In July, PC storefronts Steam and Itch.io both pulled hundreds of games from sale, citing pressure from payment processors like Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe. The games affected allegedly violate a vague set of standards set forth by those companies, mostly targeting games with any sort of sexual content. Now, the developer of one horror game is pushing back and taking the chance to support a good cause at the same time.
Vile: Exhumed is a horror game intended to launch on Steam right in the midst of the storefront removing huge swaths of games, but ended up banned from sale instead. According to developer Cara Cadaver, Steam pulled the game for “sexual content with depictions of real people,” which the game does not contain. Played entirely through a computer interface, Vile: Exhumed is a disturbing story of a stalker, pieced together through artifacts left on his computer, but according to Cadaver, nothing in it actually runs afoul of Steam’s stated policies.
