I want to talk about two recent horror stories from Taiwan. Incantation, a film by Kevin Ko, was released this year. Devotion, a horror videogame from Red Candle Games, came out in 2019. Both are, to varying degrees, documentary-style exercises. In each story, the audience is invited to dig through the evidence of a family’s dissolution. We are asked to bear witnesses and are then made into participants through the act of observing.
Devotion follows the point of view of failed screenwriter Du Feng-yu as he meanders through half-remembered, half-fantasized memories of his now-estranged family. Its events begin in 1980s Taiwan, in an apartment bare but for shelves lined with Feng-Yu’s writing awards and walls plastered with his wife, Gong Li-fang’s glamorous acting headshots. Soon follows baby and a trying journey during which their little girl, Du Mei-shin becomes chronically ill while failing to live up to her parents’ lofty expectations. Throughout Mei-shin’s sickness, the father acts with short-sighted selfishness and boorish patriarchal rigidity. He refuses to let his wife return to acting and he forces his religious zealotry on his child, made not so much physically as mentally sick as a result of her parents’ self-destructing marriage.
The memories end seven years later: Li-fang has moved out, leaving her daughter alone with an increasingly deranged Feng-yu who ultimately drowns her accidentally in a misguided attempt to heal her mysterious ailments. Feng-yu is thus left alone, in a darkened room, with nothing left but a TV screen through which to watch his own life, and remember his own mistakes, again and again.
Incantation focuses on a young mother, Li Ronan, as she struggles to lift a curse which has been placed on herself and her young daughter. The trouble starts when Ronan visits her boyfriend’s ancestral village deep in the mountains. The village residents worship an old, near-forgotten deity called Mother Buddha whose presence resides in a hillside cave, which Ronan’s companions foolishly blunder inside. They are all cursed, and Ronan, the only survivor, spends the rest of the film desperately trying to rescue her daughter, who has inherited this curse. The film presents its events as having been captured on “found footage,” and during its climax, Ronan goes so far as to break the fourth wall, press-ganging the audience into helping her mitigate the curse by joining ourselves to her cause, and her doom.
Found footage, a well-established cinematic trope, holds interesting resonance with how we experience games, particularly those played from a first-person perspective, like Devotion. Found footage functions by drawing the audience’s attention to the medium itself. We are not only experiencing the image but how (and often why) the image was captured. The artifice enters the frame, the viewer is brought into the world of the film’s story, and is often implicated by the events which ultimately brought that story into our hands. Sometimes, the abyss stares back; in the form of a grieving mother desperate to offload the cause of that grief.
When it comes to games, it’s not really possible to fully ignore or elide the artifice behind the experience. If you do not apply any input, for example, your character does not move. You are the cameraman, the cinematographer, the intrepid documentarian, generating the footage that weaves the narrative into a coherent whole. Detached, as we are, from the characters which populate these stories, it nevertheless, cannot come alive without our participation in it.
In Devotion, we may not be living Feng-yu’s life or belong within his memories. But we must still involve ourselves by piloting his fragile avatar through the remains of his existence—must still steer him clear of the vengeful spirits who justifiably pursue him, seeking penance for the crimes and transgressions he doggedly executed in his role as patriarch.
Devotion is little more than these memories, strung out and opened up as vignettes, stages through which to walk and observe. Scenes of fights, of boiled over tensions, the father figure bristling as he withdraws, haunted by his own failures. Then we see evidence of his turn toward overbearance and suffocation, folding his helpless daughter within the vice-like grip of a demanding family deity and accompanying religious dogma. Nearly every decision Feng-yu makes only serves to further disrupt and spoil the happiness of his wife and child. He pulls them both under, into his own nightmare, until they twist into things which haunt him, and us.
Though we play as Feng-yu and wander through his tortured reminiscences, we do not experience what he sees in the same way that he does. We react and respond to his actions as outsiders, dispassionate observers. He is the game’s protagonist but his point of view exists only inside the halls and rooms of a small apartment in Taiwan in the eighties. We occupy only his physical form; we incorporate him into ourselves so that we may bear witness to his downfall.
There’s no clearer example of this divided identification than in a scene late in the game, when Feng-yu enters into a psychotic trance in which he beseeches his god for guidance on how to save his sickly child. At some point during the trance, Feng-yu enters a long hallway, with a door at the far end and a mirror to his right. As you pilot Feng-yu down the hallway his reflection in the mirror speaks to him. This version, wearing a glowing, grinning mask sternly admonishes your Feng-yu for his failures as a parent and a guardian. Here, the disembodied nature of controlling a character we are emotionally at odds with becomes every more starkly literal, as he splits apart and condemns himself from a remove.
We get a similar dissociative splitting of point of view in Incantation’s final moments. Ronan has brought the camera, us, with her into the cave to confront Mother Buddha’s statue. Up to this point, Ronan has largely been the one holding the camera, pointing it outward, directing our gaze. But after she exposes the camera to the horrifying visage of the deity, she collapses and drops it to the floor, driving a split between her perspective and ours. From the camera’s position on the floor we get one final glimpse as she, alone, destroys herself.
Right before these moments, Ronan takes action to draw the viewer into her own story. She asks us to study a religious scroll, to memorize an image and a chant. After we do so she admits that the act has spread the curse which had previously only been affecting her onto us, onto anyone who has watched and participated. This is the moment in which the audience is made active, when we are brought on and made to be players in her production. We, after all, are the suckers who signed up to experience Ronan’s personal nightmare, voyeurs of her dissolution. It’s only natural that we absorb her curse for our impertinence.
Devotion betrays a similarly antagonistic relationship with its audience. The central activity of the game is to explore the world and its bric-a-brac; its photos, letters, tattered dresses, and old playthings, in order to uncover the Du family’s tragic story. But, as we do this, we are haunted relentlessly by visions, and pursued by frightening phantoms. Our traversal of the world is not silent, nor unobserved. Our main goals as the player may be to sift through the pieces, to make out what happened, but we are harassed and interrupted by interlocutors, defenders of the memory who react and lash out as we trespass in this painful and haunted space.
A trauma is not, after all, just a story to be absorbed passively. A family which has been split apart leaves behind bloody fissures. Even those who make it out leave parts of themselves behind. Li-fang may freely exist somewhere in the world, having escaped from Feng-yu’s petulant anger, but her shade remains; a spirit which lives inside Feng-yu’s subconscious and his dreams. It harasses him, haunts his steps and therefore the player’s, too.
There is something like a contract between a horror story and its audience. We sign up to be frightened, to feel the skin on our neck prickle at the soft, tortured groan of someting just behind us. To leap in shock as a window we had thought empty is filled with a ghastly face on second glance. To feel trapped as rooms change and shift, closing in on us in an endless twisting maze. Human life is full of pain and violence. We don’t want to suffer from it, but we remain curious. So we duck into the peep show and drop a quarter into the slot. We make a quick bargain for a taste, the sharp lash of the whip, the prick of the needle, the glowing ash of a cigarette squeezed between thumb and forefinger.
These stories question and complicate that morbid impulse, that churlish curiosity. Incantation chooses to curse us. Devotion forces us to inhabit a dark and disturbed form, and suffer for it. We must, to witness the story, become that story’s villain. We want to see his (our) victims, see what violence he (we) may have wrought, even as he struggles and attempts to turn away from it all in unseeing disbelief. We want to see how far Feng-yu might go in order to control his child, how far Ronan might go to rescue hers; all the while remaining stubbornly hopeful that we would never go so far, that we are only here to observe from the other side, holding the camera, hiding behind the lens.
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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Twitter @youmeyou.