➤ Atonement 🎮

Two Taiwanese boys, Kay and Wei, find themselves trapped in their high school during what seemed like a normal day of class. The bridge connecting the institute to the city collapsed due to the flood of the river.

It's raining heavily 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 which, fearing the advent of communism, instituted martial law, with which it aims to repress all forms of dissent. The country is censored of books that are opposed 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 don't know what to do, other than wait for the rain to stop. Holed up in a classroom, Wei decides to go get food and blankets for the night, and go to the director's office to call for help. The two split up and then all hell breaks out. Kay is alone and in a different place than where she remembered being. The atmosphere has changed, there are candles everywhere and disturbing scenes unfold before his eyes. What happened? Where did Wei go? Why does all 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

Unconscious

A cliché has it that it is what one expects nothing from that surprises the most. Detention is one of the many titles quietly published on Steam, which risked going unnoticed. Fortunately it did not happen and the work of the unknown Red Candle has managed to rise to the fore, mainly driven by word of mouth. Describing Detention as a 2D point and click horror adventure runs the risk of belittling it. Not that it isn't, but after finishing it it's hard to think of it as a Monkey Island, while the word Silent comes to mind several times, followed by that Hill.

Sure, the puzzles are there, the pointer too, but it's the gameplay as a whole that suggests we are faced with something else. Detention wants to tell its story at all costs. The more you go on in the adventure, the more you understand that this is his urgency. The puzzles are not there to stop the player, but to accompany him in the discovery of the immense tragedy hidden 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 protagonist's mind. The whole experience is constructed as if it were a long nightmare, in which the pieces of Kay's life are associated in the typical ways of the dream. It soon becomes clear that the supernatural presences that have occupied the school are not the real horror to face, but that there is a more horrifying and profound truth that we are trying to bring back to the surface. An inner truth, but also a historical one, which when it finally emerges, with all the desperation that it brings with it, cannot leave us indifferent. What initially may have seemed like a simple school-themed teenage horror suddenly becomes something else, displacing and involving the player in an unexpected plot, in which the supernatural is transfigured into the human.

Removal

Sure, there are ghosts, drawn from Taiwanese folklore, that you should avoid, but don't expect to find banal chair jumps scattered here and there in Detention to ensure free scream on YouTube. The atmosphere that permeates the entire game is more disturbing than frightening, and the tension you breathe explodes in rare moments of horror, which are built with great intelligence, never indulging in easy solutions. Let's take an example: one of the ghosts must be overcome by walking and holding your breath. Kay can stop breathing only for a few moments, so you have to choose the right time to start it, but only after you get close enough to the creature so that you can overtake it in the time available.

No sudden surprises, therefore, but only a very strong tension, which subsides when we are saved. A second type of ghost was used in a different but equally clever way. A document placed at the beginning of the chapter in which it appears suggests its presence and explains how to avoid it. His appearances are rare, however, so as not to get used to the player, who lives every match as an event. In this way, even the simple exploration becomes more tense, because you are always on the lookout for until the end of the chapter. On the sidelines of all you will have understood that Detention is not what we would call a rich production, but Red Candle has been able to make the most of the means at its disposal, without ever overdoing it. The same intelligence used to create the ghosts is also found in all the other aspects of the game, starting from the graphics, apparently simple, poor in certain details, but excellent in style and in its ability to visually accompany the story, as in the column. sound, made up of painful and never intrusive songs, of music that recall the regime and disturbing sounds that help to better describe the environments. The truth is that Detention could only have existed with this approach, the only one that could render the basic theme of the game, which is the staging of the sense of guilt in the great theater of the unconscious. There is no redemption in the rejection of reality, that is, in the removal of what has been and what has been done, as the two endings, one positive and one negative, make us clearly understand, both to be seen because they tell the two sides of the whole. each other, without ever being consoling. Is there more to ask?

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Intel Core i7-4770 processor
16 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 video card
Windows 10 operating system

Minimum requirements

Windows 7/8/10 operating system
Processore Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo 2.4, AMD Athlon(TM) X2 2.8 Ghz
4 GB of RAM
Geforce 9600 GS video card, Radeon HD4000
3 GB of hard disk space
DirectX 9.0c

Recommended Requirements

Processore Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad 2.7 Ghz, AMD Phenom(TM)II X4 3 Ghz
8 GB of RAM
Scheda video GeForce GTX 260, Radeon HD 5770

Comment

Digital Delivery Steam Price 11,99 € Resources4Gaming.com

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Readers (14)

7.8

Your vote

There would be much more to say about Detention, which can include among its many qualities the ability to raise important and adult themes, despite the horror setting, but to do so we should make the details of the plot more explicit, giving great anticipations. Better to avoid in this circumstance. The important thing is that you understand that Detention is one of the most beautiful stories told by video games in recent years, not only among independents. In fact, we struggle to find any triple A that can compete from a narrative point of view with the minute masterpiece of Red Candle. Some might complain about the duration, certainly not stellar (about four hours), but honestly we struggle to imagine a way in which the developers could have lengthened it without making it lose its compactness and without avoiding the watered-down broth effect.