CW: This article contains references to sexual assault and violence against women. 

One of the quickest ways to lose faith in humanity is by listening to a woman’s experience on the Internet. Many have horror stories that started in YouTube comments, Twitch chats, Instagram messages and more as the world’s digital town squares increasingly reflected the worst of the world’s real misogynistic attitudes. While it’d be reductive to say there are no positive experiences to be found if you’re not a man online, as countless people have found friends and communities through surfing the web, everything from Gamergate to the manosphere to a single TikTok have shown that the Internet is no stranger to male entitlement, objectification of women, sexual harassment and assault, and systems that fail to protect women against both individual ghouls and armies of them. 

VILE: Exhumed tackles this reality head-on in one of the most effective and unorthodox ways I’ve seen yet. Developed by Final Girl Games, the game studio run by developer Cara Cadaver, and published by DreadXP, players will search through a computer straight out of 1999 and discover its contents by using clues to deduce passwords for locked folders and applications. However, each new discovery will paint a sometimes gore-y, always gross picture of the computer’s owner: a 29-year old man called Shawn who is deeply obsessed with the porn star Candy Corpse, and currently unemployed after perpetrating what’s heavily implied to be a sexual assault.   

It’s clever how VILE: Exhumed peels back each layer of Shawn’s obsession to reveal a truly disgusting man emboldened by the culture around him. While folks that love to pull out some pen and paper (there is an in-game notepad too) will especially enjoy solving  the password hints, as they require jotting down and putting together all types of information littered throughout Shawn’s hard drive, the information being obtained will make you squirm a bit. Some of it is almost disarming, like figuring out the name of a book from one of Shawn’s favorite horror pornos. Given that passwords are often made up of things a person can easily remember, often something or someone cherished, these digital keys can speak volumes about the people creating them — and it’s humorous to be the type who would use small details from your favorite jackoff material than a combo of your first pet and an important calendar date.  

However, any laugh will stop cold in the throat when finding other passwords, like the one that includes the street address of a woman Shawn harmed. It’s in searching for information like this where you realize Shawn isn’t just the type of guy to make your skin crawl — he’s the type of guy that if you fit what he’s looking for (or, if you look like his favorite porn star), you need to avoid him at all costs. 

Cadaver doubles the impact of finding these passwords by making the path toward them equally discomforting. Arguably, the most incisive commentary present in VILE: Exhumed is not the horrifying material awaiting players in the computer’s darkest corners — materials that, despite Cadaver sharing with Dread Central that she had little experience with practical effects, were effective in unnerving me the way only FMV and still-photos could — but in the chats and emails I scoured to find answers. In conversations and forums with other men, one can find a glimpse of not only the absolute disdain and disregard some have for women, but also the systems that protect men like Shawn both subtly and explicitly. There is a disgust to how Shawn and his comrades in misogyny talk about women that one would usually expect to be saved for a personal adversary or renowned villain. These men treat the sources of their desire more as inconvenient necessities, objects born to fulfill insatiable lust and constant boredom, rather than human beings deserving of privacy, safety, and respect. 

The entitlement on display only gets worse when reading Shawn’s chats with women or entities perceived to be women. He’ll briefly don a textbook Nice Guy persona before the bile stewing inside him can’t help but spill out. He has no interest in following boundaries that impede on his desires. To him, if he thinks a woman wants it, then she wants it. If he thinks a woman will want to talk to him, then he’ll use all means at his disposal to contact her. And if he thinks he can get away with doing what he wants, then he and the men around him that say things like “She probably led you on like crazy” and “You should have seen it, she made herself cry and everything. The pictures are wild, kinda hot too” will help him get away with it. 

Moreover, what’s especially nauseating about the whole affair is how these attitudes embolden behavior outside of the computer screen. Perusing Shawn’s communications reveals others willing to use their positions of power, knowingly breaking the law and/or company policies, to essentially minimize Shawn’s actions and feed into his delusions. You don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that the material being shared with Shawn should not be in his possession (some of it shouldn’t be in anyone’s possession), much in the same way you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to realize Shawn has committed more than just one crime in pursuing his fantasies. 

It’s important to note that this experience could not be nearly as impactful with its message if the player wasn’t effectively in Shawn’s POV. As Grace Benfell discussed in her writing on the game, while you’re not playing as Shawn, there is minimal distance between the player and Shawn’s thoughts. There is a closeness to his actions that, rather than endorses them, negates any attempt to sanitize their vileness. It’s a perspective that lets all his malice speak for itself, as well as creates space to examine the two-faced behavior men like Shawn employ to navigate the world. After all, while you don’t need to look far to see that abusers can make it quite far in life even when their actions are publicly known, the legal consequences and social stigma of being an abuser are enough to scare most people who aren’t stupidly wealthy. If nothing else, men in Shawn’s position will do the dance of “I would never do that!” and “How could you think I did that?” to both save face and lure in their next victim. By being as close to Shawn’s position as VILE: Exhumed puts the player, you cannot see him as anything but the monster that he is.

It is incredibly disappointing that Steam decided more people shouldn’t engage with these ideas by banning VILE: Exhumed for sale in July 2025. This game cuts ruthlessly at the heart of what creates toxic online spaces dedicated to harming women and reveling in that harm. Refusing to sell it for “sexual content with depictions of real people,” as Cadaver states in her developer statement — grounds that cannot earnestly be called a good faith or, frankly, honest read of what the game explores and how — does more to help these online spaces thrive unchallenged than meaningfully tackle their existence. To borrow Cadaver’s words, “what this [ban] actually results in is taking power and storytelling away from women, other marginalized artists, and ultimately, from everyone.” I want to see more storytelling like VILE: Exhumed, unafraid to address the worst of our online communal spaces, and I hope the world’s largest gaming storefront doesn’t keep making that harder.