Insomniac’s “Wolverine” has now begun rolling out on PlayStation 5 platforms, the title arriving in the wake of good, but not great, critical reviews along with vocal discourse that got quite toxic over the weekend.
The game has faced various successive online backlash campaigns. The root causes seem to stem from it being the first major PlayStation exclusive since Sony announced it was ending physical media for games, along with content farmers spewing outrage for monetised engagement clicks.
This time last week, the project was being slammed for being ‘too woke’ because of an ‘unsexy’ Mystique design, an emasculated title character, and backlash against the title’s linear narrative with a relatively compact twelve-hour campaign length.
That seems quaint now in the light of the ‘fart gas’ debate which dominated social media all weekend, especially on X. The game has moments where Wolverine uses a ‘scent trail’ to track his prey, this being depicted in the game as a blue gaseous line.
Early claims suggested the line was on ‘all the time’ throughout the game, a line deemed unnecessary because it’s a linear game as opposed to an open-world one (and thus has a set path to follow). It’s also built into the game with no way to switch it off via the Accessibility menu.
That, combined with other elements like waypoint markers, white highlights and Wolverine’s own dialogue, has seen social media flooded with claims that the game is being disrespectful to player intelligence and so hand-holding that it has been made for kids despite being a blood-soaked title for adults.
Backlash quickly rose against that backlash, with clips going up proving the fart gas line only appears in certain scenes/sequences in the game. Even Insomniac’s Director of Community and Marketing, James Stevenson, weighed in saying:
“It only is there when he’s tracking a specific scent / sound (a person, whisky, or another clue scent) – story/mission moments or when he catches whiff of a collectible.”
Reviews and people posting random clips are getting a flood of reactions even if they’ve deliberately avoided the discourse. Debates are raging over accessibility options, gameplay mechanics for more casual players, and labels being thrown around – culture war grifters seeking profit, Sony fanboys bending the knee, and Soulsborne fanboys slamming anything that isn’t a bloated open-world title that’s basically a second job.
With the game finally hitting stores, all eyes will now be on the sales figures and if any of this outrage has had an actual impact on sales – or if it’s going to end up like the woke controversy over Nolan’s “The Odyssey” which ultimately had no effect.
