One of the most celebrated games of 2020, Disco Elysium, had its rating declined in Australia for its next Final Cut – this effectively means that it has been banned from the country.
As noted by ScreenHub, the Australian Rating Board said in a statement that Final Cut was refused a rating due in part to the way the game portrays sex, drug or addiction abuse, crime, cruelty and violence. The government agency also said that Disco Elysium violates the rule about “repulsive or abominable phenomena in such a way that they offend the standards of morality, decency and decorum generally accepted by reasonable adults”.
Disco Elysium is still available for sale on Steam in Australia, as it has been since 2019. As Kotaku AU points out, the original version of the game “was never really submitted” for classification in Australia, but the final cut is also coming. consoles and therefore needed a rating, it seems.
Other games, such as Call of Duty: WWII, Saints Row IV and South Park: The Stick of Truth, have all been edited to go through the rating process in Australia. It remains to be seen whether the ZA / UM developer will edit Final Cut to allow it to be sold in Australia.
The Final Cut of Disco Elysium will be released on March 30 for PC, PS4, PS5 and Google Stadia. The PC update will be available free of charge to all owners of the original version. There is no word yet on a version of the game for Xbox or Nintendo Switch.
The Final Cut adds much more dubbing to the game for a total of one million words, along with new searches for political insight and quality of life adjustments.
GameSpot’s Elysium Disc review scored the game at 10/10. “It is an investigation of ideas, the way we think, power and privilege, and how we are all shaped, with varying degrees of autonomy, by the society in which we find ourselves,” said reviewer David Wildgoose.
