The Suicide Forest, a free game released through the Xbox Live Creators Collection on Xbox One, will be removed after its content was brought to light on January 30th. Polygon reported on one of the earlier tweets about the game from TT Games’ global community manager, Bear Parker, embedded below.
The game is based on Logan Paul’s recent YouTube video (and ensuing controversy) in which he filmed a man who had hanged himself in Japan’s Aokigahara forest. The area is known as “The Suicide Forest” for the increased number of suicides and attempted suicides reported within its boundaries. In the game players are instructed to enter the forest and find a corpse to film at which point a counter displays a skyrocketing number of subscribers on Logan Paul’s YouTube channel.
Is this a joke? Just decided to check out the Creators Collection on the Xbox Marketplace and found a free, PEGI 3 rated game based on Logan Paul’s trip to Aokighara Forest… pic.twitter.com/i5XIW7OLvn
— 🐻 (@Bearskopff) January 30, 2018
Polygon received word from a Microsoft representative that stated “this content violates our Store policies and we’re in the process of removing it,” and went on to dig up the exact wording in those policy documents: “app and associated metadata must not contain potentially sensitive or offensive content.”
Few Creators Collection titles have a web page to link to and The Suicide Forest appears to be one of them; it may still be searchable from an Xbox One console. Creator Felipe Orion is also offering the game on PC through Gamejolt and (according to the trailer) on Android, though it was not listed on the Play Store search results at the time of this writing.