Cyberpunk Anime Game: On Friday, January one
Top Hat Studios posted a tweet about Sense:
A Cyberpunk Ghost Story that is since gone viral. Developed by Suzaku and published by Top Hat itself, Sense is actually a horror game that purportedly combines the cyberpunk genre with traditional Cantonese folklore. It also boasts an aesthetic that has caused quite a good deal of a stir during the last couple of days, instigating discourse about censorship – or even a lack thereof.
Essentially, Top Hat has suggested it received a deluge of requests to censor Sense after it was discovered that it will be coming to Nintendo Switch on January seven. In response, Top Hat said it “will not censor the game due to self centred crowds who care solely about grandstanding.” You are able to read the complete statement below.
Cyberpunk & Top Hat Publishement
Admittedly, this all reads strangely. A quick Google search is going to show you that Sense launched for PC back in August 2020, and received in and around sixty reviews over the course of the 4 months following that. The number has nearly tripled since Top Hat published the statement of its on Friday, which leads to a good dose of skepticism as to the veracity of its intentions.
One Steam reviewer notes on January one they purchased the game “to reward Top Hat Studio[s] for providing a big middle finger to the SJW cancel mob.” They’d 0.4 hours logged at the time of review. Another reviewer admits they “never would’ve also given that game a second look” if not for the stir on Twitter, but says they appreciate that “this developer had the balls to stand up to [SJWs] and tell them to shove off rather than cowering and kowtowing to the whims of the fickle and perpetually offended.” This sort of attitude, you may have guessed, represents the bulk of new reviews after January one.
Moral Clarity and Bravery of Top Hat
What is funny here’s that a large amount of folks do not even seem to like the game. Prior to the controversy from this weekend, Sense maintained a fairly positive Steam rating, with only a couple of bad reviews interspersed throughout the entire amount. Today, nonetheless, reviews this way one are actually starting to creep in, which include sentiments like, “I have very little intention of playing this game, it is just not my thing.” The person that wrote this has logged 0.4 hours and gave Sense a good review due to, in the words of theirs, the “moral clarity and bravery” of Top Hat.
I might go on, but it suffices to say that a huge amount of the more recent reviews – which constitute more than sixty % of the general amount since August – are only folks saying “Fuck SJWs” with 0.1 hours played and an addendum stating that they probably will not return to Sense. One person also said they were planning to purchase a brand new Switch just to buy another copy of the game. it is all of a bit ludicrous – but then again, It is not really, because this’s how the “anti SJW” crowd has been once again played by edgy marketing. It’s Hatred all over again.
After Top Hat’s original tweet, some folks – myself included – expressed skepticism as to how truthful the statement was. The evidence above discounts any claims of “review bombing,” given that there are only 4 reviews on Metacritic and every one of them were posted well before any of this even came to light. Steam is exactly where the great majority of the reviews actually appear, and I went through every single review posted on the platform. From this perspective, Sense is like another relatively uninteresting game destined to fade into obscurity a few months after launch.
Top Hat has since gone on to gather several of the messages and replies it’s received via other platforms and Twitter. The thread is actually 5 tweets long, though 3 of these’re just smaller segments of the image included in the parent tweet. You can assume this was done to enable men and women to see close ups of the messages, but actually we all have access to zoom functions as well as the third tweet, as opposed to the fifth or second, is actually the brand new one, making it are like more of a bloating technique than anything else. Not that this excuses several of the direct messages portrayed in the screenshots.
The public tweets here are relatively tame for probably the most part. They are not truly calls for censorship so much as they’re expressions of general disapproval towards the game’s stylistic choices, that is one thing that happens with… every game ever. Additionally, a lot of them are actually justified – art styles this way are actually outdated. That is not a call for censorship – it is a point of style. Could it be censorship when the anti SJW crowd complained that Abby’s arms were too big in The Last of Us Part two?
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The DMs are more damning and I think for the devs receiving them – there’s not an excuse to send death threats to folks that are real, regardless of how you think about them. I am all for criticism of a text, but you do not take it to an individual level and make it about a real human being. That is probably the lowest of the low.
It is important to be aware that while I’m sympathetic to the devs receiving horrible messages, the majority of Top Hat’s statement provides no evidence for its promises. From what I are able to see, there has been no review bombing and no mass cries for censorship. The parts of the statement that quote criticisms against the game represent things that few folks actually said, but they’ve been sensationalised to make the game appear as some sort of anti censorship, anti SJW product that’s enticing for the same people type who abused others about Cyberpunk 2077 before actually playing it.
Probably The biggest proof of this’s Sense had already gotten past its platform tests. There is no need to discuss censorship unless you want to trigger a marketing plan. There’s no pressure to change the game from people outside of a little group that will not play it anyway – so why amplify it and say “The game won’t be censored. We categorically refuse”?
Ultimately, this reads as a call to arms. It is pandering to folks who’ll do just what this article has highlighted – buy a game they’ve zero to no interest in to support a self righteous ideological cause that does not exist outside of their own heads. Criticizing a game for the art style of its is not censorship – it’s criticism! On the contrary, lambasting criticism and attempting to snuff it out with overblown marketing ploys designed to sell copies of an upcoming Switch port for a quickly forgotten game is far closer to the sort of censorship it proclaims to be rebelling against, if only since it’s censoring meaning by intentionally manipulating truth. If Nintendo asked for Sense to be censored, you are able to ensure it will have been. But Nintendo did not ask for it to be censored, and virtually nobody else did either. The one parties talking about censorship are actually Top Hat and the folks it’s riled up to purchase a game that nobody, on either side, really cares about.
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