Devotion is about coming home, time and again, and never quite
arriving. A perfectly insidious horror game from Detention developer Red
Candle, it follows the plight of a troubled young family - mother,
father, daughter - over seven years in a single, cramped apartment in
1980s Taiwan. Beyond the prologue, in which your character awakens from a
daze on the living room sofa, you'll be able to explore three
incarnations of the apartment side by side - three intricate studies of
domestic life, feeding off from a hall where photos slowly cover
noticeboards like multiplying lichen. Your task for much of the game is
to make the connections between these spaces and timeframes, restoring
the patchy memories linked to those photos and (so you hope) entering
into a "flawless present". The problem, of course, is that few of those
memories are pleasant, and many of them are out to get you in turn.
Playing in the first-person, you tip-toe about with a lighter
shivering in your fist, picking up objects and applying them to other
objects according to simple clues scribbled in the margins of journals
or photos. As in Konami's PT, a short-form masterpiece that continues to
bedevil designers years after it was removed from sale, you must reckon
with both a nasty abundance of blindspots and the apartment's habit of
shape-shifting when out of view. The interior design lacks PT's
relentless focus, following its corridor around and around as though
rewinding a cassette until the tape disintegrates, but there are moments
of unease here to equal anything in a horror game north of 2000. The
best horror is about doing a lot with a little - a viscous exhalation on
the edge of hearing, a skewing of perspective that chases all warmth
from a room - and Devotion's deceptively small layout is a mass of
stiletto touches that gradually take you apart.
Consider the hall between the living room and the master bedroom.
Sometimes it appears unremarkable save for a faulty light that flickers
far too rhythmically, taunting with the thought of what might stutter
into motion during each metronomic slice of darkness. Sometimes the
plaster is crowded with crayon doodles: sausage-string children waving
trophies, cats with crimson lamprey jaws. In each case, the scariest
prospect is simply rounding the corner beneath that flickering light to
see what has become of the bedroom. Elsewhere, the problem is seeing too
much at once, not being able to compartmentalise your dread. It's
perilously easy, for instance, to glance through from the living room
into one of the bedrooms and spot something you're not quite ready to
deal with, not just yet. There's no combat in Devotion, and no player
death as such, but there are plenty of creatures and objects you'll want
to stay away from. A red umbrella ripening in mid-air, as playfully
incongruous as one of Pennywise's balloons. A wooden mannequin stooped
over a kitchen counter, vegetable knife in hand.
What's most impressive about these apparitions is how sparingly
they're wielded. Far from aiming merely to shock, Devotion is a
sorrowful account of a family broken on the wheels of history in which
every jolt or gruesome object sheds more light upon the cast. It is
about an uptight man's inability to play provider to a more talented
woman who is obliged to play housewife, and a precocious, sickly
daughter who becomes the focus of their insecurities - the keyhole
through which they both, in different ways, hope to squeeze into that
flawless present. You could call these "universal" themes, and they are
certainly familiar touchstones for horror, but Devotion (whose creators
have given us some fascinating dialogue
with European developers) is as much about a particular time and place
as it is a traversing of common ground. It reserves particular space and
hostility for the practice of faith healing versus the nascent science
of mental health, but also investigates the grooming of child stars and
the emancipatory possibilities of TV celebrity for women who might
otherwise be chained to a stove.
In the course of investigating these topics, the game treats each
character as a warped and soiled lens for the other two. You spend a lot
of time in the father's head, from whose perspective the mother becomes
a staccato, glitching phantasm, a creature of eyes and right angles,
and the daughter a squat and recalcitrant doll. But you'll also play
the daughter, struggling not to overhear an argument that blots the view
with shrieking, disembodied mouths. You'll embody her as she is
literally bowed by the weight of expectation, crawling towards a stage
overlooking an auditorium where a single figure sits in shadow, equal
parts Slenderman and Simon Cowell. Lest all this seem too theatrical,
next to the timeless delights of a blind corner, Devotion also strews
your exploration with backstory texts that provide the necessary
undertone of mundanity. There are limp reassurances in letters from
in-laws, taped conversations with a calculating spiritual mentor, and
balled-up excerpts from a script in which concepts of family are splayed
and pinned like butterflies.
It's a psychic pressure cooker, a screwing-down of years of
bitterness and resentment to the point that the architecture buckles
under the stress and bursts into the realm of metaphor. Sometimes the
living room is a hospital ward. Sometimes the daughter's bedroom is a
meadow. Sometimes the whole apartment is a wind-up puppet show witnessed
through glass and water. The tragedy is that for every dozen moments of
malice there's a moment of tenderness, a seed that never quite took
root. Not all the architectural contortions or changes of perspective
are malign: there's a graceful bit of genre-splicing in which father and
daughter read a storybook that blossoms into a 2D platform game,
altering the plot as they go with a crayon. It's a grace note that
echoes the fairytales of What Remains of Edith Finch, but which also,
like the fairytales of Edith Finch, speaks to the perils of escaping
reality too avidly. There are times when it is healthy to rewrite the
story, and times when it's better to work with what you're given.
At the time of review, Devotion itself is undergoing something of a rewrite. As you may have read,
the game has been found to contain insulting references to China's
"core president" Xi Jinping, which prompted a deluge of negative Steam
reviews and much outcry on Chinese social media. It has since been
removed from sale in all territories to check for technical errors and
leftover "offensive" material. It's sad to think that a horror story as
crafty as this one might be remembered only for tripping the
insecurities of the Chinese regime. Red Candle's second game is a genre
landmark, a carefully spun social critique and a haunted house ride that
is as compact and deadly as a switchblade. For better and for worse,
there's no place like home.
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