Amateur Recommendation Hour: Detention

Today’s recommendation is an extremely unique, fascinating, and touching horror experience that has stayed with me for a long while after the credits rolled upon finishing for the first time. Along with the Metal Gear series and Shadow Of The Colossus it is among the first I think of when I think of the medium of video games being taken seriously as a form of creative expression and art. (As it damn well should be. The fact that I’d even have to make this argument is still utterly ridiculous to me.) While it does not have the pedigree or prestige of either, its sheer commitment to its vision, uncompromisingly so, and its ability to tackle such dark, painful subject matter as deftly and artfully as it does, to me make a prime example of horror that is not afraid of itself.

Detention, developed by Taiwanese horror masters Red Candle Games, is a story inspired by some of the grandparents of the development team who lived through White Terror, a 38 year period of martial law imposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party post-World War II. We open on a young boy in school struggling to keep his eyes open as the teacher lectures. Birds chirping, wind gently blowing, who could blame him? Instructor Bai, a military uniformed man comes walking down the hall, the students notice. “Ms. Yin? May I have a word?” he inquires, “have you seen this list before?” The screen fades to black. The young man who had fallen asleep awakens to find his classroom empty, a steady rain falling against the window of his dimly lit classroom. “This is strange…where is everybody? A typhoon alert? There shouldn’t be any typhoons this time of year.”  He finds a note on his desk, it appears of have been passed around and stopped with him. “Ms. Yin keeps calling in sick lately, man I hate those other subs they send in.”

Greenwood High School, on this cold and stormy night is where we find our main characters, Ray and Wei. Stranded in the remote and mountainous region in which the school is located, they begin to learn more about each other and why they are unable to find their way out. The mood it creates is beyond compare. The loud clops of foot to wood floor punctuated by the relation omniscience of the surroundings. World class atmosphere and tension building is brought on with it a sense of isolation, the school doesn’t feel so much a safe haven against the storm but a predator waiting to strike when the time is right. Its use of ambient sound and mostly atonal, distant music is a stroke of genius. The more we descend down that hill, the more we dread, straying away from the deceptively unwelcoming school through an even more blatantly unkind storm. Avant-garde imagery, unfamiliar locations, notes and logs seemingly left behind by staffers and students. The narrative slowly unfolds with very little dialogue. A smart choice for a game of this magnitude, never allowing us to feel connected with the outside world. Speaking only when it needs to speak. And the story unfolds in such a way that it never explains itself too much to the point where we are fully aware of what is going on and how to deal with it, whilst remaining coherently intelligent in its subtleties.

Its gameplay could be considered “rudimentary” however the baggage associated with such a term feels so loaded and unfair to the intimately small-scale game Detention is trying to be. You move along a 2D-plane side scrolling across each environment, picking up clues and puzzle-solving objects along the way, all the while supernatural horrors of unexplained origin pursue you, the only defense against them is to hold your breath and back slowly away from them, (which is in line thematically with the game’s wider points I might add). It’s somewhat similar to Silent Hill in that regard, albeit with no combat and two dimensional movement. Making what I believe to be a very good entry point for horror game newcomers or those who are newcomers to the medium entirely.

With an extremely unique art style designed to look like a faded photograph its remarkably empathetic sense of horror attempts to convey the kinds of emotions those who lived through this period of time would feel in their daily lives. Conveying them remarkably effectively if you ask me. It’s withered look reflecting the player’s own constitution as it preys on your vulnerable senses. Its use of imagery is integral to creating a sense of fragmented place that is more of a collection of experiences of its time period rather than that of any one person or family. And its ability to make that feel intimate and modest is a remarkable achievement, given how long a period White Terror was and how many it affected in total. Emotional intelligence is a hard line to walk in horror. The overly grotesque or the absurdly silly is often the place writers can often find themselves pigeon-holed into. The ability of Detention to create a deeply personal work of horror that treats itself with such respect and reality whilst going to places far beyond our plane of existence is beyond impressive.

This work deals with a lot of complex themes, learning how to forgive oneself or at the very least be at peace for the atrocities they’ve committed, the oppression and paranoia of constantly being watched by a restrictive regime, the isolation and pressure that comes with being but one person against a coercive and suppressive force of a government. These all come together to form the cohesive message of personal catharsis. Coming to terms with the wrongs you’ve done is an undeniably emotionally intense process. Our souls will never truly be given the space to rest until we confront the past we aren’t proud of, the things about ourselves we don’t like. As restless as it makes us when we alive, that restlessness may just extend beyond our endpoint. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s the essence of this game’s horror. Intimate encroachment that won’t fully leave until we allow it to. It’s a process that could last us a whole lifetime to overcome if we’re not careful, potentially that horror could even persist even after we have been laid to rest.