With all the sales going on lately on PSN and Steam, I’ve been browsing around on them pretty frequently looking for something interesting to snap up. I was thinking of trying Conscript, but I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to sanp it up at full price and so kept looking. That’s when I found Stasis: Bone Totem, a really interesting-looking horror game that seemed to check all of my personal boxes. It was on sale too! However, there’s one quality about it that has me feeling hesistant and not so sure I want to buy after all.

I was all set to buy, but I figured I should watch a review first, which led me to this excellent video by MandaloreGaming. He does a great job of breaking it down, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, and he ultimately winds up recommending it to those who enjoy horror and intriguing stories. Again, I would have been all set to give it a try if it wasn’t for one thing I learned in the review: there’s a lot of body horror in Stasis: Bone Totem, of the sort that tends to turn my stomach a bit too much.

See, I like horror games for the most part. I like trying to survive in scary situations and dealing with gross monstrosities. It’s even better if I get to puzzle my way out of a few locked rooms and such too. Jumpscares, monsters, horrible creatures, creepy vibes, music and even blood/gore are fine (to a point). What I don’t really do well with though is stuff that involves cutting things up. For real, anything that involves slowly cutting something up, or pseudo-surgical situations is a big nope for me. I just can’t help bu think about what it might feel like and the sheer sickening horribleness of things getting cut open. No…just….no.

I don’t care how good Stasis: Bone Totem is, I’m gonna really need to think this one over before potentially having to deal with that. There are apparently several instances in which you have to do something horrible like cutting things out of dead bodies, so there isn’t even the “it’s just one” argument to be had here. Maybe I can get over it, maybe I can’t. Maybe I don’t even want to; there are plenty of other games without nasty body horror to play out there, after all.

So yeah, this just kind of got me thinking about difficult it can be for studios to make games with mass appeal. Regardless of quality, there are lots of people out there who will refuse to play something for one reason or another. For me, this time, it was an apparent excess of the exact sort of body horror I can’t stand. There’ve been other instances in the past, I think, but I can’t really recall any at the moment. So I kick it over to you now. What sorts of qualities have kept you from buying a game?

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Are there any features, themes or other elements that just immediately kill your interest in something?

Image from Stasis: Bone Totem Steam page