The sequel to the one of the worst games of all time failed its Steam review and hasn't gotten a response from Valve, so it's been delayed: "Come on Steam, you guys are busting my balls here"

Hong Kong 2097, the official sequel to one of the most infamously offensive games of all time, has been delayed after failing its Steam certification and seemingly being ghosted by Valve.

Kanipro's sequel to Hong Kong 97, itself explicitly designed to be "the worst game possible," was announced back in October with a trailer paying tribute to the original unlicensed '95 floppy disk atrocity, which I'll remind you stars a heroin-addicted relative of Bruce Lee named Chin and charges him with massacring "fuckin' ugly" (the game's words) Chinese communists in Hong Kong.

The sequel, with involvement from the original's developer, Yoshihisa Kurosawa, brings back Chin for another round of absurd, proudly crude twin-stick penis gun shooting chaos. "One minute you'll be shooting down dancing hot dogs on a ranch in Texass, and the next you'll be fighting off flasher Uncle Sams in Idahoe," reads the Steam description.

Anyway, apparently Valve didn't like something it saw, as it declined to approve Hong Kong 2097 for distribution. Shocking, I know, but Kanipro has had a hunch for a while that there might be a few hiccups getting Steam to sell its game. A tweet from a couple of weeks back said the game "failed its first Steam review" and foretold that if it failed again, it would be delayed. And, well, it failed again, and is now delayed to Q1 2026.

"Two weeks since resubmitting and still no response from Steam, so we'll have to delay the release of Hong Kong 2097. New release 'date' is Q1 2026," reads a recent tweet from Kanipro. "The game is totally finished but we can't do anything without approval. I'm in gamedev limbo."

Another admittedly amusing tweet from Kanipro, or whatever comic genius is running that account, rails against Steam's decision: "Oh for god's sake! Come on Steam, you guys are busting my balls here for no reason. There's no nudity (at least not with anything visible), the game's perfectly playable from start to finish, LET ME RELEASE HONG KONG 2097!!!"

The nature of Hong Kong 2097's apparent ban from Steam is inherently silly, if only because someone at Valve was almost certainly forced to look at a deeply stupid game flagrantly testing the limits of the platform's content guidelines, despite that very same platform being known for publishing games whose titles I can't mention here for fear of being flagged by HR. Anyway, my point is, until we know exactly why Valve is refusing to distribute Hong Kong 2097, this looks a lot like the same sort of censorship the internet is up in arms about with the whole Horses situation.

Steam removing adult games shows "you can even censor another country's free speech," claims Nier creator Yoko Taro.