"Vile: Exhumed" Game Review
Cadaverous.
VIle is an intense, unsettling experience. Its brand of horror is far from "fun" but is thoughtful, well-crafted, and uncomfortably real. As someone with a longtime fixation on the fringe regions of horror and exploitation cinema, the blend of cryptic web 1.0 message boards and lo-res media feels resonant and close to home, even at its most elevated and on-the-nose. There is no real catharsis or parable to be found here, just a dive into the mind and private spaces of someone at the end of a rabbit hole.
There's an inherent warning here behind the dodgy .jpegs and grainy FMV's, a recognition of people and attitudes that exist in the real world, where spaces like Abhorrent Archive are only a Google search away, but even more an understanding that they don't really need to. As much as the internet has changed, people haven't. Men like this no longer need private message boards and spooky web rings to get their kicks, because they've been subsumed into the algorithm like the rest of us. They're on Reddit. They're on Discord. They're on Instagram. They're in every space where the social mechanisms that keep them in check erode further every day, and where depictions of degrading sex, death, and suffering are piled on top of each-other in ever greater supply.
From a strictly "video-game" perspective, I have a few qualms. It feels like Vile ends a bit too quickly, and its arbitrary "win" condition is all too easy to stumble into. Once this happens, the illusion breaks, and though there are likely more secrets to uncover on a following play-through, at that point the walls of the artifice are revealed and the carefully curated atmosphere suffers for it.
Within all the misery on display here, there is a faint sense of joy. The presentation of early internet and crossover into deep horror culture is so niche and specific that it could only come from a place of appreciation, from someone who swam in the deep end and ran into the rotten bits floating around out there. Cara Cadaver has created something special here, and it only adds to the injustice of the insidious censorship she's faced, the details of which can be expounded on much better elsewhere. I hope in the long run we see more of her work despite the roadblocks, and I'm excited to see what comes next.
Please read Cara's statement and show some support if you can over at her site.
4.5/5
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