#754: Detention

 

Detention

Red Candle Games
Initial release: January 13, 2017 (Worldwide)
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, Switch
Alternate title: Returning to School (Taiwan)

In 1947, Chinese Nationalist government forces under would-be dictator Chiang Kai-Shek staged a series of massacres across Taiwan in response to popular uprisings. One of these massacres was an incident at a high school in the city of Keelung in which several students and staff were executed or imprisoned over suspected Communist loyalties. This triggered a long period of violent political oppression known as the White Terror, which lasted for forty years. Somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 people, mostly native Taiwanese and indigenous people, were executed. In the years since the end of martial law, Taiwan has grappled with its bloody history and questions of what it means to be Taiwanese. That grappling can be seen in Detention, the freshman release of Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games.

When I was reviewing Orson Welles' The Trial, I wrote about state terror and the seemingly arbitrary, byzantine nature of it. In Detention, that state terror is conveyed through suspicion, violence, and fear. The game is set in 1962, thirteen years since the formal start of martial law and fifteen since the beginning of the White Terror. Wei, an ordinary high school student, falls asleep in class; when he wakes up, the school is dark and he is alone, with an out-of-season typhoon bearing down on the island. As he attempts to leave campus, he stumbles upon a young girl, Ray, passed out on the stage in the auditorium. The two of them try to leave campus, only for the bridge to have been washed away by a roaring river the color of blood. Splitting up to gather supplies to wait out the storm overnight, Wei soon disappears, leaving Ray by herself. She soon discovers that the school is haunted by ghosts, and her own lingering guilt over an incident that must be pieced together over the course of the game.

Detention isn't really about the White Terror, though it certainly serves as a backdrop. It might be more accurate to say that the White Terror is the weapon through which a jealous Ray gets revenge on a teacher over a tragic misunderstanding. In another work, from another country, she might have made accusations of sexual impropriety, or perhaps simply shot someone. Instead, she takes a page from her mother, who escaped her abusive marriage by framing her husband as a communist sympathizer, by turning in the clandestine book club the teacher was secretly running. She'd hoped to simply get the teacher fired, but the military swooped down on the school and arrested and executed several students and staff. Her guilt for the incident is the driving emotion of the game's storyline, told mostly through narration from Ray herself with the occasional scene she bears witness to.

While nominally a survival horror game, Detention is unusual in that it's a side-scrolling point-and-click game. The art seems to be a mixture of hand-illustrated and CG modeling; characters move about in that slightly jerky motion reminiscent of old Flash games, or perhaps Salt & Sanctuary might be a better comparison. You carry no weapon in this game (though a fateful list of banned books is represented by a handgun) and encounters with the hostile spirits stalking the halls are rare. Getting past them is simple: simply holding your breath and either moving past them, or waiting for them to move past you. But you can't hold your breath forever! But ultimately, it's a point and click adventure game where you walk around from room to room putting inventory items onto things to make stuff happen.

Detention gets a lot of its visual language from works like Silent Hill; as I was playing I got to thinking about how common it was for games (and other works) to use imagery the way Silent Hill did to represent psychological disarray. So often, it takes ordinary day-to-day settings and gives them a dark twist; characters often find themselves in these places after hours, with nary a soul around, but are unable to leave. As they explore, their surroundings change, sometimes in nonsensical ways: the walls grow grimy, doors become boarded up or inexplicably locked, twisted things are discovered like headless dolls in cages or whatever, spooooky. All too often we find that the player character is dead or insane or even just in denial about a tragedy in their life. And like, I get it, I liked the first three Silent Hill games too, but there are other ways to do this. Consider the liminal horror of My House, or the dreamy nightmare of Rule of Rose. Or we could look to film, with Jacob's Ladder using 1970s New York City as a metaphor for Hell itself; or we could just return once again to The Trial, where its sprawling urban labyrinth embodies structural violence.

Nevertheless, Detention, while not the scariest game I ever played, is a visually arresting game with profound themes of alienation and paranoia. I can't help but feel, though, that it might be better as a movie, or perhaps a visual novel or even just a novel. Someone else clearly felt the same, as Detention has spawned a novel, a film adaptation, and even a direct TV sequel. Maybe someday I'll take a dig through all that stuff, but today is not that day.

I liked Detention, for what it was; you might like it too. It's an interesting window to a period often overlooked in the West, probably because we were also busy oppressing our own citizens in the 1960s.

Lest we forget: knowledge is power. 

-june❤