People on social media are upset about censorship in Resident Evil Requiem. Wait, come back! This isn’t one of those situations where Twitter dudes with usernames like BasedMaxxing97 rant about the bikini armor being altered to cover up the ‘vagina bones’. It seems the Japanese version of Capcom’s new horror game doesn’t feature any blood and guts in certain scenes, in a bid to appease the country’s regulators.

Instead it has… anomalous pools of shadow. Hideous darkness spilling from the cleaved torsos of ostensible cadavers. The same darkness lurks within you and I. What fools we were, to ever think ourselves meat. We are but the place where the light isn’t. Umbral puppets. Gabbling event horizons. Arigatou gozaimasu, Capcom! I feel much better now.

The news comes via IGN, who’ve been snooping around the fan Reddits. Capcom have long been in the habit of censoring Resident Evil games in Japan, of course. They are also no stranger to cheap workarounds. As IGN recall, there’s a bit in Resident Evil 7 where you find a decapitated head in a fridge. Capcom’s quickfix for the Japanese version of that scene was to swap the head for a photo of the character in question. Might as well have left an IOU.

In Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom have opted for not only blacking out gore, as in certain versions of Resident Evil 4, but shading out whole stretches of anatomy. The image above is a Reddit snap from a puzzle in which you have to delve around in a zombie’s torso.

I’ve watched violent anime that uses similar tactics to get around the spectacle of injury and dismemberment. I guess it’s interesting to consider how bloodthirsty imaginations might storyboard and execute action sequences to escape prohibition. Notwithstanding its Ligottian undertones, Requiem’s approach feels rather phoned in. Also accidentally ironic, given that the puzzle depicted above is about replacing missing organs with an artifical heart and lungs.

Come now, Capcom – watch the Team Fortress 2 Pyro video again and think of all the visual metaphors you could deploy here. Perhaps the zombies could be full of sweets? Or soap bubbles? Or maybe they could be plant-based, which would double as a sop to gaming’s silent majority of vegans. No, it wouldn’t break the fourth wall – if I’m remembering my Resi lore correctly, a lot of the zombies in Resi 7 and Village are technically a species of fungus.

If you’re reading this, of course, it’s likely you’re playing the overseas version and so, unbothered by any Japanese censorship. We found the game to be a fine time on the whole – Callum called it “a cathartic cross-breed of creeps and carnage” in his Resident Evil Requiem review.