Background: Deviating from the 2D puzzle-adventure style of gameplay of its preceding title, Detention, developer Red Candle Games has meticulously crafted an exploratory first person experience that anatomizes the profound and devastating impact tradition, culture, societal expectations and perception, and religious fanaticism can have upon the fraying relations of a family contending with mounting penury and the illness of a child. Suffused with visual details and ideological stances prevalent within Taiwanese life in the nineteen-eighties, Devotion primarily draws its horror from the harrowing reality and grounded complexity of the familial predicaments it presents.
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Detention was a beautiful, touching game as well as deeply informative, and, similarly, this developer succeeded with this title in their particular implementation of intricately-designed imagery and clever mechanics to convey a narrative entrenched in themes of a difficult or personal nature. The traversal of this family’s story as it transitions through time is accomplished quite fluidly as you physically move between detailed re-creations of their home environment as gradually destabilizes across the passing years. Paralleling detention, aspects of the gameplay and visuals effectively translate into elucidation of the story and its underlying emotional tone. Player action, movement, and sightline seem fairly well-directed throughout its entirety.
Needless to say, the fecundity of this development team’s imagination will never cease to impress me. Their methods of storytelling and establishing a heavy, melancholic atmosphere are diverse, effective, and continually surprising. In particular, the depiction of what appears to be Mei Shin’s panic attack, with her rapid breathing, palpitating heart beating loudly in her ears, attempts to calm herself, and the inevitable exacerbation of her symptoms due to the stress of her familial situation was rather accurate and a little harrowing to witness from her perspective. In accordance with my personal interpretation, there seems to be a bit of a theme expressing the interaction and contention between the ideals of traditionalism and modernity, represented in the father and mother respectively. The father appears intent on enforcing rigid adherence to certain familial roles, preventing the mother from working despite their dire financial circumstance and painfully internalizing his inability to solely provide for his family. Additionally, as implied throughout the game thus far, especially evidenced within the contents of the storybook, the father believes in the curative powers of belief and devotion. The mother appears to offer an antithetical perspective, berating the father for wasting money on what she perceives to be inefficacious and regretting sacrificing her career and financial independence to adopt a traditional role as a housewife. From my personal upbringing, it would seem that the fault predominantly lies with the father, as allowing the mother to work while the father sorts out his situation appears to be a tenable decision, however, I understand how entrenchment within a certain set of ideals and expectations can render a person obstinate against what they perceive to be an improper and demeaning choice. Truly, their relationship was likely loving early on, yet their incompatible and opposing perspectives on their mounting tribulations have, apparently, proven irreconcilable and insurmountable.
There’s certainly an element of miscommunication existing between the mother and father, with the couple clearly unable to discuss the variances in their opinions without devolving into a bitter argument over unresolved regrets and resentments. As the father truly seems to love his daughter, perhaps the mother could have successfully convinced him to let her work, even just temporarily, by calmly addressing the urgency of their situation and rationality of her stance. I do wonder, though, how effective a purely logical discussion would be, considering some people are more heavily influenced by emotional stimuli than reasonable, perspicuous arguments. For the father in particular, his rationale and justifications appear to be deeply rooted in his sense of personal identity and the ideological framework which supports it. His ability to provide for his family, the quality and reception of his writing, and his religiosity are all of exceptional importance to him, and are quite foundational to his conception of himself and his status in life. Consequently, agreeing to the stipulations of his wife’s proposal would be equivalent in his mind to accepting his failure as a father and husband, writer, and adherent to his religion. In avoidance of this potentially debilitating reality, he becomes defensive and rejects this offer presumably on the basis of its impropriety. He might have then succumbed to his own dissonance, deluding himself into believing that he can still financially support his family with his screenwriting and that his daughter’s condition will be ameliorated through devotion and practices of faith alone. Additionally, in augmentation and support of this quixotic perspective, he has anecdotal evidence of his daughter supposedly feeling better following religious experiences. Overall, though it might seem obvious from an outsider’s viewpoint what the most effective option may be, from the inside there are likely multiple complex factors and complications which incline people to believe and act upon only what they want to accept as best, instead of what actually is.
In general, the writing in this game is truly exceptional in its ability to accurately recreate the ambiguities and difficult decisions that are debilitating for people to navigate in real life.
To avoid sounding repetitious, in consideration of my prior comments on the ingenuity and brilliance of the imagery, direction, set-pieces, and methods of story-telling executed throughout the game, I suppose I’ll conclude with a discussion on the narrative itself. Firstly, it was rather difficult for me to hear the denial and stigmatization of anxiety and other psychological issues, specifically from a parent towards their child. This sort of flawed and misguided conceptualization of mental health issues is immensely pernicious, though, unfortunately, rather pervasive, as is the tendency to misconstrue these matters as evidence of either irredeemable insanity, personal failure or laziness, moral depravity, or corruption of the soul.
Additionally, I appreciated how this game subverted the anticipated role of a young girl in a horror game and, instead, inspired an overwhelming sympathy for the stressful burden of her fracturing family’s worsening financial situation which exacerbated, and perhaps even initially caused, her anxiety. The prevalence of the tulip image was also particularly powerful, especially in its symbolic significance to the relationship between Mei Shin, almost always depicted in yellow, and her father. It was also rather striking to me how the gentle act of folding these tulips alongside her beloved father provided such a pronounced reprieve from her symptoms, demonstrating how, like a fragile flower, tenderness, affection, care, and proper consideration of her surrounding environment were all necessary to her healthy, normal growth. Being deprived of this sensitive cultivation and placed under extreme pressure, she withered. I’m not certain if the father lived or died in the end, however, it seems as though he is truly gone either way.
Utterly devastating and beautifully constructed game overall. As anticipated, this game has truly delved into immensely grounded and devastatingly real subject matter, with an ending that is certainly not as perfect and happy as the one shown in Mei Shin’s storybook.