Resident Evil 7 does much with the tension that comes from what you don’t see, and the expectation of scares that may or may materialize. But the game also doesn’t shy away from delivering on the gore and moments of body horror that can make the series so effective. Bad things are happening to real people, and you’re put right in the middle of it.
Unless you live in Japan, in which case the edge to some of those situations has been dulled considerably.
The video above shows some examples of how the Japanese censors have adjusted the game to take away some of the pure gore. You can watch a bit of one scene below in which you find a key next to a corpse, and that’s already a bit disturbing. The American version of the game, on the other hand, asks you to physically dig into the mutated body to drag the key out.
Things like this may seem small, but horror games in the first person change the tenor of how we think about these situations. We can all imagine grabbing something next to a body, but thinking about it would be like to reach inside with our own hands is a very different, and much harder to imagine. You lose a lot of the power of the scene with this sort of edit.
