If you scroll down to Popular New Releases on Steam right now, you’ll find a quintessentially 2026 list of games. There’s Shelves & Sorcery, a new entry in the burgeoning sortslop genre. There’s Landscaper Simulator, which is a simulator about landscaping. The War in the North reissue is there, and there are at least two incremental games, which is not a lot compared to normal.
Possibly that’s because Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse landed on Steam this week, throwing all norms into disarray. As the name implies, it’s a game about magnifying horses. The trailer bears this out: horses are shown being magnified or else distorted—not what I came here for!—alongside a ’90s evoking drum ‘n’ bass soundtrack.
Lest you think this game is a mere joke, it has over 250 “very positive” reviews already after releasing on Monday. Because despite looking like a joke it’s actually a fairly decent puzzle game, one that has been on Itch.io for a while, but which arrives on Steam in a premium The Full Horse edition.
It plays out like this: there are two horses on the screen. Using a variety of magnifying glasses each with their own distorting effect, you have to make your horse match the other horse with pixel precision. This isn’t always easy, but that’s OK, because it is always curiously funny. I haven’t played this new premium edition, but I have spent a little while mucking around in the Itch version, which is both very annoying and, like I said, pretty funny.
In the words of Steam user Toasterban: “This game is beautiful. This game is confusing. This game is horrifying. This game is horse.”
Look: this premium version of Horse Magnifier has more than 50 levels which I can’t see myself tackling. Call me a dullard, call me a philistine, call me a prude: I can only bear magnifying horses for about 15 minutes all up. But if Steam demonstrates anything in this year 2026, it’s that people sure do like to play a bizarre variety of games.
The new version also has Steam Workshop support, meaning you could possibly magnify horses forever. It’s on Steam with a launch discount.
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