Gory Horror Game Agony To Be Censored On Consoles; Removal Patch To Be Available On PC

If you’re like me and backed the extremely gory and brutal looking first-person horror game Agony on Kickstarter back in 2016, you would have received a concerning update notification titled ‘Censorship in Agony‘. The Kickstarter update from developers Madmind Studio, explains how the game’s release (it was meant to release last month on PC) has been pushed back further due to classification issues. Long story short, in order for Agony to receive an appropriate rating for a console release (PS4 and Xbox One), the developers have had to alter/censor certain content within the game.

The good news is that this will not affect the Australian version of the game, which received an R18+ rating last month. The censorship issue is isolated to the North American console version, which has yet to be rated by the ESRB. If the game was to receive an AO rating then it would be banned from release on consoles, meaning the devs have had to aim for a lower M rating instead. Madmind has confirmed that despite this subtle changes, PC players will have a censorship removal patch available at launch. Furthermore, they have confirmed that console backers will have the option to change to PC in the near future. It is also somewhat amazing that given Australia’s history with strict censorship that our version will remain untouched. You can read the update in full below:

Dear Fans and Supporters!

      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.

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    Many of you ask us what exactly we had to censor, fearing that the game you have been supporting for years will not be the same experience you hoped for. We do not want to list exactly what’s been censored due to possible spoilers, but it is important for you to understand that none of the elements you have seen in Agony’s promotional materials (gameplay, trailers, screenshots, GIFs) have been censored. Do not be afraid, the full version of Agony is much heavier than what you’ve seen so far anyway.

If you don’t know what Agony is, this trailer below should paint a good enough picture for you: