Developed/Published by: Cara Cadaver / DreadXP
Released: 05/08/2025
Completed: 06/08/2025
Completion: Explored enough to trigger the end credits, then nosed around a little more.
It’s impossible to talk about VILE: Exhumed without talking about the moment in time in which it finds itself released–and in fact, how it found itself released. After all, I probably wouldn’t have played it otherwise. Originally due to be released on Steam on July 22nd, the project stalled unapproved for a month, during which Steam instituted a new rule that forbid “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers.” The game was delayed, and just days later on July 24th itch.io also found itself at the mercy of payment processors, deindexing all NSFW content (though it’s worth noting this specifically means making unsearchable, not removing or banning–and they were able to re-index free NSFW content a few days later.) A bunch of Australian Mary Whitehouses would later claim credit for this entire wave of morality policing.
In this climate, Steam officially banned VILE: Exhumed on July 28th, with the stated reason that the game featured “sexual content with depictions of real people”–which were it true, could probably be a violation of payment processor requirements (unjust or not). But having played VILE: Exhumed, I can state that unless it’s well hidden, it doesn’t. What it does feature is the implication of sexual content, and while I’m certain those who love to obey in advance could waffle that’s a grey area or something, sometimes you need to tell a story that features things adults do–and considering the other things that feature in this game, the sexual implication seem like the least objectionable thing about it.
With the game unreleasable on the main storefronts, developer Cara Cadaver and publisher DreadXP decided to take matters into their own hands and release it, in full, for free as shareware (with 50% of profits going to Toronto’s Red Door Family Shelter) on the 5th of August, and it’s in this context that I chose to play it.
As a game, VILE: Exhumed is in the genre I’d call digital archaeology–or at least, I would, if apparently that wasn’t already used by actual archeologists for when they use computers and that. But what I’m describing is a game where you–as a person at a computer–role play as a person at a different computer, and dig through the files to try and solve a mystery. This genre encompasses things such as Her Story to Hypnospace Outlaw, and differs, I would say, from a potential genre marker such as “digital procedural” because the computer itself is a defining characteristic as an artifact you explore and from which you excavate: the interface is part of the puzzle, part of the the game–it is not purely dressing for a cerebral exercise.
(And “digital procedural” is a useless term in context anyway. “Procedural” is completely bogarted by procedural generation in gaming’s parlance.)
In VILE: Exhumed, there is no context as to why you have begun digging through this old computer–the game is experienced entirely within the diegesis of it. In fact, I’d say this reflects the game’s absolute commitment to player interpretation. There are many ways to imagine yourself while playing if you’re predisposed to playing a role, and I think that can deeply change the experience.
Whoever you are, you experience the game by clicking around–opening software, reading chat logs and e-mails, visiting webpages, even playing a game-within-a-game. VILE: Exhumed is not a long game, and nor is it one that breaks the conventions of the genre I’ve (possibly) imagined–the puzzles you are going to solve generally relate to scouring text and taking notes, hunting around screens for hidden or unexpected things, and using that to work out what passwords are, so you can trigger the appearance of new things to click or new information, which can start the cycle again.
The pleasure of this is how non-linear it can be, and VILE: Exhumed is non-linear to the point you can trigger the ending within a handful of actions–and you’d miss an incredible amount of context if you did so (say by following a solution or something, which would defeat the entire point, anyway.) You aren’t locked into a designed narrative–your play creates the narrative. It’s very immersive!
Which is why it’s such a great setting for horror. The most obvious comparison I would give is the found footage genre–it feels real, so it’s more immediate and visceral–and there are echoes of the V/H/S franchise here, certainly. But for me, the movies that most came to mind related more heavily to the themes on show here, such as Adam Wingard’s earlier work (Pop Skull, A Horrible Way To Die) and in particular J.T. Petty’s “pseudo-documentary” S&Man (which I highly recommend.) VILE: Exhumed is exploring something deeper about the genre of horror–prodding at the edges where fact and fiction might be blurry, where exploitation and misogyny are more clearly perceived.
So while VILE: Exhumed may be a victim of the current moment, it is also a game that struggles with what this moment is about–and I think how you feel about that is going to be heavily affected by the lens from which you approach it. As I said above, the lens can be as simple as the “role” you imagine yourself playing. Maybe you’re a cop, digging through the computer to find evidence. Maybe you’re the owner of the computer, reliving your “great works.” Maybe you’re just… you.
This has an effect. From one lens, for example, VILE: Exhumed could be considered moralising: representing the fans of horror and pornography as twisted by their consumption of it. Sure it uses horror to get its point across, but it’s simply rubbing your nose in it–trying to disgust you. Showing you what it really is, what the threat of unfettered access really is.
From another, VILE: Exhumed is instead an unpleasant celebration of the unjustifiable. Your reward for success in this game is getting to pour over and enjoy gory images of misogynistic abuse and murder.
Now, from the artist’s statement, we know neither lens the intended experience, and I think it would be completely fair to call them bad-faith readings! But what I find challenging is the game’s dedication to the diegesis leaves it completely open to interpretation, and either viewpoint feels as valid (if extreme) to me, as strange as it may seem to see a banned game as one that can be read as in favour of its own banning.
But VILE: Exhumed is disturbing and uncomfortable, and that it doesn’t take a moment to direct moralise–or even contextualise–what you are seeing has the double-edge of making it feel affectingly real but narratively inconclusive. It takes you on a journey to a place you simply may not wish to go and leaves you there.
Certainly, for me, as much as it plays (cleverly) with low resolution video to imply a lot, there are certain things (notably some images of hunted animals) that I genuinely wish I’d never seen (you can choose to censor content–though it was too late for me, it’s something I recommend particularly if you don’t want to see anything with animals. And yes, I can see the double standard.) While the game is hardly the level of new French extremity, I think these representations suffer the same questions over aestheticisation. You either revel or are repulsed, without a structure to understand.
And further, I think this correlation of horror and pornography with snuff and exploitation is the game’s most concerning invocation of “slippery slope” tropes, and it made me wish the game had more to say on consent. How as a viewer do we truly know that when we watch something extreme, that it’s actually “ok”? What if the performer says it’s ok, but is actually under duress–and under capitalism, can people truly make fully free decisions? What is the limit of consent when it comes to the infliction of bodily harm, legal or otherwise?
These issues are not solely limited to horror or pornography–performers can be forced to perform, and regret performing many kinds of non-sexual or violent acts–but they provide an easy “gotcha” for the moralist and the potential for even the most thoughtful to err towards illiberalism, all of which has led to the situation video games have found themselves in. I’m interested in questioning that, and I don’t know if it’s a question that VILE: Exhumed is interested in, or equipped to deal with.
The more I think about this one, the more I think it just is. You find a dusty computer that contains something horrible, a truth about the world. Maybe you knew it already, maybe it changes you. Maybe now you think what it shows should be banned–after all, look at what it could lead to! Maybe you want to see more.
Maybe that all just says something more about you.
Will I ever play it again? No thank you!
Final Thought: The most important thing about all of this: it doesn’t actively matter what the “point” of VILE: Exhumed is, it’s artistic merit, if it’s even any fucking good at all! While thematically disturbing, nothing you see here is even close to what you’d see in a Terrifier movie, and those are terrible, have no point or artistic merit, and literally come out in cinemas. Even if VILE: Exhumed was as graphic, it would still have the right to exist and be released as any artistic work does. Whether or not you wish to experience it is a different story.
