Agony to Release a PC Patch to Bypass Censorship

The game that literally puts players through Hell definitely had a long, hard road to launch. Agony had to make a few major compromises to their vision due to censorship, otherwise the entire project would have seen cancellation. Because of this, many scenes were altered and cut entirely, but the team over at PlayWay want their total vision to be realised. So they've come up with a plan.

In a recent update on their Kickstarter page, the team delivered a backstory to the game's production cycle while also detailing plans to share their original title with the world. One important note, however, is that this will only be possible for the PC version. The console version of the title is as is and would be "impossible" to change at this stage.

Here's what they had to say in their latest update:

"As mentioned many times, every version of Agony, regardless of the platform, is identical in terms of content.

However, in order to be able to publish the game, we had to make some compromises. Otherwise, we would have had to to delete the whole project and never release it. With that in mind, we have spent a lot of time to make sure that censorship will not affect the perception of the game. That is why for many months we have been conducting interviews with age-rating companies in order not to cut out entire scenes from the game but at the same time modify it enough (e.g. just slightly changing the camera's frame) to get an M (Mature) rating instead of AO (Adult-Only) rating. AO rating means that the game could not be released on PS4 and Xbox One, and we would not keep the promise made on the Kickstarter."

We also want to confirm that we are preparing a special, optional patch for PC that will remove the aforementioned "censorship". We would love to do something similar for consoles but from a technical and legal point of view it is simply not possible.

With that in mind, we decided that backers who have bought the console version of Agony will be able to convert it into a PC version. Details on how to do this will be provided soon in the next update, here on Kickstarter."

The team also took the chance to sooth fan fears about the final product. Many raised concerns that the censorship changed the game so much that they weren't given the experience promised. The developers assured that everything shared in promotional materials remained in the final project that shipped out, though they did provide a few GIFs of cut content. To check those out, you view them right here.