Time Extend
How a Taiwanese horror game made us face the sins of the past
How Taiwanese horror game Devotion makes its players face the many sins of the past
Developer/publisher Red Candle Games Format PC, PS4, Switch Release 2017
Like therapy, Detention aims to work through repressed traumas, coaxing them to the surface and preparing the patient to confront them. But for Taiwanbased developer Red Candle, the trauma is the territory’s own modern history, and the patient its population. Suggesting the full reality is too much to bear from the start, it wraps its subject in a tragic horror story that explores the effects of living in fear and how ordinary individuals must take responsibility for the parts they play. In the process it drags the past back into view, to encourage a future free of its scars.
Detention is set in the 1960s during Taiwan’s nationalist White Terror, a 40-year period of martial law in which dissidents were jailed or executed in their thousands as communist sympathisers and spies. Its oppressive atmosphere filters through the game’s central location, a rural school, threatening to burst into violence. You only glimpse the lived experience, in brief montages of bound hands and sack-covered heads, or scraps of notes and conversations about the tyrannical military-uniformed Instructor Bai. But the sense of being monitored, judged and hunted is constant.
In the game’s first two chapters, an allegorical horror conveys the hanging dread. It builds slowly as you begin playing as Wei Ching Ting, a student who finds himself waking up at his school desk at night in the midst of a typhoon alert, the area evacuated. He finds another student, Fang Ray Shin, and the two take refuge for the night, but as Wei sets out to fetch supplies he simply fades away. Next thing you know, you’re waking up as Ray on the stage of the school auditorium, with the pale, dead body of Wei hanging upside-down beside you.
Disquiet becomes hellish confusion. As with life under the oppressive regime, nothing feels normal or safe, and eyes are everywhere. Visually, Detention forms an uncanny blend of the familiar and the otherworldly, almost-photographic backgrounds layered to create twisted collages, and its detailed characters animated like paper mannequins. Aurally, the rumbling suspense music is somehow less discomforting than the everyday noises, which feel egregiously stuck onto the world rather than organically embedded in it.
As you explore with Ray, the school’s militaristic pomp dissolves into decay and torture. As in Silent Hill, locations that should symbolise security and innocence become nightmare versions of themselves. Bloodstains and magical charms coat the walls, broken furniture piles up into impassable towers, and bathrooms are infected with dirt and flies. And with its 2D perspective, Detention takes a horror game staple – the claustrophobic linearity of the corridor – and compresses the whole world into its form. Wherever you are, even outside, it forces you forward along its constant depthless pathways, unable to circumnavigate the disturbing sights or monsters that stalk the halls.
The two types of conventional enemy in the game are both suitably disturbing. The Lingered appear as demonic students, patrolling in unpredictable stutters and emitting a sinister loop of cackling, sobbing and gurgling. Lantern Spectres are tall, spindly creatures in traditional garb, accompanied by religious chanting, who shuffle behind an outstretched lantern and leer over you as they approach. With no way to defend yourself or move around them, your only recourse is to hold your breath and tip-toe right past, hoping you don’t need to inhale before you clear their perceptual range.
The rest of the time, progress takes the form of a simple point-and-click adventure. It’s usually quite clear what you need to find and where it goes, with explanatory notes littering the floors, waiting to be added to your journal. But puzzles often come with a surreal or macabre twist, and solutions cause scenes to alter around you. A set of dice used in forbidden gambling games turn into pulled teeth when thrown; a mangled hand with its fingerprints erased is revealed as you pull a puppet from a cage; an item marked ‘book club reading list’ appears in your inventory as a pistol.
There’s also a sense of gruesome tactility when collecting or using objects. It’s mostly implied, as Ray stares into buckets and blood-glazed basins to fish out essential bits and pieces within. But one
incident in particular brings it into sharp focus, as you return to Wei’s body with a rusty utility knife and the need to perform a ritual sacrifice to collect blood in a bowl. He may already be dead, but the game switches to a close-up and makes you draw the incision across his throat, then leaves you listening to the residual dripping once you’ve claimed your prize.
