Disclaimer: The Roblox game “Dress to Impress” is inappropriate for a younger audience.
Imagine this: a young 12-year-old girl logs onto her favorite game, only to be greeted by a string of letters that form an obscure word. As she googles the term, she is taken aback by images of girls with skimpy clothes, fishnet tights, and bunny ears. Seeing everyone in the server wearing similar outfits, however, she brushes it off and adopts the new “style” herself.
Roblox’s Dress To Impress, a trending game in 2024, offers players the opportunity to put an outfit together based on an assigned theme and rate each other player’s looks as well. It advertises itself as an “All Ages” game, yet such vulgarities are a common experience for many users. It prematurely exposes young children to inappropriate topics and normalizes such content not suited to their age.
The problem arises from inappropriate behavior exhibited by players, which brings confusion and shame. “There was one where [the theme] was ‘pool party’ and this one girl put clothes on to match her skin color. This made the characters appear nude. That made me [feel] really weird.” Lumin Crewe in seventh grade said.
Behind the innocent façade of an “all-age” dress-up game provides an opportunity for some users to get creative. Their disturbing ideas of a “fun game” revolve around recreations of gory and torturous R-rated movies. If that lacks conviction, they flaunt their “masterpiece” on social media — which only works to worsen the damage, as it exposes nightmare-inducing material to children.
The permanent themes also play a dangerous game. “Euphoria,” a raunchy adult show involving substance abuse and sexual violence in high schoolers, serves as a prime example. Although the theme leaves much to the users’ interpretation, teens may mistake the theme for the raunchy show.
The game was always intended for players to dress up and vote on other people’s outfits, hence the name “Dress To Impress.’ However, under all that glitz and glamor, users not only find inappropriate content but a haunting tale as well – one that the developers meticulously spun together.
The creators chose to introduce a storyline to the Dress To Impress. In one of these particular paths of the tale, players are redirected to a satanic-adjacent ritual, which then leads to a bone-chilling maze that they need to navigate through.
Sinister elements like “satanic imagery,” body horror, and grotesqueries terrify children. “When I got in, [there was a] person that has two heads [and] is stitched together? I don’t really prefer the quest for kids, because it actually made me feel uncomfortable too. It was kind of scary, so I couldn’t really do anything,” seventh-grader Ivy Yoon said.
That was only the first round of said ‘side quest’. Yoon went on to describe the horrors that only seemed to worsen. “There’s also this nurse on the second quest, and that was actually really scary for me. It was like, you have to hide in a closet to get over with this nurse that was actually chasing you… It was really scary,” she said.
Dress to Impress puts this sinister storyline at the frontlines of the game. This terrifies young kids, as seen on social media, where they shared their fears about it. Children desperately want the newest “hot items”, especially those locked behind a specific achievement from the side quests, but they come at the price of grueling nightmares.
The R-rated themes of Dress to Impress take it too far for an innocent children’s game. Young users become victims of imagery so gruesome before they even know what it all means. Ultimately, users need to report what they see and stay safe on the platform.
Extra: (Steps to stay safe online)
- Never share your personal information.
- Ask your parents before you play a game to remain safe.
- If somebody makes you feel uncomfortable online or shares explicit images, tell a trusted adult immediately.
- Say no to strangers who ask you for information or images.
Remember. People with dubious intentions know to disguise themselves. Even someone who poses as a child may hide their true form as “bad people”.
