00:00:00.87 Dave All right, three, two, one. Hello, everybody. My name is Dave Jackson and you're listening to Tales from the Backlog. This is a video games deep dive review podcast where each week I'm joined by a guest to bring a game out of the backlog, play it and discuss. 00:00:19.01 Dave My guest today is a returning friend of the show, Editor-in-Chief of the Indie Informer, host of the Indie Council podcast, and the guardian spirit of indie games. Welcome back, Jill Grodt. 00:00:30.86 Jill Ooh, that last one I wasn't prepared for. That's exciting. Hi, everyone. 00:00:34.90 Dave Yeah, good to have you back on the show. In episode 75 of Tales from the Backlog, we talked about Dredge, ah which is, yeah, a little horror adjacent game. 00:00:42.87 Jill We did. 00:00:46.27 Dave We're back with another horror game, full on horror game today. 00:00:49.70 Jill It's so off brand for me. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself. 00:00:52.48 Dave Yeah. 00:00:52.98 Jill I'm probably the guardian spirit because I am now a ghost from having played the game. You've made me play. 00:00:59.04 Dave I made you play it. We'll talk about this in a little bit, but yeah. ah Today we're gonna talk about Devotion, which is a first person horror game developed and published by Red Candle Games for PC in 2019. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, thanks for stopping by and here is the spoiler policy. 00:01:18.85 Dave Devotion is a super story heavy game. And as always, we're going to save the story spoilers for the second portion of the episode. So if you don't want to be spoiled, you can listen for a while, make sure to jump out when we warn you that spoilers are coming. You can also look down in the show notes for a timestamp for when the spoilers actually begin for devotion. So. 00:01:40.80 Jill Wouldn't it be terrible if we did spoilers like a jump scare? yeah 00:01:44.45 Dave Oh, it would be on brand for horror month, just ah random, yeah well, not gonna say it, but there you go. 00:01:50.22 Jill You'll have no idea whether or not we're going to do that, listeners, so prepare yourself. 00:01:54.19 Dave Trying to keep you on edge over here. ah So what is devotion? We have our quick elevator pitches at the top of the show. I say Devotion is Taiwanese first person, Silent Hill 2. 00:02:07.99 Dave That is my pitch. Jill, what would you say? 00:02:10.80 Jill You're still a little more succinct than mine. Mine is, first of all, real scary. 00:02:14.24 Dave Uh-huh. 00:02:14.27 Jill Second of all, ah it's an exploration of family, societal, and cultural expectations in the form of horror. 00:02:20.99 Dave Absolutely. Horror games do a good job of drilling down into a lot of those things in entertaining ways. So Devotion has all that stuff going on. Well, I played this on PC, not like we have much of a choice there. 00:02:35.44 Dave It took three hours to beat. Does that sound about right to you? 00:02:38.69 Jill Yeah, right about there. 00:02:39.63 Dave Yeah. ah Devotion was delisted from all regular storefronts that we usually get our games from. So you can get the game direct from the Red Candle Games website, ah which is how I assume ah you got it too. 00:02:53.68 Jill I did indeed, yes. 00:02:54.54 Dave Yeah. So three hours, not a very long game. So back to that idea that I made you play this game here today. um What is your history with Devotion and why was it the one that you decided you want to talk about on the show today? 00:03:10.81 Jill Um, so it's one of those things. First of all, red candle games just, uh, released a game this year called nine sols, which is in every way, unexpected for what devotion is and what red candle games has done before. They've been sort of a horror horror game creator. 00:03:32.25 Dave Yeah. 00:03:32.26 Jill Nine Sols is a fast pace kind of Sekiro like animated slightly anime looking um beautiful beautiful like ah it's it's it's wild it shouldn't it's an action platformer type Souls-like and it and it shouldn't exist and it shouldn't be as good it is as it is and it's a hundred percent as good as it is like y'all should go check that out. 00:03:52.26 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 00:03:58.34 Jill And of course, going back to my time at Game Informer, speaking of things that are scary, I started reaching out to Red Candle Games to talk to them about Nine Sols. 00:04:08.68 Dave yeah 00:04:20.63 Jill And um because it was so different and because they have a history ah with devotion and all of that stuff had been happening, like they had just come back and and there was all that hubbub. but um So I've been kind of professionally connected with this ah studio. 