Extracurricular Lessons (Gameplay)
Detention is a point and click adventure where the character moves along a twodimensional plane. In that regard, it's very by-the-books; you interact with objects by clicking them, you can drag items from your inventory onto interactable objects in the environment to use them and so on. You similarly enter doors simply by interacting with them.
The gameplay differs where the horror comes in. In Detention, you'll mostly encounter two types of ghosts - the Lingered and the Lantern Ghost, both of which must be avoided in a specific way. The Lingered are common humanoid ghosts that stalk the otherwise quiet halls of the school and will attack anything alive they come across. To avoid them, you need to hold your breath when they approach and they will simply pass you by. Holding your breath slows you down, however, and is only temporary - so you need to watch the Lingered carefully and pick the right moment to start holding your breath. Lantern Ghosts are much less common but also harder to deal with; when they approach you, the only way to avoid detection is to turn away, hold your breath and don't move. The Lantern Ghost will smell Ray, detect no signs of life and move on... unless you fail to take the proper steps, in which case she'll get grabbed and killed. Food offerings can be put down on the ground to lure away the Lingered, but this is required only once - when the mechanic is first introduced. I never needed it again after that, though I suppose it's nice to have for people who find the patrolling Lingered too unpredictable.
The enemies initially make the game rather tense, but they lose their impact pretty quickly. Having to hold your breath may seem scary, but the time period is generous and even if a Lingered detects you, you don't die immediately. All in all, they're easy to avoid and the penalty for detection is mild for Lingered. The Lantern Ghost is more threatening because it can kill you instantly, but it's very slow and uncommon. I died only once in the game, and this was due to an instant death trap that I thought was a bit cheap. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but I needed to hold my breath in a situation where it was never implied I should - the danger was not properly introduced like with the two aforementioned ghost types.
As quickly as the fear from the enemies may fade, the game's saving grace is that it is pretty short to begin with, so the enemies disappear once you start to get used to them. In fact, about halfway through, the game's focus shifts almost entirely to puzzles. The atmosphere and visuals are still disturbing at this point (more on that in the next segment), but the gameplay doesn't resemble a horror game anymore. There are no more hostile ghosts at this point. There are story reasons for this, but it makes the pacing feel strange; the 'hold your breath' mechanic loses all relevance at this point. If they wanted to shift the focus to puzzles, it might've been a cool idea to use holding your breath in a puzzle; like maybe a secret message will only appear if you're not making any sound. At least that way, the mechanic would've stayed relevant instead of being tossed out just like that after being your main method of self defense. Even so, the puzzles represent one of the game's greatest strengths. Many of them are interesting and inventive, though none of them are very hard.
One last nitpick: Certain rooms have important scenes or a particularly frightful atmosphere, and the main character cannot run in these rooms; she'll just slowly shuffle forward. This is fine for the most part, but sometimes you can enter these rooms before you have what you need to activate the scene, causing you to shuffle all the way into the room at a snail's pace only to realize you don't need to be there yet. You then have to slowly shuffle out of the room again. It's a slight waste of time, but nothing serious.
All in all, Detention plays like a point and click adventure. It has a few interesting mechanics to represent the horror part of its genre that certainly build tension when first introduced, but it gives up on them shortly before they get stale. During and after this, it focuses mainly on puzzles which are easy but entertaining and inventive. There are a few problems with the gameplay, but it works well enough.
Oppressive Atmosphere (Presentation)
The game makes a strong visual impression. People often describe life under totalitarian reign as "grey" or "colorless," something reflected in the game's muted color scheme. Its graphics are built up from both drawings and what seem to be cut out photographs, leaning strongly into the historic realities the game portrays alongside the supernatural horrors.
The animations of the characters are slightly robotic, although this is actually to the game's benefit when it comes to the monsters. It's hard not to feel a chill when you see a humanoid figure run in from the dark, back bent at an awkward angle and arms outstretched toward you. In terms of appearance, the monsters aren't terribly inspired - they are all essentially undead humans of varying sizes - but the sound design really picks up the slack there. When you're in a hallway with one of the Lingered, you can't miss the distant sound of their alternating coughing, wheezing and laughing. This is what makes it really tense when you're holding your breath and sneaking past them - you never know if a sudden cough or chuckle is just incidental, or because you were noticed.
