The new South Park game gets harder as your character’s skin gets darker
After many, many delays, it seems like South Park: The Fractured But Whole is finally going to launch for real in October. The folks at Eurogamer recently went hands-on with the role-playing game and found something a bit unexpected while creating their character. Players take on the role of the same New Kid that moved to town in the last game, The Stick Of Truth, and they’re able to customize their clothes and hairstyle. After that, they’re sent to a difficulty selection screen where, in a very South Park-style twist, the option you pick also happens to determine the color of your character’s skin. Choosing “Easy” automatically makes you white and your skin gets progressively darker as you work your way up to “Very Difficult.”
Just in case you didn’t already get the joke or needed a little more clarification as to how this actually impacts the game, Cartman chimes in during this selection process to say, “Don’t worry, this doesn’t affect combat. Just every other aspect of your whole life.” After seeing this, Eurogamer asked Ubisoft, Fractured But Whole’s publisher, to get a little more specific about what this difficulty setting actually does if it doesn’t make battles any easier or harder. The outlet was told it alters “the amount of money you receive and the way other characters speak to you.”
Unlike in The Stick Of Truth, where the New Kid had to be a boy, Eurogamer notes that Fractured lets you have a conversation with Mr. Mackey, South Park elementary’s uptight guidance counselor, to determine the character’s gender. The options are male, female, and other, further subdivided into cisgender and transgender. Any options you choose that don’t adhere to Mr. Mackey’s presumption that you’re a cisgender guy, trigger a scene where he retcons your gender identity from the first game. In Eurogamer’s video, they choose to be a transgender girl, which also prompts Mackey to tell the New Kid to look out for people who don’t accept them for who they are. That comment is immediately followed by the player getting jumped by some rednecks who “don’t take kindly to your types” around here.