Detention

How a Taiwanese horror game made us face the sins of the past

- Jon Bailes

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.

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.