This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2025-08-07 10:39:13+00:00.
Warning: I have 0 knowledge of languages, so I’ve used google translate to translate any Mandarin sources in this post.
China and Taiwan
To properly explain things, I’m going to need to cover some complicated geopolitical history first. Taiwan is an island in the South Pacific, situated between Japan and the Philippines. In 1683, it was conquered by China. They ruled it until 1893, when it was taken over by Japan. After World War 2, it was retaken by China.
Sidenote: In 1912, the Chinese emperor was overthrown and the Republic of China (ROC) was established. In 1927, the Kuomintang (KMT-the nationalist party of China), consolidated power and ruled the country as a one-party state for the next twenty-two years. In 1947, in what became known as the “February 28 Incident”, the KMT violently suppressed a revolt in Taiwan, massacring thousands of civilians.
In 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overthrew the KMT and took control of mainland China, establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chiang Kai-shek, then leader of the KMT, fled to Taiwan and re-established his government there, continuing to govern it under the name of the ROC.
From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled Taiwan as a brutal dictatorship, enacting martial law. This period is known as the “White Terror”. More than 140,000 people were imprisoned or executed.
Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, but the KMT remained in power. In 1987, they lifted martial law and Taiwan slowly became a democracy. In 2000, the Democratic Progressive Party won the Taiwanese presidential election, ending over fifty years of KMT rule.
Both the CCP and Xi Jinping, the leader of the party and China’s current president, have frequently stated that they want “reunification” of China and Taiwan. Taiwan opposes unification with mainland China and seeks to remain free from Beijing’s control.
It’s likely that China will find an excuse to invade Taiwan in the coming years, and the world will enter a new precarious age of geopolitics, if not outright war.
…
Okay, now it’s time to talk about video games!
Red Candle Games and Detention
Red Candle Games is an independent Taiwanese video games studio. It was formed by six people in 2015:
Founded in September 2015 by six individuals from various backgrounds. At first, the team was united because of one game, Detention, and the goal was to create a game that enable us to illustrate Taiwanese culture and history. As the project progressed, and as more team members started to devote full time to the development, we realized our passion for game making has lead us to the establishment of a game company.
It was a massive risk for them:
Then again, the studio itself was founded amid change – for the Taiwanese game industry, and for Red Candle’s six co-founders, all of whom had to make life-upending decisions. Many of them left jobs at a bigger studio to form their own, while Vincent Yang quit a stable job in banking. “We were not some fresh graduates that hadn’t stepped into the real world,” Yang says. “We’d been working for three or four years already – I joined the team when I was 30. Some of us were married, some of us had kids, so it really was a huge gamble, basically, for everyone. But then, not to say that we were sitting on a goldmine, but it felt like: if we don’t do it now, are we going to regret it a few years down the road?”
Their first game, Detention, is a horror game set in 1960s Taiwan, at the height of the White Terror.
Greenwood high school, located in a remote mountainous area, two students found themselves trapped and vulnerable. The place they once knew has changed in unsettling ways, haunted by evil creatures. To escape, they must explore the mysterious campus filled with ominous objects and puzzles. How will they survive in this ever threatening environment? Could they return to safety in one piece?
Set in a fictitious world in the 1960s Taiwan under martial law, Detention, the story-driven atmospheric horror incorporated East Asian elements rarely used in games. Taoism, Buddhism, Chinese mythology, the game draws on local Taiwanese cultural references to tell an unique and terrifying story.
It was a major success for Red Candle Games, achieving critical acclaim and an overwhelmingly positive user rating on steam. In 2019, it received a movie adaptation, and in 2020, a tv series.
Devotion
In 2019, Red Candle Games released their next game, Devotion, an atmospheric horror game set in 1980s Taiwan. It’s about a broken family and explores heavy topics (TW) such as child abuse, domestic abuse, and religious fanaticism.
From the creators of the IndieCade Journey Award winner Detention, Red Candle Games brings you a story Inspired by East Asian folk culture. Devotion is a first-person atmospheric horror game depicting the life of a family shadowed by religious belief. Explore as a 1980s Taiwan apartment-complex lost in time gradually shift into a hellish nightmare. Delve into the vows each member of the family has made and witness their devotion.
You step into your apartment, 80s music drifts through the air, an idol show plays on the television; a nostalgic setting surely, but what is this feeling of unease? You question this place you used to call “home,” noticing as it distorts with every shift of your eyes, anxious as your surroundings skirt the precipice of the extraordinary. As you push through each memory, uncovering the layers of each mystery, you may find buried in this home, the unsettling truth of those who lived here. “Remember what you prayed for…”
To market the game, Red Candle Games created an elaborate ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It featured IRL puzzles- participants travelled all over Taipei, uncovering clues and solving mysteries.
Devotion came out on February 19, 2019. Just like Detention, it received critical acclaim and initially “Overhelmingly Positive” user reviews on Steam. However, within a couple of days, reviews had dropped to “Mostly Negative”.
Why?
Devotion was being review bombed.
Xi Jingping Winnie the Pooh
On February 21st, 2019, someone found an easter egg in the game: a Fulu (‘a Talisman with Taoist magic symbols or incantations painted or written onto it by Taoist practitioners’) with the following messages written on it:
The stamp in the centre means “Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh”, while the writing on the corners mean “your mother is a moron”.
Since 2013, Xi Jinping has been mockingly compared to the honey-loving ursine from the AA Milne books. The CCP have long tried to censor images such as this and this.
Rumours spread that there were more insults to Xi Jinping in the game. On a newspaper, one of the headline stated that a man named ‘Baozi’ (meaning steamed bun in Mandarin) had been sentenced to death. Allegedly, ‘Baozi’ was a common insult for Xi Jinping at the time. However, this turned out to be an error: “Baozi” was actually the nickname of Henry Wang, one of the co-founders of Red Candle Games. Another insult was that, allegedly, a cult leader featured in the ARG was named “Lu Gongmin” (meaning “mainland citizen” in Mandarin). The outrage got so bad, that even Detention was being review bombed.
On February 22nd, Red C…
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