Burning Shores, the recent DLC for post-post-apocalyptic robot dinosaur hunting game Horizon: Forbidden West includes a completely optional lesbian love interest for the main character.
The article should, by all rights, start and end there, but gamers never fail to disappoint. As a result of this – short, optional – scene, the game has been bombed on review aggregagor Metacritic, with hordes of negative reviews complaining about the "woke agenda". In response, Metacritic has released a statement vowing to rework its review tools, which can be read in full below:
Fandom is a place of belonging for all fans and we take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic. Metacritic is aware of the abusive and disrespectful reviews of Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores and we have a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use. Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etc) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed. We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.
At the very least, developer Guerilla Games seems unphased, and has already announced the next Horizon game.