It seems that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board is doing a better job of marketing games these days than the proper marketing people. No bland, cut and pasted “Embark on an action adventure of epic proportions” box blurb can top this sort of stuff:
“Players swing their own giant scythe and employ magic—glowing white crosses—to battle the winged, the lost, and the damned. Blood often splatters out of monsters’ bodies when attacked; weakened monsters can be finished off with a set of commands leading to tongue-evisceration, but more often, some version of dismemberment.”
Or this:
“Templar soldiers cut townspeople in half; a man is decapitated and his head hurtles toward the screen; a man gets stabbed through the eye with his own crucifix, and a soldier impales a woman through the chest by throwing a sword at the fleeing victim.”
The best part, of course, is that this is all authentically literary – Dante Alighieri’s original Inferno wasn’t exactly kindergarten reading either. This is a guy who wrote about the wretched damned rolling in their own excrement for eternity, predatory sodomites hunting in packs, and some guy being skinned alive. And they say video games are bad.
There’s a bunch of naughty, naughty bits too. Quite literally, as the ESRB points out:
“During one sequence, a distraught demon-like creature seizes Dante’s right hand and slowly guides it across her bare chest; during another, “shade minions” in high heels moan lustfully—in the Lust level—as tentacles protrude from their stomachs, their lower regions. As for the nudity: a tapestry-style (hand-drawn) image of a topless woman embracing a man; the same art-style depicting a slave woman—breasts exposed—lying on the floor with the guilt-ridden; a naked woman on a stone slab levitating in the air (only her breasts are fully defined); the aforementioned topless Cleopatra; and a bluish devil/demon in boss-battle mode—its penis visible during the flying and fire-spewing, the standing around (there are equivalent physics applied to female/male body parts).
Tongue evisceration, impalement, and full frontal nudity? It’s just like a real date! It also probably goes without saying that the game’s been slapped with a Mature rating.