Set along the roads of 1970s Italy, the game takes the form of a narrative road trip that weaves together dialogue, player choices, and historical and political references. While maintaining an essential structure and a minimal interface, Wheels of Aurelia marks a significant shift, showing how the studio can address complex themes through a more immediately recognizable narrative form.
The title achieved solid international circulation and helped broaden Santa Ragione’s audience, confirming the studio’s ability to adapt its identity to less abstract contexts without sacrificing stylistic coherence.
Saturnalia: folklore, architecture, horror
In 2022, Santa Ragione released Saturnalia, one of the studio’s most ambitious and layered projects. The game presents a third-person horror experience set in a village inspired by Mediterranean imagery, where folklore, labyrinthine architecture, and dynamic lighting systems play a central role. Critics received Saturnalia with strong interest, and the game continues to spark discussion and analysis over time, becoming one of the most frequently cited Italian titles within contemporary author-driven horror.
The project definitively consolidates Santa Ragione’s international reputation and highlights the studio’s maturity in managing complex productions, both creatively and technically.
Mediterranea Inferno and working with authors
Alongside the development of its own titles, Santa Ragione has built a path of support and co-production for strongly author-driven works. Within this context sits Mediterranea Inferno, directed by Lorenzo Redaelli and awarded Excellence in Narrative at the 2024 Independent Games Festival. The game confirms the studio’s interest in projects that engage with Italian cultural contexts, addressing social and generational themes through unconventional expressive forms.
This path had already found an earlier and significant expression with Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star, a visual novel published by Santa Ragione in 2020 and also directed by Redaelli. An intimate and deeply personal project, it uses interactive storytelling to explore complex relational dynamics, further confirming the studio’s commitment to supporting strong authorial visions that push beyond the boundaries of traditional videogame forms without normalizing them.
Toward HORSES
HORSES emerges from this long-built trajectory. The project has drawn attention not only for its artistic choices, but also for the circumstances surrounding its distribution on major digital platforms. These events have sparked a broader debate about the relationship between authorial works, distribution systems, and the limits imposed by the industry’s dominant gatekeepers.
This interview aims to explore Santa Ragione’s path, their understanding of videogames, and the challenges they have faced over the years, without reducing the discussion to a single episode. It offers an opportunity to reflect on what it means, today, to continue making experimental videogames within an increasingly standardized landscape, and on whether space still exists for alternative forms of expression within the medium.
The Interview
This interview is published in full, preserving the natural flow of the conversation. At Indie Games Devel, we believe developers deserve the space to speak freely, without cuts or reinterpretations.
Looking back at titles like Saturnalia and Mediterranea Inferno, as well as FOTONICA, MirrorMoon EP, and Wheels of Aurelia, how do you approach design, aesthetics, and minimalism in relation to narrative?
We always start from a sensation or a theme, then remove everything that weakens it: few rules, few interfaces, a small number of elements repeated with care. In FOTONICA, narrative lives mainly in rhythm, space, and the body. Wheels of Aurelia: it takes shape through structure, history, and dialogue. In Saturnalia, it emerges from atmosphere, navigation, and systems. In Mediterranea Inferno, it relies on words and staging. The form changes, but the idea stays the same: design and aesthetics must serve meaning, not decorate it.
Do you have an internal method for balancing experimental atmospheres and accessibility?
We introduce friction only when we intend it. We run playtests, including with people who are not experts or enthusiasts, to understand where the game becomes difficult for the wrong reasons. Then we adjust readability and onboarding, while leaving intact the parts that must remain ambiguous or uncomfortable. Accessibility means removing unnecessary friction, but also creating appeal for players who have little experience or interest in traditional videogames.
How does Santa Ragione come across abroad? Do more stimuli come from Italy or from elsewhere?
In the past, Santa Ragione resonated more strongly abroad because interest in non-traditional games ran higher there. Today, Italy also hosts an audience that appreciates more narrative and experimental videogames. What Italy still lacks, perhaps, are more festivals, conferences, and events that treat videogames as a medium.
Our cultural stimuli and sources of inspiration come from Italy, because it is our context and we want to speak about it. Funding, distribution, and broader opportunities, however, still come mainly from the international market.
How much weight does sound design carry in your creative process? In many of your titles it feels structural rather than secondary.
We try not to treat sound as a finishing touch, because it defines rhythm, tension, and spatial perception. In Saturnalia, for example, we knew from the start that sound would define ninety percent of the identity of the creature at the center of the game.
We use sound to convey information, build anticipation, create discomfort or intimacy, and make a world believable without over-explaining it. The relationship between sound and silence matters deeply to us.
Are you working on proprietary techniques, pipelines, or tools?
Unfortunately, we have not had the chance to develop proprietary tools in depth. The main exception is the dialogue system we used in both Wheels of Aurelia and Saturnalia, which manages non-linear conversations based on internal and external conditions. Anna Kipnis originally designed and developed this system.
What technical challenges do you typically face, and how do you address them?
We face the usual challenges, amplified by the fact that we are a small team and that funding experimental titles remains difficult: performance, porting, build stability, and tools not designed for what we want to achieve. Our strategy relies on prototyping, profiling, internal QA, defined pipelines, and collaboration with external partners for ports. Most importantly, we learn to say no to interesting features when they put the entire project at risk.
What conceptual impulse initially drove HORSES?
