Devotion (2019)
God, what a terrifying and devastating game. A domestic horror story about a family shattered by manipulation and tragedy, Red Candle’s Devotion pulls you in with the incredible precision and atmospheric richness of its details, and then scares the hell out of you. Devotion is about so many things—cultural pressures to maintain an appearance of marital bliss even as things turn rotten, the dangers of misguided faith and belief, the ways in which women are expected to sacrifice so much and men are expected to be infallible protectors—but most of all it’s about one specific family and its own very specific grief. That grief manifests in unforgettably terrifying ways over the course of this surreal nightmare, and in the end, Devotion left me as moved and heartbroken as it did scared. Horror games don’t always have to have incredible stories and profound meanings, of course, but when you encounter one that fuses amazing scares to a tale as agonizingly human and beautifully told as this one, you’ve really got something special. — CP
