Rapture Rejects, the Cyanide and Happiness battle royale game announced at E3, will have a gender-neutral character creator. It’s thematically a little crude, but the removal of a gender marker in place of physical feature checkboxes is something we rarely see in video games.
“While I’m not super impressed with the amount of upset Christians after we announced Rapture Rejects on the PCGamingShow at E3, I’m pretty proud of the character creator we’ve been working on,” said Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of TinyBuild. “It took close to a year to make the game look like it’s part of the Cyanide & Happiness universe, and we went the extra mile with a gender-neutral character creator.”
Rather than opting to use gender options in the character creator for Rapture Rejects, Galvanic Games and Explosm Games instead added two checkboxes, one for “boobs” and one for “dong.” On the surface, it’s a little crude. But for non-binary and transgender people like myself, a small change like this can go a long way. Trans and non-binary people rarely have the opportunity to accurately portray themselves in video games, with the majority of portrayals either existing in the indie sphere or in binary trans side characters in Triple-A games.
Is it perfect? No, it’s not, but considering the relative simplicity of the Cyanide and Happiness art style and the crude humour of the universe, this is about the best that they could do. Moreover, it’s a first step in getting some genuine trans representation for player characters in what’s a relatively mainstream game.
Rapture Rejects is going through various private alpha testing stages for a few hours at a time in order to stress-test the servers. The next playtest is scheduled for this Thursday, June 28, so if you signed up for and successfully made it into the private alpha, make sure not to miss it.
