Multiplayer-horror game Dead By Daylight removes the Leatherface mask after purported cries of blackface and racism, according to developer Behaviour Interactive.

To recap, Dead By Daylight is an asymmetric multiplayer-horror game where one player is the murderous psychopath and the other players are the survivors. Knowing that Dead By Daylight removes the Leatherface mask after supposed cries of blackface and racism is confusing at best.

Here’s the word from Behaviour Interactive:

Before we dive into the fun stuff, we want to address a serious topic.

For those who may not know, The Cannibal can unlock the faces of the four original Survivors by sacrificing them 25 times.

Members of the community have shared their experiences with people targeting and harassing them while using some of these masks. These reports were disheartening to hear, and we absolutely condemn this behaviour. We are not comfortable having these masks in the game when they are used as a tool to spread hate. To that end, we will be removing The Cannibal’s unlockable faces in this upcoming Mid-Chapter.

Anyone who has ever played The Cannibal by the release of the Mid-Chapter update will be awarded 6,000 Iridescent Shards to compensate for their removal.

We will not tolerate hateful activity and will continue to take every step necessary to protect the community

The Leatherface character is well-known to fans of the horror genre, originating in the legendary 1974 horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and has been recaptured in several remakes, video games, and homages of other sorts.

The Leatherface character would murder his victims, eat them, and use their skin to make unique human flesh masks for him to wear. When players reprise the role of the Cannibal DLC character, they had the ability to kill other players and then wear their skin as masks, just like the character from popular culture.

Whenever this new update goes live, it will remove the four human flesh masks that you could have worn in game, of which the blackface claims that players were frequently using the face of Claudette, a black woman.

Users on the popular game’s Subreddit and Steam forums are understandably frustrated over the new development, with seemingly equal numbers of comments either dismissing the removal as censorship while others claim the blackface portrayal was common in online matches.

Dead By Daylight is available now on Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android. In case you missed it, you can read our thorough review on the game here (we highly recommend it!).