We wanted to create a videogame that draws from a certain kind of arthouse cinema, using linguistic registers and themes that rarely appear in the videogame medium. HORSES attempts to export this form of authorship by experimenting with the expressive potential of interaction, reaffirming that videogames can function as tools for reflection and communicative power.
Steam and Epic removed HORSES after preliminary approvals and without clear indications of problematic content. What was your first reaction, professionally rather than emotionally?
We felt stunned and perplexed by the reasons provided. Tried to understand which content they considered problematic and attempted to establish communication channels with multiple contacts at Valve, offering full cooperation to resolve the issue. We spent months trying, but nothing worked.
On a practical level, we had to impose order: reconstruct the chronology of events in writing, collect exchanges and communications, and understand where room for intervention existed and where opacity prevailed. This process also led us to make parts of it public. When a small team enters a months-long limbo, the impact remains far from abstract: costs continue, planning collapses, people look for other jobs, and fragmentation becomes extremely hard to repair.
From your perspective, does this situation speak more about HORSES or about the current state of digital platforms? Is it an isolated case or a broader symptom?
A shift is clearly underway. HORSES has its own specific circumstances, but it exposed systemic issues and sparked an intense discussion.
We do not know whether this will lead to concrete change, and the current political climate does not look particularly favorable. At the very least, greater awareness has begun to spread, and that already matters.
What strikes us most is that the issue does not concern only “what is allowed,” but how enforcement happens: automated procedures that never turn into real dialogue, unclear rules, and no path for adapting a product to requirements. When a few platforms control most access to audiences, this situation harms the entire medium. The problem does not belong to a single title, but to accountability and transparency among digital gatekeepers.
Santa Ragione has always worked with complex and uncomfortable themes. During HORSES’ development, did you feel you were crossing a different threshold?
We knew HORSES would stand out for its more disturbing elements compared to our previous games. Every sequence was designed to serve the narrative, yet what followed went beyond our expectations. Some controversy was anticipated, but not reactions severe enough to jeopardize the project’s production.
Careful work went into content warnings, intent, and staging, as the goal was never to shock for its own sake.. When judgment operates through fragments, however, an work’s internal coherence loses priority.
Will this experience change your future approach to distribution or to the themes you tackle? Or does it reinforce your current direction?
It will have an impact, though its extent remains hard to measure. We still aim to create videogames with a strong authorial component. We do not plan to sacrifice creative choices, but greater awareness and caution will inevitably shape future projects.
At the same time, it would feel dishonest to deny the risk of self-censorship. Not because our ideas change, but because an arbitrary and undisputable rejection can devastate a small team.
How does HORSES relate to your previous work? Does it break from it, synthesize it, or extend it?
If we look at Santa Ragione’s recent productions, each expresses the personal vision of its director. That vision changes, but continuity persists in how we approach videogames as authorial and artisanal works, with attention to themes rooted in Italian contexts yet capable of expressing universal values.
HORSES also represents an important step in how we work with authors: we support strong, personal visions with production and technical structures that allow realization and distribution without normalization. In this sense, the game connects to our recent trajectory not only thematically, but methodologically. We believe videogames can remain artisanal, specific, and still speak to diverse audiences, especially when they follow less traveled formal paths.
If people remember HORSES years from now, what kind of conversation would you like it to have generated?
We hope people remember it as an authorial game that asserted its right to exist, even when it felt uncomfortable for certain distribution systems and fell outside common definitions of videogames.
We would like it to serve as a useful case for discussing processes: what happens when a lawful adult work becomes effectively invisible, which minimum protections should exist, and how opaque decisions can determine the economic and human fate of a project.
Most importantly, we hope people remember HORSES for bringing new themes and techniques into videogames, and for inspiring other authors.
After fifteen years, Santa Ragione still moves in alternative directions. Does this stance feel exhausting or necessary?
Both, naturally. It feels exhausting because it entails greater risk and uncertainty, but it also feels necessary. Despite more than sixty years of existence, videogames remain a young medium that has not fully developed its own grammars. This limitation restricts its communicative potential. We believe experimentation carries responsibility: it allows new genres and paradigms to emerge.
Looking ahead, do you feel more interested in pushing further experimentation or consolidating a recognizable identity?
If we look at our eight commercial titles, experimentation already defines that identity. We consider it essential. If opportunities arise to work on new projects, we want to continue pushing in that direction.
Final Thoughts
Santa Ragione’s words outline a trajectory that has never bent toward normalization, neither creatively nor productively. Their experience shows both the possibility and the difficulty of continuing to treat videogames as spaces for research, ambiguity, and critical confrontation.
HORSES fits into this trajectory not as an exception, but as the natural continuation of a method that has long questioned the limits of the medium and its systems of legitimization. The issues surrounding its release extend beyond a single title or studio, reaching deeper into the relationship between authorship, distribution, and platform responsibility.
After more than fifteen years of activity, Santa Ragione continues to move along a divergent line, fully aware of the risks and consequences this choice entails. Their path avoids shortcuts and insists on the need to experiment, fail, and open new expressive possibilities. In a medium still under construction, this position remains not only demanding, but deeply necessary.
We thank Santa Ragione for their availability and for taking the time to grant us this interview, allowing for an in-depth discussion of their work and their vision of videogames.
In the coming days, we will return to Horses with our review, taking a closer critical look at the experience.
If you want to know more:
Santa Ragione Official Website