00:04:38.00 Jill um And I wanted, like Marcus Stewart, lovely human being, um also a big Indies fan. And he's also a horror fan, unlike me. So he was the one who was really pushing for like, no, you guys need to play a devotion, because as you kind of talked about on the opening, 00:04:59.91 Jill Devotion came out in 2019 and very quickly after that was delisted from everything. 00:05:07.54 Jill And a lot of that has to do with a um like an asset in the background on a wall somewhere. It wasn't even like part of the game. It was really just somewhere in the background that conflated the Chinese president with Winnie the Pooh. 00:05:19.45 Dave Yeah. 00:05:26.91 Dave Yeah, which he doesn't like, so. 00:05:27.95 Jill That is a real thing that he is known to be against and does not allow. 00:05:37.26 Dave Yeah. And like goes on the attack whenever that's around like that. 00:05:42.67 Jill Right. 00:05:43.28 Dave Yeah. 00:05:43.54 Jill And Red Candle Games is a Taiwanese developer and there are geopolitical tensions depending on what view you take on who owns Taiwan. 00:05:58.99 Dave Yeah. 00:05:59.94 Jill So China got really upset about this. like This was an actual international political problem. So any storefront who wanted to do business in China, which has a lot of business to give, 00:06:16.57 Jill Um, probably we're not willing to take the side of a small indie developer, um, for a little horror game. 00:06:22.45 Dave Yep. 00:06:24.67 Jill So it got delisted and then it came back up a couple of years later. I want to say it was in like 2021 that devotion became available again, because the developer themselves set up a website that you could go through, um, to actually buy the game directly from. 00:06:43.31 Dave Yeah. 00:06:44.10 Jill ah So yeah, all of this was happening. And I was interested in their next game because it's definitely my jam. And I was sort of like, I really should play devotion because I 100% am following the story. 00:06:58.83 Jill I am intrigued by what is happening in the real world concerning this game. I am super into the fact that they're switching so dramatically in their next game. 00:07:10.02 Jill So I did want to play it at some point, and this presented a good reason to do that because it's good it's been in my backlog forever. 00:07:20.59 Jill I'm always like, I'm going to play this. I really, really am going to play it. Today's the day. 00:07:24.80 Dave Yeah. 00:07:25.31 Jill And then, no, it's just a little too creepy. I'm going to go ahead and walk away. um So it was a good, good chance to be able to play. 00:07:33.18 Dave Yeah, I take pride now in giving people the opportunity to be like, hey, what's that thing that you need a little push to play? Let's do that. 00:07:40.81 Jill Mm hmm. 00:07:41.61 Dave So I'm glad I could give that opportunity to you. ah Did you play detention, the one before this? 00:07:46.80 Jill I did not know. 00:07:47.89 Dave Okay. So I played detention earlier this year and really, really liked it. And that was another one that I had bought a while ago because it was cheap and I heard it was good. And then I was like, this looks scary. I probably, you know, may never play this, but eventually got around to it and I really, really liked it. ah So that was part of why I wanted to play devotion. The other part was, um, 00:08:13.02 Dave I listened to the episode of Watch Out for Fireballs, where they did a detailed play-by-play plot discussion of devotion. So I spoiled the entire story, because I thought I'd never play it, because it looked too scary. 00:08:24.13 Jill Right. 00:08:25.35 Dave um And the way they described it, it's the exact same thing that happened with Soma for me, where the way they went through the plot, the way they talked about it, made it sound so interesting that it was like, I got to play this and like see this stuff for myself. 00:08:39.82 Dave So that's why it went on my list. I think it was on my backlog resolutions list for 2024 of stuff that I, you know, I need that extra push. So ah here we are. And I did a quick shout out. I did a Patreon only episode about detention. 