South Park: The Stick of Truth

Combat involves turn-based melee attacks. Characters -- kids pretending they're heroes in a fantasy game -- whack each other with a wide range of weapons, including swords, hammers, beer bottles, and sex toys. Magic spells are graphically less violent but take the form of powerful, explosive farts. Combatants' faces appear red and bruised, and blood occasionally spatters the environment (when Kenny dies he's torn apart and dragged off by rats). Players can kill small animals including birds, cats, rats, and dogs without consequence and are sometimes sent on missions to attack civilians around town, including homeless people. Adults attack the kids with guns, knives, and special moves such as curb stomps and gut punches.

Several sequences show full male and female nudity. Characters are depicted masturbating, having sex, and even engaging in bestiality. Some receive anal probes from aliens. Moaning sounds often accompany these acts. Sex toys such as vibrators can be found lying around environments (a quest actually requires players to retrieve a vibrator for a male sex slave). Some weapons and attacks involve sexual equipment, such as a rubber penis and a staff adorned with brass breasts. An izmel knife is used as part of a special attack in which enemies are circumcised. "Pubes" found lying around the world can be collected and added to the player's inventory. A mini-game requires players to tap a button as quickly as possible to make the player's character poop while sitting on a toilet.

Spoken dialogue is filled with profanity. Strong language includes "bitch," "a--hole," "damn," "goddammit," "fag," "s--t," "f--k," and "motherf--ker."

Illicit drug gear appears in some areas, including a ramshackle meth lab where players find syringes and drug ingredients lying around on the floor and tables. One of the game's settings is a bar. Beer and liquor bottles are lying all around town and in the sewer. A handful of characters appears under the influence of one substance or another, including a strange sentient piece of fecal matter presented as a housewife with a serious drinking problem.

Parents need to know that South Park: The Stick of Truth is absolutely not for kids, despite its cartoonish aesthetic and cast of kid characters. Like the TV show that inspired it, it's filled with very mature humor. Jokes often include extreme profanity and explicit sexuality and represent a form of cultural, religious, and racial satire that kids are likely to misinterpret. The South Park children frequently fight, leaving each other bloody and bruised, and generally spend their time getting up to mischief, from vandalism to attacking small animals. Most of the grown-up characters are deeply flawed and irresponsible as well. They ask the kids to fight a gang of Mongolians, have a beer with them, and "deal" with the town's homeless problem. Meaningful and interesting ideas about issues such as commercialism, peer pressure, individuality, and religion are occasionally communicated amid the poop jokes, foul language, and questionable quests, but they're best received by a savvy, mature audience capable of sorting it all out.