Quiet Forward Steps for Red Candle Games

Over the past handful of days, Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games has wed together two quietly announced but significant avenues for growth, following a period of seeming silence between February of this year and the present. Readers will likely recognize the developer’s name from the removal on Steam of its second release, in February of 2019.

Devotion was removed in the aftermath of targeted review bombing following accusations that the game contained material insulting to Chinese President Xi Jinping. The developers maintained at the time that this material’s inclusion was an accident that was quickly patched out and that the game’s subsequent removal from Steam was to fix lingering technical issues as well as to ensure no further such mistakes were present in the game.

Nonetheless, Devotion co-publishers Indievent and Winking Skywalker terminated their working relationship with Red Candle Games over the incident, and Indievent in particular has since seen its business license revoked by the Chinese government due to violation of “relevant” laws. Meanwhile, Red Candle Games expressed in July 2019 that they had no present or near-term plans to re-release the game internationally but added that they would consider doing so in the future if “the public would be willing to view this game rationally.”

In the meantime, Devotion was added to the collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library in February 2020, almost exactly a year after its initial release and swift removal from Steam’s storefront, alongside its first project, Detention. At the time, Kotaku writer Ian Walker explained that the Harvard-Yenching Library “also houses over 1.5 million volumes of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Manchu, and Mongolian texts.” As such, the collection makes up one of the largest libraries for East Asian research outside of Asia.

Following Devotion‘s storage at the Harvard-Yenching Library, Red Candle Games stated that this move was an “incredible honor,” and that the inclusion of their game in Harvard’s “prestige collection” inspired them to “rethink the possibilities that our [sic] games could achieve.”

Indeed, several months after this statement, it seems Red Candle Games has taken some steps to do just that. The announcements have been quiet and not very widely spread, perhaps speaking to a degree of caution on the developer’s end, but nevertheless seem indicative of a promising revitalization of the creative energies at play here.

The first of these is a collaboration between Netflix and Taiwan’s independent Public Television Service to air an eight-episode adaptation of Detention. It’s been made clear that while the show shares connective tissue with the game, it stands distinctly from the 2019 film adaptation of the same text. Rather, it refreshes the story through the eyes of a transfer student (Ling-Wei Lee as Yunxiang Liu) to Greenwood High School.

As she arrives at the school about thirty years after the events of the game, she encounters the ghost of Ruixin Fang (Ning Han) who reveals that the traumas of White Terror-era political suppression and censorship continue to linger over the school, carrying with it stories that still need to be told, retold, and understood.

The trailer, released to YouTube a little over a month ago, looks to offer a promisingly unnerving watch, and the first episode is available on Netflix now. The rest will follow on a week-to-week staggered basis to keep pace with the television broadcasts released in Taiwan.

In the same tweet as Red Candle Games announced the forthcoming airing of Detention: The Series‘ first episode, the developers further added that they are working to assemble a new game. While they shared no additional information than that for now, we can likely make some educated assumptions about genre and subject matter. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing Red Candle find its footing again with these two new projects.