Let us meet again, in another podcast.
Welcome to October! It’s time to play some horror games, and boy are we starting off with a bleak one. Detention is set in Taiwan during a period of marshal law, and despite its supernatural elements, really wants its lasting horror to be about the oppressiveness of life during this time. The game itself is a point-and-click adventure game, with puzzles to solve and diary entries to collect and uncover more of the story, and taken together, all its elements are in an eerily even balance. And that’s a good thing. The puzzles are not too hard, but not brainless. Narratively, there is equal weight placed on character-driven plot as well as the surrounding gloom of the world they inhabit. The game is spooky for its imagery and terrifying for the consequences its characters face. It all blends together into a really worthwhile experience in a genre of game that has seen its fair share of auteur works recently. We talk about the mechanical implications of narrative themes, good adventure game puzzle design, and ghosts that move just waaaaay to slowly.
Thanks for joining us again this episode! This is a game we played sort of on a whim based on the coverage it got and subsequently felt we had to put out an episode on it. We’re still in the early stages of the spookiest month of the year, and have a few more episodes queued up to talk about, but what have you guys been playing? Anything really scarin’ your socks off? Am I too late in the description now to be asking questions? No one’s reading? …yep.