The BAFTA Games Awards pulls indie game's trailer at the last minute, citing "the wellbeing of all guests"

The developer of upcoming indie adventure The Quiet Things says the last-minute decision to remove their trailer from the BAFTA Games Awards showcase “was devastating,” and left her in tears. Silver Script Games founder Alyx Jones explains that she was “so hopeful that this tiny indie game might actually be seen by a huge audience,” but was told on her way to the nominees’ party that it had been pulled from the show “due to its content.” BAFTA says it “made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.”

The Quiet Things is an autobiographical adventure game that tells the tale of “a fractured 2000s childhood in the South of England.” It follows Alice, a young woman attempting to make sense of the world around her while dealing with abusive surroundings. The game’s mature content description notes that it includes “discussions of self-harm, suicide, sexual assault/non-consensual sex, and childhood abuse.” Silver Script explains, “It’s about giving survivors a voice. Alice’s story is also many people’s stories that never get heard.”

“The Quiet Things is deeply personal to me. It’s my story,” Jones writes in a post via Linkedin. “It’s about trauma, abuse, survival, and giving survivors a voice. It’s about being shut down and silenced, and what that does to them. So there is something deeply painful about reliving that again now. Art should make people feel something.” She notes that the trailer had already been revised once, but was then told that “there wasn’t enough time to put the appropriate warnings in place for the audience,” despite her offer to make immediate further changes.

When I reached out, a BAFTA representative told me, “We made a compliance decision not to show a trailer of an unreleased game that contains themes that may be a trigger for some, in consideration of our guests as we were not in a position to sufficiently warn them. We fully support games that engage with difficult subjects, and we made the decision in relation to our event only and with the wellbeing of all guests as our priority.”

Jones continues, “For the last two weeks I’d been working hard to cut this trailer together while already badly burned out, because I believed this was the biggest opportunity we were ever likely to get.” This included the aforementioned revision, which removed imagery that “BAFTA flagged as potentially reading as ‘weapons and violence’ (an object inspection of a craft knife and a statue breaking out of a mirror).”

Jones adds, “What has upset me so much is not just the decision, but how this happens to me over and over, doors close because the subject matter might upset people or make them uncomfortable.” Following the news, she says it “was very hard to hear” the presenters on stage during the awards “talking about how proud they were to champion games that deal with difficult and challenging subject matter.”

The Quiet Things is due to release Thursday June 4. You can wishlist it now on Steam, where there is also a demo available to download for free.

“We’ve lost a huge opportunity because of this, and I really need your help,” Jones concludes. “Please watch the trailer and decide for yourself whether BAFTA was right to pull it. If you can help its visibility in any way, that would mean so much to me, and everyone who has worked on the game.”