Reviews
[Review] ‘Devotion’ is a Masterful Slice of Taiwanese Horror
Red Candle Games follows up its modern classic horror game Detention with another great entry into the genre. Find out why we have an early Horror Game of the Year contender in our Devotion review.
Scene 4: Child’s room, night, interior
[Close-up]: Candles illuminate the bed and the herbal tea remedy.
Child (weakly): Father, when will we go down into the big city?
Husband: We cannot do so under these troubling circumstances. Son, when your illness has passed, Mother and I will take you anywhere you’d like.
Child: Father, the needles are painful. This treatment is unbearable!
The husband pulls the acupunctural needles out of his child.
Husband: No more pain, no more pain! Father won’t have you suffer any longer!
The child, tired from crying, drifts into sleep.
Wife: How is this going to work? It’s been such a long time, my heart clenches.
Husband: Set your mind at ease, I’ve another way.
Red Candle Games made a name for itself with Detention, a side-scrolling horror game that managed to remain intriguing due to the facets of Taiwanese culture ingrained in the story wrapped within an unsettling art-style. With Red Candle Games’ newest title, they have taken what made their first game an excellent piece of psychological horror and transitioned their talents to a first-person perspective eloquently.
Devotion centers around a Taiwanese father, a screenwriter named Du Feng Yu. Together with his wife Li Fang, a prominent actor, they have a daughter named Mei Shin who is subjugated to an illness. Playing as Du Feng Yu, players traverse a small yet densely detailed house over numerous years that explores the family’s various struggles. There was a care in making sure that every part of the house felt lived in. As newspapers used as tablecloths are fully detailed, books are messily strewn about, and there are even notated calendars signifying important events. Ultimately, the set-dressing is thoughtfully put-together and compliments the game’s story thoroughly.
Yet, the genius of Devotion is found within this non-linear form of storytelling. As the house shows increasing development through the various time jumps that the player subjects themselves to within the game. For example, in one of the earlier years that you explore the house, Du Feng and Li Fang are moving into the house. Organizing their furniture, portraits, and trophies onto empty walls and bookshelves. The puzzle design is fascinating in this regard, as the gameplay is contextual with the story rather than an attempt to pad out the game’s length. At some points, you’re hanging photos of Li Fang’s various photoshoots on walls, or sometimes you’re assembling the x-ray of Mei Shin like a jigsaw.
In terms of the quality of horror, the game has the typical ghosts and various scary monsters you expect from a horror title. However, there are also life-size woodblock figures adorning the house in certain pass-throughs, recreating various events that the family has been through. The terror comes from how the inanimate objects follow the logic that should your back be turned on them they will be in different places than they were before (much like the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who), and sometimes they’re looking directly at you or adorning weapons. This is also utilized to portray various holidays and life events with the dolls recreating these moments with the turn of a head. This factor is one of many in the game that creates a uniquely unsettling experience attributing to the game’s overall effort to be horrifically moody.
Various other environments do get introduced such as a hospital but are all still under the guise of the house. Inside the house as well, is a constant utilization of Taiwanese entertainment programs. As you watch various broadcasts, such as singing competitions, the window is open to Taiwanese culture in the 80s and states intriguing things on this specific era’s commercialism and how it was used by various cults. The broadcasts are replications of the style that was found during the time, and the effects that are used to resemble a CRT television with FMV cutscenes makes for a riveting experience.
Another tool of storytelling that’s used is a radio that plays various broadcasts, as you hear on various talk shows characters calling in for advice. As well, tabloid articles are utilized as a device for exposition that lets the player uncover the mysteries of the family at their own meticulous pace, with just enough information being withheld in a 3-hour playthrough to keep someone engaged in completing the experience in one sitting.
The sound design in Devotion is also excellent, as ambient noises unique to each year and contribute to the overall atmosphere. It’s highly suggestible that this game is played with headphones, as the 3D audio work is meticulously designed. Another factor of the game’s production that is unique to each year is with the distinct lighting variations of the environment. Utilizing a variety of warm colors to set a specific tone for each of the various encounters.
Collectibles in the game are also purposeful. Across photographs, various childhood scribbles, and even television scripts that detail and flesh out the Shin family. The plays into the factor that the story is the strongest part of the game, and that the heart comes from the familial dynamic. Each of the three central characters gets the progression and details that they deserve, going through various arcs via the numerous details that you learn over the years. With Devotion, it’s evident that you can learn a lot about a person just from reading a to-do list for shopping, an essay a child writes for school, or the ramblings of a dissatisfied wife.
Devotion is a revelatory horror game, one that manages to remain unsettling and horrific through the mood and tone that’s imparted from the game’s design and storytelling. This is refreshing since rather than relying on unearned jump scares and unending chase-sequences, the thematic elements of the game bring the experience to life. Making this arguably the first great new horror title of 2019, and a must-play for any enthusiast of the genre.
Devotion review code for PC was purchased by the reviewer
Devotion is currently unavailable on PC. More details here.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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