Dev Made a Free Spanking Game to Apologize for Delaying His Spanking Game

The premise, explained with a straight face

Spanking Exorcist is a comedy horror game from Japanese solo developer Actor. Players step into the sandals of Ioto Shirihataki, an exorcist dispatched to the haunted Peach Butt Housing Complex. The building is full of housewife spirits whose unfinished business, per the premise, is to be spanked as hard as possible. Players must locate and exorcise them while steering clear of more dangerous entities that are, presumably, not interested in the same resolution. The game features full voice acting, 69 available actions, and online leaderboards, according to reporting by Dexerto.

It was supposed to arrive on Steam on July 24, 2026. It did not.

A month of negotiations, then silence

Actor announced shortly before the planned release date that Steam’s review of the game was still incomplete. The developer said he had spent roughly a month in back-and-forth discussions over whether portions of the game crossed into territory the platform considers too sexual. Steam’s content review process has long been a source of frustration for indie developers working in mature or niche genres, and Spanking Exorcist joined a longer list of titles caught in that particular limbo.

For players who had been following the game, the timing stung. One user on X, posting under the handle Paul Bunyon, captured the mood pretty succinctly: “I just want to slap ghost booty, is that so wrong?”

Fair question.

The apology is also a game

Actor could have posted a standard text apology and moved on. Instead, he made a second game.

The free Windows release is titled A Game Where You Can Spank Actor, and it does exactly what the name promises. Distributed through a Google Drive link posted to the developer’s X account, the game consists of a single screen showing a cartoon rendering of Actor’s butt placed just beneath his profile icon. A flashing red button labeled “Spank that butt!” sits front and center. Pressing it causes the cartoon posterior to jiggle, accompanied by a slapping sound effect.

That is the whole game. It also includes a direct link to the Spanking Exorcist Steam page, so players are reminded, mid-spanking, exactly what they are waiting for.

There is something genuinely charming about the logic here. The delay was embarrassing. The game is about spanking. The apology is therefore also about spanking. It is consistent branding, at minimum.

Why this kind of gesture lands

Publisher and developer apologies tend to follow a familiar script: acknowledgment, explanation, revised timeline, maybe a small goodwill gesture like an in-game item or a discount. Actor’s version skips straight past corporate-speak and leans into the absurdity of his own situation. He made a game about a very specific thing, that game got delayed over questions about that very specific thing, and his response was to hand players a tiny interactive outlet for their frustration.

It works because it matches the energy of the original project. Spanking Exorcist is clearly not trying to be something it is not. The developer is not embarrassed by the concept, and the apology game makes that clear without him having to say it explicitly.

As of reporting by Dexerto on August 2, 2026, Spanking Exorcist was still awaiting a confirmed Steam release date. The apology game, at least, is already out.