PlayStation Plus New Free Game Was Banned For Being Too Violent
One of October's free PlayStation Plus games has a ton of gore.
PlayStation Plus subscribers are getting three free games for the month of October. No matter if you're subscribed to PS Plus Essential, PS Plus Extra, or PS Plus Premium, you will be able to download these three games between October 3 and November 6. And once downloaded they are yours to keep as long as you maintain an active subscription to PlayStation Plus. If you missed the announcement, these three games are: The Callisto Protocol, Farming Simulator 22, and Weird West. The highlight here is The Calisto Protocol, a game that is very violent and gory.
The survival horror game is so violet and gory that it was banned from releasing in Japan. A couple of months before its release last December, Japan prevented the game from releasing as it did not pass the CERO rating it needed to pass to release in the country. As a result, the only option for developer Striking Distance was to release a different, censored version in Japan, something it opted against.
For those that don't know: Japan is one of the stricter rating boards in the world when it comes to violence and gore. While they are more lenient on sexual content, when it comes to violent content Japan is fairly strict in comparison to other major markets like The United States and Europe. In other words, this isn't the first game to be prevented from releasing in Japan for over-the-top violent content. Sometimes, games censor certain content in order to remedy this, but The Calisto Protocol isn't the first to bypass this and just not release in the country, which is an increasingly smaller market for console and PC gaming.
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♬ Deep house – TOKYO Lonesome Blue
As for why the content that's an issue, it's the game's "gore engine," which leads to all types of dismemberment and over-the-top violence and death that is reminiscent of the most violent parts of Mortal Kombat. Unfortunately, the game's impressive gore engine wasn't enough to redeem underwhelming parts of the game, which currently sits at a 69 on Metacritic.
"The Callisto Protocol isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't do much to verify why survival-horror fans wanted these types of games back in the first place," reads our review of the game. "With a bit more depth to its various systems and mechanics, The Callisto Protocol could have been far more enjoyable from start to finish. Instead, my main takeaway from Callisto has simply been that I'm now that much more excited to play a number of other survival-horror games that are set to release in 2023."
H/T, Gamingbible.
