As the 70th anniversary of a bloody political purge in Taiwan looms, a new horror video game set during the island’s “White Terror” is winning rave reviews.
“Detention” was created by Taiwanese developers and takes place during the crackdown on opponents by the ruling nationalist Kuomintang, when the now democratic island was still under martial law.
The nightmarish 2-D game starts with the disappearance of a teacher, with players acting as two high school students trying to solve the mystery.
One scene shows a classmate hanging dead in the school auditorium. Another sees one of the students consoling her sobbing mother before entering a room with portraits of faces bleeding from their eyes.
Gamers have praised it as an “emotional and educational” experience—it made the top 10 of popular gaming distribution platform Steam after its release last month, and is still on the bestseller list.
Developer Yao Shuen-ting said his team tried to capture the pervasive fear of a time when family members and colleagues were going missing.
“We want to let players experience the atmosphere through the characters’ perspective… to come to the conclusion themselves that this was a time when you could die from reading a book,” said Yao.
