Dispatch, the highly acclaimed episodic superhero narrative game from the group of Telltale alums at AdHoc, has landed on Switch a few months after hitting PlayStation and PC, but Nintendo's version is decidedly more kid-friendly.
Dispatch is a game with a lot of sexually explicit content, including scenes with partially nude and fully nude characters. Nothing, nothing at all, is censored, unless you decide to switch off the nudity toggle in settings, and then you won't see any naked people or hear naked people sex sounds. All middle fingers will also be censored.
Two problems as this relates to the newly released Switch version: One, this is the default and only option. There is no currently available version of the game on Switch that isn't automatically and permanently censored. The other problem is that Dispatch's censorship, specifically, is obnoxious. The way developer AdHoc opted to censor nudity and profanity is with these big black bars that cover any offending material, and it's just jarring to look at and at-times distracting.
"Different platforms have different content criteria, and submissions are evaluated individually," AdHoc said in a statement to Eurogamer.
"We worked with Nintendo to ensure the content within the title met the criteria to release on their platforms, but the core narrative and gameplay experience remains identical to the original release."
There's no denying that Nintendo's overall brand is generally considered to be less mature than, say, PlayStation or Xbox, but it's also true that there are plenty of games currently available on Switch with plenty of sexually explicit stuff as well as violence. I mean, one quick search of the Switch eShop (not that I recommend it), yields a cache of games with "hentai" plainly in the titles. And then there are games like Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, both of which were ported over to Switch largely uncensored.
I've reached out to Nintendo for clarification on why Dispatch was treated differently and will update this article if I hear back.
Dispatch broke me out of my gaming slump when nothing else could.
