Indie horror game rejected by Steam releases for free instead: 'This is our response to being censored, and our rejection of the idea that horror can be defined as acceptable or not'

Indie horror game Vile: Exhumed launched today as a free donationware game under a Creative Commons license, following the cancellation of its planned release on Steam in July, reportedly over the presence of "sexual content with depictions of real people."

Vile: Exhumed had been listed on Steam, and was slated for release on July 22—the page is gone now, but still visible via the Internet Archive. According to SteamDB, the page was taken down on July 25.

In a message posted on Bluesky a few days later, solo developer Cara Cadaver said Vile: Exhumed had been banned for "sexual content with depictions of real people," although she added that all such content "is all implied, making this all feel even worse." DreadXP also noted that Vile: Exhumed has "no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography present at all."

Valve has prohibited depictions of real people in adult games on Steam for a while now, so the rule it's citing wasn't created in response to its recent dust up with payment processors: Both Steam and Itch.io recently removed or deindexed a large number of adult-themed games that "may violate the rules and standards set forth by our payment processors and their related card networks and banks," as Valve put it in July. Concerns about those possible rule violations were driven by a pressure campaign carried out by Australian anti-porn crusaders Collective Shout.

A disappointing update about VILE: Exhumed...

— @dirtlord77.bsky.social (@dirtlord77.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-08-05T23:23:26.509Z

Despite the takedown, Cadaver said she would not censor or change the game "to make people who don't understand it feel more comfortable," and promised that she and publisher DreadXP were working to make the game available through other channels. Today that effort bore fruit at vileisbanned.com, which includes links to multiple download sources.

The game is free and can be freely shared under the terms of the Creative Commons license, and players (or people who just think this sort of thing should have the opportunity to see the light of day) can donate to support the game at the Vile: Exhumed website. All of DreadXP's profits on the game and a portion of Cadaver's, totaling to 50% of all profits earned, will be donated to Red Door Family Shelter, a Toronto based charity that focuses on helping families, refugees, and women who are escaping violence.

"As soon as we realized that the game had been banned, the conversation internally with Cara became about what we collectively could do to do right by her and her work," DreadXP director Hunter Bond said. "In the face of widespread attempted censorship, it didn't feel like a time for half-measures and compromise, so we all decided that releasing the game into the wild where it could never be made unavailable by a single platform felt like the best option, and strongest message."

It's possible that Vile: Exhumed would have run into trouble regardless of Steam's recent payment processor headaches: It does contain pixelated "photorealistic" images and video depicting a real person and the aftermath of implied sexual violence, and that may have violated Valve's pre-existing rules against "nude or sexually explicit images of real people" even without the worries about payment processors. But I'm inclined to think that recent experience left Valve a little more twitchy about the whole thing, contributing to a clearly incorrect outcome.

Cadaver said the rejection of Vile: Exhumed "is a direct attack on creative expression and artistic freedom, and it will not stop with false accusations of sexual content."

"This is our response to being censored, and our rejection of the idea that horror can be defined as acceptable or not," Cadaver wrote in Vile: Exhumed's readme file. "I am not sure if you just downloaded this from the website, maybe a friend sent you the zip file, who knows. Ultimately, I’m just glad you’re able to play it, that’s what matters."