Detention

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 Taiwan based 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.

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