Hello,
I’m a solo developer preparing Commedia: L’Altro Viaggio, a first-person, single-player adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1321, public domain), for release on the Epic Games Store alongside Steam. It’s not yet onboarded, and I’d like to confirm it fits your content requirements before production goes further.
Your Content Guidelines (https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-games-store/requirements-guidelines/content-ratings/content-guidelines) list “Depictions of — or allusions to — self-harm” under prohibited content. The poem, which we follow closely, refers to suicide in a few places, always as a sin and its punishment and never as something to emulate:
- Inferno XIII, the wood of the suicides: their souls are turned into trees. One of them, Pier delle Vigne, tells how he took his own life (lines 70–72), and an unnamed Florentine says he hanged himself in his own house (line 151).
- Inferno V 61–62: Dido is pointed out among the lustful as the one who “killed herself for love”.
- Purgatorio I 73–75: Cato, the guardian of Purgatory, is reminded of his death at Utica.
The game has no self-harm mechanics, and the player character can’t harm himself. There’s nothing instructional, and these scenes are presented as the poem’s own moral judgment, in the poem’s words. We expect an M / PEGI 18 rating and will keep all store media within your IARC 12 / Teen and IARC 7 / E10+ limits.
Could you tell me:
- Is this faithful, non-glorifying treatment of a classic text acceptable under the self-harm clause?
- If so, are there conditions, such as specific content descriptors, an in-game content warning, or limits on what the store page may show of these scenes?
- Is there anything else in a Divine Comedy adaptation that you would expect to be a problem at review?
Thank you,
Apsis Studio