"This game is horrifying. This game is a horse": a horse-magnifying simulator has stormed Steam's new releases charts — with 100% positive reviews

Open Steam's list of popular new releases, and tucked between the usual weekly lineup you'll find Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse — a game where you magnify horses. Not metaphorically: you literally grab a magnifying glass and examine a horse. It launched on August 10, costs $2.99, with a 10% launch discount, and has already racked up nearly 300 reviews, 100% of which are positive.

Here's how it works. Two horses sit on screen: a reference on the left, yours on the right. You're given a set of magnifying glasses, each with its own distortion effect, and the goal is to move them across the animal until it matches the reference pixel for pixel. It sounds like a joke, but plays like a genuine puzzle game: there are more than fifty levels, plus an editor and Steam Workshop support, so other people's horses will never run out. PC Gamer's reviewer, covering the week's new releases, admitted it's actually a fairly decent puzzle game — though he was honest enough to add that he personally couldn't see himself sticking with it much past fifteen minutes.

The game has a single developer, who's also the publisher, working under the handle sketbordcat. It all started as a free jam version on itch.io that unexpectedly went viral, racking up nearly seven hundred comments ranging from "I'm drunk and I'm praising this game" to "best... horse... 2026." The Steam version is an expanded, paid edition of the same thing. The developer's own description fits the tone perfectly: "Do you believe horses have souls? Come, let's look inside together."

The tone of the reviews is exactly what you'd expect from a project like this. A user going by Toasterban put it best.

The mere fact that a release like this made it into the new-releases charts is a sign of the times. Steam in 2026 is living through a golden age of hyper-niche, hyper-literal genres: in that same new releases list, sitting right next to the horses, you'll find Shelves & Sorcery, from the sprawling family of shelf-organizing games, and Landscaper Simulator — a landscaping simulator that is exactly what it says on the tin. Against that kind of company, a game about a magnifying glass and a horse starts looking almost academic.

What's the most absurd game you've ever bought that turned out to be genuinely addictive? Tell us in the comments.