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Baldur’s Gate 3’s Dark Urge is a major highlight of the story—putting the player character in the role of a barely-composed murderer with the choice to either lean into, or away from, the urge to slaughter.

Chief among the Dark Urge’s accomplishments is how it’s consistently gross with its narration, often managing to be both off-putting and just visceral enough to let your imagination do the rest of the mauling. Imagine my surprise when, reading through Eurogamer’s interview with the Dark Urge storyline’s lead writer, I discovered the Dark Urge’s writer wasn’t a fan of gore at all.

Baudelaire Welch was selected for the role by Swen Vincke himself because their “mother worked partially on the script for Silence of the Lambs, the movie”, they explain. “I think Swen got that in his mind a little bit like, ‘You’ll be good at this’.” As the interview reveals, however, Welch is a self-described “squeamish” individual (many sympathies, I can’t make it through horror movies myself) and, hilariously, that they “hate gore!”

Writing director Adam Smith, however, maintains that was exactly the point: “When you get somebody who is really into gore and horror…