After being banned for sale VILE: Exhumed has released for free

It was going to release on Steam but it was removed and banned for sale, now VILE: Exhumed is back as a free game to fight back against censorship. With the release it's now under the CC BY-NC-ND license.

Not caught up on what's going on? This is one game that was caught up in the recent campaign to have certain games with adult themes removed for sale on Steam and itch.io, with ZOOM Platform also recently talking about it too.

The developer said that 50% of the profits will go towards the "Red Door Family Shelter, a Toronto based charity that focuses on helping families, refugees, and women who are escaping violence". Writing on the website the developer posted a statement about the situation:

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. There are a lot of intense visuals in VILE: Exhumed, but there is no uncensored nudity, no depictions of sex acts, and no pornography whatsoever – which is one of the justifications bad actors are using right now to censor games.

What this actually results in is taking power and storytelling away from women, other marginalized artists, and ultimately, from everyone.

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.

By giving the game away, for free, to whoever wants to play it, I am doing the same thing I set out to do when I started working on VILE: Exhumed, a game about sexual assault, male entitlement, and misogyny. Taking back my agency.

No one is allowed to dictate what kind of horror is acceptable, or what stories are allowed to be told.

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See more on the release website.

Editor's Note: these bans and removals don't work. All that ends up happening is games and other content move elsewhere, and people go looking in darker places. We know how these things go, and now with all the age verification in the UK and coming to other countries, the situation is only going to get worse.