Artistic Devotion – A Journey Through Horror And Success With Red Candle Games

12.01.2024 - 09:17 / gameinformer.com / Marcus Stewart

Scaring players has helped put the small team at Red Candle Games on the map. Its first two titles, Detention and Devotion, impressed and terrified fans with frighteningly strong horror chops, but the team is leaving that behind to tackle something completely different in Nine Sols. This side-scrolling action platformer blends sci-fi with Chinese mythology and is Red Candle’s most ambitious project yet. This significant step forward affords an opportunity to look back on the studio’s young history, so we spoke with co-founder Vincent Yang to learn about how a small band of gamers in Taiwan formed one of the industry’s most promising – and, at one time, controversial – indie studios.

Red Candle Games began in 2014 when designer Coffee Yao was developing a prototype for Detention. The side-scrolling horror game features two students exploring a haunted high school in 1960s Taiwan, incorporating local cultural references rarely seen in games. These elements drew the attention of Henry and Light Wang during an indie developer meetup in Taipei. According to Yang, Detention impressed the Wangs enough for them to join the project. As the game grew in scope, the three recruited help from mutual friends – Doy Chiang, Hans Chen, and Yang himself – bumping the yet-to-be-named team to six members by late 2015. After working remotely on Detention for a period, the group decided a physical office was necessary, which led to the official formation of Red Candle Games.

Detention was released on Steam in January 2017 and was well-received by critics and players. The game has since been ported to multiple platforms and even adapted into a live-action film in 2019 (it premiered in the U.S. in 2021). Additionally, Netflix and Taiwan’s Public Television Service released a Detention TV show in 2020 – though with a different story from the movie.

Red Candle followed this success with Devotion, an atmospheric first-person horror game set within a haunted apartment. Moving from 2D to 3D development is a big design shift, but Yang believes regularly changing gears like this is necessary to maintain fan interest.

“Because in this ever-changing and competitive gaming market, we often find it difficult to impress the players by applying the same techniques repeatedly, which pushes us to keep delivering new and innovative ideas,” Yang says. “This, in turn, changes the way we make games.”

After over two years of work, Devotion arrived on Steam in February 2019 to heaps of praise from the lucky players who managed to get their hands on it. But only two days after its launch, the game riled up controversy among Chinese players thanks to a piece of in-game art mocking China’s president, Xi Jinping, by calling him Winnie the Pooh,