Classification methodology
This is the rulebook behind every record on this site. Any entry should be reproducible from these rules alone: two reviewers applying them to the same game should reach the same categories and the same severity.
Purpose and scope
CCRB answers one question: does a video game contain content that is anti-Christian, anti-Catholic, or pro-Satanic, and if so, what kind and how central. It does not rate violence, language, sexual content, or any religion other than Christianity. Those are out of scope by design, and the ESRB and Common Sense Media cover them well.
Which games are reviewed
A game enters the queue if it is a widely played title on a major platform from roughly the last 25 years, or an evergreen title that people still play and discuss regardless of age. Being reviewed does not mean being flagged: a clean game is recorded as no concerns, so that absence from this catalogue never gets mistaken for a clean verdict.
| Platforms | Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo. A game on any one qualifies. |
|---|---|
| Time window | Release from 2001 onward by default. |
| Evergreen clause | Older titles qualify if they remain in active play or discussion — remasters, continued sales, a living franchise. The test is whether a visitor could plausibly be deciding whether to play it today. |
| Popularity bar | Drawn from platform sales and play charts. Microsoft publishes no per-title sales, so the Xbox pass used the Xbox One million-seller list and OpenCritic's Series X/S ranking instead. |
The explicitness test
A game is flagged only if its content points at real Christianity or Catholicism, not at religion in general. This single rule removes more candidates than any other.
What counts
- A real Christian office or title: Pope, Cardinal, Archbishop, Bishop, Vicar, Confessor, Inquisitor, Saint.
- A real sacrament or rite: Communion, baptism, confession, exorcism, crucifixion, canonization, penance.
- A real object or image of the faith: crucifix, rosary, Bible, Holy Grail, cathedral, crown of thorns.
- A real scriptural figure, book, or concept: Genesis, Revelation, the Seven Deadly Sins, Judas, Seraphim.
- A real institution or event: the Vatican, a historical Pope, the Inquisition, the Knights Templar.
- Liturgical language addressed to God, Christ, or the Lord, especially in ritual form.
- An authoritative external source identifying the content as Christian-coded.
What does not count
An invented god with an invented church, however much the vocabulary echoes real religion. Words like church, priest, god, prophet, cult, temple, and heresy are generic; on their own they prove nothing. This is what removed Fallout's Children of Atom, Dishonored's Abbey of the Everyman, Silent Hill's Order, Elden Ring's Golden Order, and Baldur's Gate 3's Absolute.
The fictional-deity edge rule
A game with an invented god still counts if it borrows the real Church's specific institutional vocabulary densely enough that the parallel is unmistakable — Diablo's Zakarum, Dark Souls III's Church of the Deep, Warhammer 40,000's Ecclesiarchy. The threshold is at least one specific real title or rite, not merely a cluster of generic words.
Direction matters
Christianity as the hero does not qualify. Games where the player wields the cross against evil are recorded as clean. This is why Civilization VI, Age of Empires II, Cuphead, Castlevania, Octopath Traveler and Phasmophobia all clear the explicitness test and are all recorded as no concerns: they depict the faith, or put it on the hero's side, rather than working against it.
Categories
A category names the kind of content, not its severity. A game may carry several at once, each rated separately.
Every record carries a seal: five wedges, one per category, lit to its severity. Drag a slider to see what each level looks like.
| Category | Definition | Decision test |
|---|---|---|
| Corruption | A Christian-coded institution is the antagonist: corrupt, oppressive, or hypocritical. | Is the institution itself the villain, not just a person in it? |
| Blasphemy | Christian iconography, rites, or sacred figures are mocked, desecrated, or repurposed. | Is a real sacred thing treated irreverently, or used as a weapon or joke? |
| Occult | Satanism or dark worship is framed as the correct, player-aligned path. | Does the game reward the player for devil-worship, or make it the heroic side? |
| Deicide | A pope, angel, saint, or God-figure is a boss the player is meant to defeat. | Is a holy figure a mandatory kill, framed as holy rather than merely corrupt? |
| Denial | The story argues God is fake, evil, absent, or a knowing fraud. | Does the narrative itself take a position against Christian doctrine? |
Severity
Each category a game carries is rated on its own. Severity measures structural weight — how much of the game the content is — not how offensive it is. A single shocking scene in an otherwise unrelated game rates lower than a mild theme running through the whole thing.
| Level | Test |
|---|---|
| No concerns | Reviewed; nothing in the category is present. |
| Ambient | Present but a single scene, line, item, or trope. |
| Implied | Deliberate and recurring but not structural; or skeptical rather than an attack. |
| Explicit | Structural: a main antagonist, a mandatory boss, the framing story, or the core loop. |
The removal test. Imagine the flagged content deleted. If the game barely changes, it is ambient. If a chapter or faction is gone but the game stands, implied. If the game no longer makes sense, explicit.
Flags
Some records need a qualifier that severity alone cannot carry. A flag never changes the severity; it explains it.
- Softest fit — the content is structural but the intent is neutral rather than critical, as in Crusader Kings III and Medieval II: Total War, which simulate real Church history without editorial stance.
- Mixed source — the imagery draws on several traditions, as in Agony, or in Final Fantasy X, whose doctrine of sin and atonement sits in temples modelled on Southeast Asian architecture.
- Villain-framed — the desecration is structural, but the villains commit it and the real faith is the victim, as in The Blood of Dawnwalker. The reverse of this site's usual finding, and labelled so readers do not mistake one for the other.
- Resolves toward faith — a flawed religious figure whose arc ends in renewed belief. Usually caps severity at ambient.
- Real-world basis — the institution depicted is the actual Church rather than a fictional stand-in.
Evidence
Every rating rests on at least one verifiable source, and the record says what it is. A rating that cannot be traced to something a reader could check is not published. An explicit record must name at least one specific scene, character, mechanic, or line — “has a corrupt church” is not enough.
What the first sweep found
Explicit content is rare on the charts and common in targeted research. After a full sweep — Steam's most-played list, the PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox million-seller lists, an older-generation evergreen pass, and a gap-closing pass over cult classics — three things stand out.
First, corruption of a Christian-coded institution is the dominant pattern by a wide margin, and games that endorse dark worship are almost nonexistent. Second, only a handful of explicit records surfaced from platform charts at all; the rest came from deliberate research, and broad charts mostly yield ambient and implied echoes — borrowed biblical names, one-expansion arcs, cosmetic DLC. Third, the direction test does real work: a number of games clear the explicitness test and are still recorded as clean, because they depict the faith rather than work against it.