Devotion developer Red Candle Games has teased its next title - and it doesn't look anything like its previous games.

In a tweet, the Taiwanese developer released a short clip of what looks like a 2D action game. It's a work in progress, of course.

Red Candle is best known for the superb horror game Devotion, which recently returned to sale digitally two years after it was delisted on Steam.

Read more

Superb horror game Devotion is back on sale digitally two years after it was delisted.

Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games tweeted to say Devotion and its predecessor Detention were now available DRM-free from its own online store. All the studio's future projects will be sold there, too, the studio added.

"We hope to provide a direct and simple purchasing channel for players who're interested in our games," Red Candle said.

Read more

17TH DEC 2020: Red Candle Games has issued a statement in response to CD Projekt's decision not to release Devotion on GOG.com.

In a tweet, the developer said "we are willing to understand and respect GOG's decision", adding: "This is a difficult predicament to overcome, but we won't stop striving."

ORIGINAL STORY 16TH DEC 2020: CD Projekt has come under fire for reversing the decision to release horror game Devotion on GOG.com.

Read more

Acclaimed Taiwanese horror game Devotion, which was pulled from Steam shortly after its release last February following the discovery of a controversial art asset, has finally resurfaced and will be getting a physical release - albeit only in Taiwan for the time being.

Devotion is the work of developer Red Candle Games, previously responsible for acclaimed point-and-click horror Detention, and follows the plight of a troubled young family over seven years in a single, cramped apartment in 1980s Taiwan - a journey that builds outward from a core of PT-style first-person horror, melding shifting architecture and striking visual metaphor to create an experience that's ultimately as tender as it terrifying.

Unfortunately, shortly after release, an unflattering reference to China's president Xi Jinping was discovered in-game. The outcry among Chinese players was immediate, and the fallout saw Red Candle's account shut down on China's enormously popular social media platform Weibo, the cancelation of its publisher's business license by the Chinese government, and, finally, the game's removal from Steam, despite its strong critical reception.

Read more

Red Candle's Devotion is one of the finest horror games of the past decade, and if you haven't played it already, it's possible you never will. Following its release this spring, the game was found to contain an unflattering reference to China's president, Xi Jinping. The discovery sparked an outcry among Chinese players, leading to the withdrawal of Chinese distributors, the closure of Red Candle's account on Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms, and the removal of the game from Steam in China. Red Candle, which is based in Taiwan, has apologised at length for what it says was a placeholder asset, accidentally transferred to the final release. These comments were not enough to stem the backlash, however, and a week after sale, the developer pulled the game from Steam in all territories to perform unspecified fixes. Seven months on, it's unclear whether Devotion will ever see daylight again.

There is obviously a longer story to tell about how Devotion's fate reflects the Chinese state's sensitivity to criticism, the culture of Chinese patriotism online, and the country's strained relationship with Taiwan, but when I approached Red Candle for an interview in February, it was simply to hear about the creation of a complex and powerful artwork. Set across three periods in the cramped domestic life of a mother, father and daughter in 1980s Taiwan, Devotion ties prejudices about mental illness to the pressure of gender expectations and the lure of the irrational in troubled times. Like its equally accomplished predecessor, Detention, it is both a wonderfully scary game and an intricate account of the socio-historical forces at work within a small group at people. There was much to discuss, and naturally, the conversation below contains extensive spoilers.

I've read that you didn't intend Devotion to be a 3D first-person game at first. What was the original plan, and why did you decide to make the change to 3D?

Read more

We pass through passages and hallways everyday without pause. They're boring, empty, uneventful dead-spaces unworthy of consideration - not so much architecture to stop and appreciate, as infrastructure to quickly pass through. All they do is channel things around buildings, moving us from one room to the next. But while we so often take these in-between areas for granted, rushing down them in order to reach places of real importance, they can also be incredibly evocative.

Corridors are anxious, uneasy places, and horror has a history of using them to put us on edge. They're rarely the site of explicit terror or violence, but they lead us there. Zones of anticipatory fear, the corridor is conducive to horror through its ability to heighten suspense and gesture to the unknown. What lies around the corner, or beyond that door? Every hallway is a world of undetermined possibility.

Roger Luckhurst, a professor at the University of London and expert in all things horror, recently penned a book about corridors. He's quick to mention the Resident Evil series and the various facilities of the Umbrella Corporation, where horror is sometimes confined and squeezed into a particularly pure form. On many occasions the video game corridor is a gauntlet (in the Resident Evil spinoffs for example). In these corridor shooters, the constrictive form of the horror hallway becomes a condenser for an adrenaline-fuelled onslaught where you're forced to hack or blast your way through a narrow, zombie-infested space.

Read more

Video game worlds are facades, and sometimes we catch a glimpse of what's beyond. Recently, while exploring one of the intricate levels of Dusk, I somehow managed to slip through the cracks and found myself on the other side of the invisible partition that upholds the illusion of coherent space. I'd entered a world of broken, gravity-defying architecture, and there in the middle of the level had opened a pit that revealed a vast grey void beneath my feet. Close by, there was an exasperated message on the ground: "YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE HERE, GO AWAY."

Anyone who's spent a lot of time playing games will have their own stories of discovering the cordoned-off spaces behind spaces. We know the strange feeling of clipping through the ground only to plunge into a bottomless void while the level we've been exploring recedes into the distant ether above us; a tiny island unto itself, a dwindling speck suspended in the great digital void.

These are accidents and glitches, but then again, if we're not supposed to gaze into the abyss, then why is the void such a popular trope in games? It seems any self-respecting fantasy game offers its players a tour of the void: There's the Void of the Dishonored games (read more about it here), the Fade of the Dragon Age series, the Realm Between Realms of God of War (2018). Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire also dip their toes into the great nothingness. These are metaphysical spaces inhabited by or associated with gods and spirits, the afterlife, and, most significant of all, origins and acts of creation. They are displaced and timeless, existing in between or beyond conventional space-time, and are only accessible through special pathways that pierce the veil: dreams, visions, rituals, death or magic.

Read more

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.

Read more

UPDATE 10.44pm: As the controversy surrounding atmospheric horror title Devotion rumbles on, developer Red Candle has made the decision to remove the initially well-received game from Steam across all territories.

However, it appears the move is only temporary, with Red Candle's latest statement explaining that Devotion has been pulled, at least in part, to address "technical issues that cause unexpected crashes" and to have another "complete QA check".

"At the same time," the studio continues, "we'd like to take this opportunity to ease the heightened pressure in our community resulted from our previous Art Material Incident". It will also review all assets again, "making sure no other unintended materials was inserted in."

Read more

Steam's latest hit is being review-bombed for referencing a meme directed at China president Xi Jinping.

Devotion, a horror game developed by Taiwanese company Red Candle Games, had been going down a storm on Steam since its release this week, and saw a positive user reception based on thousands of glowing reviews.

But after the game was found to include a reference to the Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh meme, Chinese gamers launched a dramatic review-bomb campaign that left Devotion's user reviews rating as mostly negative.

Read more