There isn't a lot of music, and when it's there, it's mostly diegetic (for example, there is actually a radio playing the music that the player character can interact with, rather than the music only existing for the player). It's all authentic Taiwanese music, and I've been told many of the tracks used were actually banned in 1960 - a nice touch. The sound design compliments the visuals well, each major area has its own atmospheric sound with the occasional noise that'll make you question if it was just in the background or actually an enemy waiting just around the corner.
The game's visuals are mostly gray, but it makes good use of splashes of color here and there. Most of the game is pretty grounded, but you'll run into some rather surreal setpieces as well, which all look very impressive once you wrap your head around them. I think the environments are the strongest part of this game's presentation, strikingly depicting both the totalitarian state of Taiwan as well as the frightening supernatural setting.
All in all, Detention's presentation does a great job of building a powerful atmosphere. Sparing use of color, frightening sound design and surreal rooms and locations compensate for slightly weak enemy designs and animations.
Freedom of Expression (Story)
In Detention, you play as two Taiwanese students in 1960. They are called Wei and Fang. One evening they wake up in their school and find it abandoned. It seems everyone left because of a typhoon warning, but the bridge to town is out so they're stuck. You are mostly in control of Fang, a senior student to Wei, and it's up to you to find a way out of the school while avoiding the supernatural horrors and finding out what the cause behind it all is.
While Detention is a horror game, its story is more tragic than scary. It revolves around the lives of students trying to get by in a society where even a vague or merely speculative association with China or communism could get you imprisoned, tortured or killed. The story focuses on how this affects the lives of Wei and Fang and the choices they make under this brutal regime as young people trying to find their way in life. I'm keeping it very vague here because I want to allow you the opportunity to experience this story for itself.
Not unlike Silent Hill, the game employs a lot of symbolism and wants you to think about the meaning behind certain scenes without giving you an explicit explanation for them. And like Silent Hill, the game has multiple endings. They key difference here is that the ending you get depends entirely on how well you understand the story. Without clarifying the context, near the end of the story you are asked a few questions. Answering these questions correctly means you properly understand the story (or got lucky) and this will lead you to the good ending. Answering them incorrectly will lead you to the bad ending. The puzzles are tie in with the story directly, however, so if you can get to the end, you can probably figure it all out.
I don't want to harp on this too much as the game was obviously not made by native speakers, but the English translation has several grammar and spelling errors. It's not a game breaker, but the game is short and doesn't have that much text, so I feel at least a little more time could've been spent on polishing that part up.
All in all, Detention has a strong story that is more tragic than scary, and revolves more around students trying to get by under a totalitarian regime than about kids running away from actual monsters. It misses the mark a little as a horror story, but it's a great story nonetheless. It's sad and beautiful in its own way.
Conclusion
Detention is a solid game and starts out as very unnerving and tense, even if it gives up on being a horror game after a while. Its inventive and surrealistic puzzles and engaging story will compel you to keep going long after the monsters have exited the stage. Its atmospheric presentation, solid story and unique setting make it more than worth a look. However, there are minor problems with its animations, errors in its text and it's quite short - around 3 and a half hours - so take note of that. If you love horror or point & click adventures, you can't go wrong with Detention. It's on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/555220/Detention/
Other Thoughts
That's all I had to say about Detention, but there are interesting stories to tell about the developer, RedCandleGames.
This was news some time ago, but they actually developed and released a second game called Devotion. Unfortunately, due to a controversy involving something in the game that was interpreted as an insult towards the Chinese president, the company's right to sell the game was revoked and it was removed from sale on Steam - but not before it was also review bombed, apparently by sympathizers of the Chinese government. It's painful and tragic that a company responsible for such a beautiful story about freedom of thought and expression had their work censored from the Internet because of something so petty. I really hope Devotion will be sold again one day so I can share my thoughts on it as well, because seeing art get censored like this - now that is some real life horror.
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That's all for today. Thank you for reading! I can't say for sure how many Scary Thoughts articles will be released this month, but at least I got this one done.
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