Raising the dead. Murderous chickens. Laxative Lollipops. Drunken Bums with Multiple Personality Disorders. Since its inception, the Reality-on-the-Norm (RON) collaborative series of Underground games has been no stranger to subjects that wouldn't sit well with mainstream games developers. But now it seems that a game has finally gone too far for comfort with the introduction of nudity in the game Au Naturel.

Purely in the interests of journalistic enquiry, I downloaded and played the game. Taking the role of the undead Mayor Gower, your task is to convince your mayoral campaign manager, Death, to show you the naked pictures of the female photographer Mika Huy that have come into his possession. To accomplish this you’ll have to satisfy a telepathic alcoholic fox, interact with the aforementioned bum and seek ways to reach a hyper-dense hippo at the centre of Jupiter. If all of the above strikes you as somewhat bizarre, then I suggest you play through some of the earlier RON games before even considering looking at this one. There is a certain amount of exposition at the start but nothing beats having experienced the events yourself. The game itself is fairly short and only covers a small area, so shouldn’t give too much trouble to even the relatively inexperienced gamer.

But the real issue is the nudity that resulted in the game originally being excluded from the RON database. Whilst the graphic level reminded me of playing Strip Poker on the Commodore 64 as a teenager, there are undoubtedly recognisable images of naked people in this game. Both female and male nudity is presented (the former in the photographs central to the plot, the latter in the form of a nudist NPC) and the author, bitby, has clearly made an effort to produce the best representations with the graphics available. Even so, at this highly pixellated level, whether anyone could ever find them arousing is another matter. Could anyone consider such pictures to be pornography? The RON admins clearly thought the possibility strong enough to initially exclude the game.

Guido, the male nudist

So, should the game have been banned from the RON database? This is a matter that is open to vigorous debate, as the discussions on the RON and AGS forums attest. Whilst the original decision to ban has been reversed, I’m sure the subject is one that will rear its head again. In the world of free games, there is no ratings authority to give an official age warning that, as well as alerting parents, provides a measure of protection to publishers. As such, maybe the initial reaction was a prudent one in a society that sometimes seems unwilling to take responsibility for what its children view. You can’t fault the author for not alerting people to the content. You get a huge warning at the start and you are offered the choice if you want the private parts to be covered or not, so it’s not like there is an excuse for pleading ignorance. Perhaps more telling is the extremely violent death of a character (also mentioned in the opening warning) went almost entirely unmentioned in the discussion on the ban. It never ceases to surprise me what is and isn’t considered acceptable these days.

If you want to find out what all the fuss is about then the game can be downloaded from the Reality-on-the-Norm website. The game is undoubtedly an “adult” game, in terms of humour as well as graphically. You have been warned.