This has been discussed lightly over at the Lore Discussion thread, but I think this warrants its own thread.
Recently, I bought Ashes of Malmouth and had quite a lot of fun playing through it. I’d like to preface this by saying that I didn’t consider myself particularly squeamish about the game’s content when I played through the base game—the enemies popping like gore-filled balloons, mountains of corpses, references to satanism, cannibalism, and other things I got over just fine—I get that such ideas are meant to be repulsive as they’re associated with the antagonists of the game, and to harden the player’s resolve in resisting these atrocities. It’s a game about humanity’s survival against truly insidious foes. Heck, I’m sure absolutely nobody reads a title like “Grim Dawn,” sees the cover art that includes rotting corpses dangling from a dead tree against a blood-red sky, then thinks, “Oh boy, a family-friendly experience!”
I get that this is not, by any extent, an appropriate game for youngsters. That being said, I was onboard with that right up until I got to the end of the Ashes of Malmouth expansion. For those of you ignoring the spoiler alert up top, there’s a quest where the Taken is tasked with rescuing a number of captives—specifically female captives—from an Aetherial factory, but is forced to kill the captives because the Aetherials have already mutilated and mutated the women to the point where they have been reduced to living incubators. Heck, there’s quite a bit of foreshadowing to this, too—Cronley makes reference to the Aetherials keeping some captives alive as ‘breeders’ to bolster their numbers. Furthermore, the creation of new life prevents the Ch’thonians from reaching their goal of annihilating all mortal life, so there’s a chilling sort logic that makes the Aetherials’ decisions sensible in context to the fictional setting. The idea of human livestock is meant to disgust the player and emphasize the insidious nature of the Aetherials, I get that—I just think the player is able to get the idea perfectly fine without needing to see it taking place firsthand in graphic detail.
I’d post screenshots to further explain the situation for the people who ignored the ‘Spoiler Alert’ in the title and are reading this without playing Malmouth expansion, but I’m actually concerned that posting in-game screenshots from “The Womb” area of the Fleshworks would violate the forum rules policy on pornographic content, so I won’t.
I’m not trying to say that the game has broken some moral ‘event horizon,’ as Grim Dawn is not the first piece of media to include content like this: I believe one of the “Aliens vs. Predator” films has a scene where an Alien-Predator hybrid kills a pregnant woman in a similarly intimately disgusting fashion. That said: the “Aliens vs. Predator” franchise is a horror movie, with an audience that is specifically drawn to it for the shock and disgust value—Grim Dawn, on the other hand, is marketed primarily as an ARPG set against the backdrop of a intricately detailed and blood-soaked fictional universe.
Perhaps I’m the only one who has this strong of an opinion. Heck, maybe some people were actually enticed by the content, as was jokingly suggested when the topic was brought up in the Lore Discussion thread.
Again, I’m not writing this in some fit of hysterical moral outrage, and it’s (sadly) not like I haven’t seen considerably worse things on the internet. What I feel compelled to ask is whether it’s such a good idea for Grim Dawn’s creative direction to continue down the rabbit hole of presenting incrementally more ‘horrific’ or ‘shocking’ content. Maybe the problem is just that I’m too touchy about this sort of thing?
