After being “wrongly banned” from Steam over sexual content rules, horror game Vile: Exhumed launches for free

Horror game Vile: Exhumed, which sees you delving into a 90s computer to uncover a man’s obsession with an adult film actress, has launched as a free download after being “wrongly banned” from Steam over sexual content, according to developer Cara Cadaver of Final Girl Games.

Initially released via Itch.io (where that version remains live), the game was set to to debut on Steam on July 22, but had its page on Valve’s platform pulled down. Cadaver and publisher DreadXP say “sexual content with depictions of real people” was the reasoning given for this by Valve, despit the game featuring “no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography”.

So, Cadaver’s now elected to release the game as a free download under a Creative Commons lisence, via vileisbanned.com. “This felt like the best option to make the game available to as many people as possible,” the developer wrote. “Trying to release on a different storefront would only open us up to the same problem we ran into with Steam.”

There’s still the option to pay Cadaver and DreadXP for the game if you wish, with the two parties set to donate 50% of the profits to Canadian charity the Red Door Family Shelter, which provides “emergency shelter and support for women and children affected by domestic abuse, families experiencing a housing crisis, and refugee claimants with nowhere else to turn.”

“The game covers topics of assault, abuse, and entitlement, and uses a combination of FMV and practical effects to create images as horrifying as the themes. This was never a secret,” the developer wrote. “This censorship of my work is a direct attack on creative expression and artistic freedom, and it will not stop with false accusations of sexual content. They will come for anything that speaks more loudly than they do.”

We’ve asked Valve for comment. The context here is that both Steam and Itch.io have recently changed their policies to give payment processors control over what constitutes adult content, as a knock-on effect of Australian anti-porn activists Collective Shout putting pressure on those processors to do something about adult games which the group view as “sexually violent” or which they feel otherwise sexualise or objectify women.

The question is who gets to decide what’s dodgy smut and what’s a serious work digging into issues like misogyny and parasocial obsession. Both kinds of game might end up depicting or alluding to similar things, after all, and it’s impossible to have important conversations about such problems if you’re not even allowed to bring them up. If it was pulled as part of the storefront’s recent changes to how it handles NSFW content, Vile: Exhumed would be an example of the sort of game folks feared might be put at risk by giving banks and credit card firms extra power over what gets the thumbs up.

It’s possible Vile: Exhumed might not have been pulled as a direct result of these recent changes, mind. Our game of the year 2024 Mouthwashing was assumed to have been nixed from Itch.io as a part of that platform’s mass de-adulting, but was subsequently revealed to have been delisted due to an older change. Either way, if you want to give Cadaver’s work a go, you’re now free to do so.