The Games Behind the Bans: Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem

By Grace Benfell | September 18, 2025 | 2:15pm

Video Games Features Censorship

The Games Behind the Bans: Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem

It has been quite a couple of months for independent games. Both Steam and Itch have wiped games from their libraries, due to payment processor pressure. It might be gauche to say, but it is true that bans garner their subjects attention. I might never have heard of Girls Purgatoriem if itch.io had not excised it from its library. But it also makes it harder to approach these works on their own terms. Vile: Exhumed will be forever associated with its banning. Critics, journalists, and fans will discuss its removal from Steam in greater depth than the game itself. What could have been an interesting work on its own terms is now the tip of a spear in yet another culture war.

I wanted to write this as something of a corrective against that. I can only go so far. I am still highlighting these games because of what happened to them. However, excepting this intro and a couple asides, I want to focus on these games as aesthetic objects, to treat as I would if I were writing a regular piece about them.

Without further ado, let’s get analyzing.

Vile: Exhumed Puts You in the Skull of a Killer

banned games Vile Exhumed

I want to get this out of the way first. The fact that Valve barred Vile: Exhumed from sale on Steam is absurd. For one, the game is directly critical of “male entitlement,” keen-eyed about the mundane things that enable men to hurt and kill women. For another, it violates Steam’s guidelines only if you take an especially punitive and misunderstanding eye to it. Vile‘s banning underlines the impracticality of these measures. Who exactly are these bans protecting? Who are they targeting?

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Spoilers follow:

Vile: Exhumed’s most interesting element is its queasy sense of (dis)identification. In it, you explore the PC of one Shawn Gerighs, a horror and porn enthusiast. But the deeper you go into his files and programs, the more it becomes obvious that he is stalking and murdering women. It also becomes clear that, in the game’s own parlance, you are him.

A different kind of game would distance the player from the killer, making them a police investigator or private detective going through the murderer’s computer after the fact. This is the model games like Her Story and The Roottrees Are Dead take. The identity of the player character might be a mystery, but there is usually a lack of friction between the player and the character. Vile: Exhumed emphasizes that distance, making that friction cutting rather than rendering it smooth. You can’t be Shawn, because you don’t know any of the network of passwords he has used to lock down the evidence of his crimes. Yet, in the game’s final sequence, Shawn calls his local video store but says nothing. The worker there accuses him of masturbating on the call and then berates him, saying “You’re vile.” At one point, a virus pop-up appears, with an image of Candy Corpse, which instructs you to “kill her.” In both these instances, there is an equivocation between Shawn and the player.

None of Vile‘s puzzles are especially complex, but they are clever. The game is as interested in the analog interfaces of 1999 as it is in the VHS-swapping horror culture of time. We are awash in these kinds of nostalgia pieces, which emulate old hardware. But Vile is interested in the negative sides of internet connection. Though it is easier than ever to surveil and stalk each other online, it was never hard. The internet is built for a certain kind of body and a certain kind of user. Everyone else using it has to grapple with that truth.

Girls Purgatoriem Pits Lonely, Lost Girls Against Each Other

Girls Purgatoriem was fully banned from itch, rather than “merely” de-listed, because it fits the lens which Collective Shout defined: rape and incest games. The short visual novel follows clone soldiers of a future war, fighting Beasts on the endless wasteland that remains of earth. The clones have sex and call each other sister, but they are also each others’ only peers. A claim that the game has a literal relationship to actual incest would be more than a little spurious. But this is what happens when the groups analyzing art, payment processors and non-profits in this case, do it only from afar. They get it wrong.

Girls Purgatoriem is exposition-heavy, but doesn’t lose much of its evocativeness for that. The art is inky and harsh, looking carved into paper with a scratchy pen. Ink is like blood, after all. Intimacy and care weave themselves into Girls‘ fabric, but they are also hard won. The girls are designed as tools and every step they take away from being used can lead to repression. Each soldier is a combination of human and Beast, and will eventually turn into their enemies.

The metaphor is a little obvious, a hidden self that the powers-that-be both use and despise and that has more than a little overlap with transness. However, it also gives the game a felt desperation. Fates are carved into flesh, encoded in blood. How do you escape being designed to kill what you are? Girls Purgatoriem is short and lean, but gives itself force beyond its weight-class with its dedication to mood.

When these delistings and bans first occurred, there was some discourse around needing to protect even the art which we found distasteful, abject, or worthless. The line went, if we don’t protect those things, the art we treasure will follow. Both Vile: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem are evidence that these bans deplatform real artists and narrow the things they can discuss. The least we can do is try to seek out this work and take it seriously.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.