But these moments aren’t merely for tension and disgust; Ray getting her hands dirty has a deeper significance. As Detention moves into its third chapter, the monsters are gone and Ray begins to work through surreal fragments of her own past. You learn about her father, a loving family man who became a drunk and a philanderer, before being arrested for involvement in a bribery scandal. And Ray’s mother, who it seems found her comfort in religious superstition.
To solve the item-based puzzles, Ray shifts between different versions of an incoherent reality, trying to piece it together.
Slowly she comes to realise what you’ve likely suspected all along – that the nightmare she’s trapped in is one of her own making. With her troubles at home, she began seeing the school counsellor, Chang, and the two developed a romantic relationship. But warned about his inappropriate behaviour by another teacher, Ms Yin, Chang cut Ray off, leaving her abandoned once again. Ray’s desperate response changed everything, and suddenly the repressed trauma resurfaces. From those opening chapters, where it dwelt in the unconscious, appearing symptomatically as monsters and grim mutations in reality, it has crystallised, first into jumbled images, then finally into hard realisation. As the supernatural horror fades away, a real horror takes its place, and now that initial phase of panicked survival is almost welcoming next to the terrible clarity that emerges.
The forbidden reading list, the hooded figures, the blood on Ray’s hands – it was she who revealed the existence of the secret book club to Instructor Bai, connecting the list to Ms Yin. Yet the resulting crackdown saw everyone in the group rooted out – Ms
Yin fleeing into exile, Chang executed, and numerous students, including Wei, jailed. Plagued by guilt, Ray took her own life.
The game’s short final section shows the school years later, as Ray’s unquiet spirit walks the corridors. The fragments have evolved into full-blown memories of the book club and her betrayal, which she relives. Nothing can be undone. You can only make certain choices, as she confronts reflections of herself. Does she react with indifference or grim acceptance, or still hope to be more than that one vicious act?
Ray’s story can be seen as a personal tragedy born of extreme social conditions and her own weakness. But for the game to resolve satisfactorily, you must deny the temptation to treat it as fate that can only be lamented. At the heart of Detention is a series of paternal authority figures that Ray
THAT INITIAL PHASE OF PANICKED
SURVIVAL IS ALMOST WELCOMING NEXT
TO THE TERRIBLE CLARITY THAT EMERGES
relies on, only to be let down. Her actual father neglects her as he turns to drink. She seeks refuge with Chang, and he takes advantage of her. She recognises through her mother that the father of religion is merely a pacifying escapist comfort. So she looks to the hyper-masculine authority of the state, which tears down everything around her with its violent, overbearing ‘protection’.
Each father fails in his duty to nurture, protect and educate his children, and the social symbol of those qualities – the school – deteriorates. Ray’s own failure, which she could never have known, was to believe that she needed them to shield her from fear, instead of finding her own path and facing that fear. But the same can be said about all these characters, under this despotic state authority. On one hand, all citizens may be seen as the state’s children, and the negligent behaviour of Ray’s father, mother and counsellor, formed under the duress of its extreme regimentation, reveals the state’s failure. On the other hand, Ray’s story demonstrates how each of these people has a responsibility to act in accordance with themselves, and not succumb to the fear.
Most of all, Detention is about remembering, and the value of revisiting history to understand what’s left behind. In the context of Taiwan this clearly remains an important issue. Not long before the game’s release, Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, announced a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the White Terror period, which is still ongoing. One reason for such commissions, which have been carried out in various countries after periods of extreme state violence, is to help a people heal by facing their collective past, so they begin to forge a new identity. Until that happens, nations are often still traumatised by injustice.
In the final part of Detention, you see Wei, now an older man granted amnesty, walking around the desolate school. If you make the wrong choices here, Ray experiences her own suicide again, and stays stuck in the loop of fear and forgetting. The past still haunts the present. If you make the right choices, the game ends with Ray’s spirit sitting opposite Wei at his old school desk in a moment of serenity. Only if this encounter takes place does Wei perhaps forgive Ray and move on. By facing the truth, you find reconciliation.