Disco Elysium, One Of The Best Games In Years, Has Been Banned In Australia

One of the most celebrated games of 2020, Disco Elysium, has been refused classification in Australia for its upcoming Final Cut--this effectively means it's banned in the country.

As noticed by ScreenHub, the Classification Board of Australia said in a statement that Final Cut was refused a rating due in part to how the game depicts sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence. The government agency also said Disco Elysium runs afoul of the rule about "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults."

Disco Elysium remains available for sale on Steam in Australia, just as it has been since 2019. As Kotaku AU points out, the original version of the game was "never really submitted" for classification in Australia, but the Final Cut is also coming to consoles and thus required a classification, it seems.

Other games, like Call of Duty: WWII, Saints Row IV, and South Park: The Stick of Truth, were all edited to make it through the classification process in Australia. It remains to be seen if developer ZA/UM will edit the Final Cut to allow it to be sold in Australia.

The Final Cut of Disco Elysium launches March 30 for PC, PS4, PS5, and Google Stadia. The PC upgrade will be available for free for all owners of the original release. There is no word yet on a version of the game for Xbox or Nintendo Switch.

The Final Cut adds much more voice acting to the game for a total of one million words, along with new political vision quests and quality-of-life tweaks.

GameSpot's Disco Elysium review scored the game a 10/10. "It's an investigation of ideas, of the way we think, of power and privilege, and of how all of us are shaped, with varying degrees of autonomy, by the society we find ourselves in," reviewer David Wildgoose said.