Detention game review

It’s raining and it’s cold. The two are completely alone. We are in 1960 and the Republic of China, not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China, is under an authoritarian regime that, fearing the advent of communism, has established martial law.

With which it aims to repress any form of dissent. In the country there is the censorship of books contrary to the regime, or more simply of all those that can contribute to creating alternative forms of thought, while political opponents are brutally imprisoned and eliminated.

Kay and Wei do not know what to do, apart from waiting for the rain to stop. Buried in a classroom, Wei decides to go looking for food and blankets for the night, and to go to the director’s office to call for help. The two are divided and then hell breaks out.

Kay is alone and in a different place from the place where she remembered to be. The atmosphere has changed, there are candles everywhere and in front of his eyes there are disturbing scenes. What happened? Where is Wei?

Why does the whole hell seem to have poured into the school? From here on the story of Detention turns into a horror story, where historical reality, popular legends and nightmares intertwine and nothing is what it seems.

Detention is an amazing horror game and one of the first masterpieces of 2017

 Detention gameplay

A cliché wants it to be what you do not expect anything to surprise the most. Detention is one of many titles quietly published on Steam, which has risked going unnoticed.

Fortunately it did not happen and the work of the unknown Red Candle has managed to rise to the fore, driven especially by word of mouth. 

To describe Detention as a point-and-click adventure in 2D horror is likely to diminish it. Not that it is not, but after finishing it is hard to think of it as a Monkey Island, while the word Silent comes to mind, followed by that Hill.

Of course, there are puzzles, the pointer also, but it is the gameplay as a whole to suggest that we are dealing with something else.  detention game wants to tell its story at all costs. The more you go on in the adventure, the more you understand that this is its urgency.

The puzzles are not there to block the player, but to accompany him in the discovery of the great tragedy concealed by the events that happen on the screen. Some seem even absurd, if you do not read them in their purely narrative function.

Only then does one come to understand why a gun is described as a list or why a radio can give access to memories distant in time, but connected in the mind of the protagonist. The whole experience is built as if it were a long nightmare, in which the pieces of Kay’s life are associated according to the typical ways of the dream.

Soon we understand that the supernatural presences that have occupied the school are not the real horror to face,but that there is a more horrible and profound truth that we are trying to bring back to life. Inner truth, but also historical, that when it finally emerges, with all the despair it carries, it can not leave indifferent.

What initially might have looked like a simple school-themed teenage horror suddenly becomes something else, displacing and involving the player in an unexpected plot, in which the supernatural transfigures into the human.