00:08:57.88 Dave ah So if patrons want to go listen to that, any patron can, ah just me solo talking about detention. I really like that game. And despite misnaming the protagonist of detention, because I was also playing Xenogears at the time, and Xenogears main character's name is Fei, and the main character's name in detention is Wei. 00:09:19.39 Dave So ah maybe listen to the episode and just imagine Fei from Xenogears in the school in detention. Little fun thought exercise. 00:09:26.57 Jill Would it be less scary or more scary? 00:09:30.22 Dave I think that fae could probably do a little bit more to defend himself than the main character in detention from the ghosts and stuff like that. but 00:09:40.11 Jill No, but like psychologically, if someone is used to being able to defend themselves and you take away that ability, it could be more scary. 00:09:44.04 Dave o 00:09:47.10 Dave It could be scarier because Fei from Xenogears has a lot going on in his head. Like a lot, a lot, a lot. ah So yeah, ah that is what made me want to play Devotion. Basically, basically everyone who played it says that this is really, really good. And it's just unfortunate the whole situation where every storefront said we're not touching this because of the controversy that came up. 00:10:09.65 Dave And after playing this, I gotta agree that this is really, really good. In my opinion, it's one of the best horror experiences I think I've ever had. And the way that they constrained the whole game to this very small location, you know, going through time, seeing the history of this family and these characters and stuff. 00:10:30.82 Dave ah It's all just masterfully made, I think, and it's really scary. The story is really tragic, as a lot of psychological horror stories are, and I really liked it. And I also really like games that are set in um other countries, like not the US, not Japan. I like to learn about other countries through the games that those creators make. and This is a great one for that. And so is detention. I mean, I learned more about Taiwan and their history playing detention than I ever knew before. So it's good for that. ah Jill, what would you say at the top for some ah quick opening thoughts about devotion? 00:11:12.12 Jill I like that both of us have used the phrase real scary um and I like it because it's it describes a sort of ah fear that is not propagated by a monster or some sort of spooky something happening like the real scary thing about this is that everyone is very human and very Understandable and you kim completely understand what's happening and you're still going through it anyway You're still walking down like I'm frickin I'm not spoiling anything I guess right now, but like things happen and I'm like, why am I doing this? 00:11:39.90 Dave Yeah. 00:11:56.25 Jill Why am I doing this to myself? But I'm still doing it and you understand what is pushing the main character and all the other characters involved um and while arguably there is a bad person? There's not really an evil person, but like there is you know there are some people who you like more than others. 00:12:19.70 Dave Yeah. 00:12:20.25 Jill um And again, you talked about masterfully doing just it to pitch this game to someone. It's like, okay, you are in a situation where you are in the same apartment over and over and over again and you are literally retreading the ground you've been in. um That shouldn't be scary and somehow every time it is creative and different and even in the subtle differences You those so much more because you become so familiar with your surroundings You're like wait a minute that that wasn't there. 00:12:56.21 Dave Yeah. 00:12:59.46 Jill Why is that what's happening here? ah Which makes it even more unsettling because you get to know the apartment as if it were sort of your own space um And yeah, so there is a great amount of this is a real scary game because there's no 00:13:10.42 Dave Yep. 00:13:21.63 Jill I mean, I mean, you can argue, we can argue about what the ending means and all of that, but there is no, everything that is happening is human. Everything that's happening is human. 00:13:31.04 Dave Yeah, absolutely. ah There it is like, you know, psychological horror and there is a fantasy and wild explorations of like, you know, non real places and things like that. 00:13:44.86 Dave But at the game's core, it's superhuman. You're completely right about that. 00:13:47.34 Jill Mm-hmm. 00:13:49.84 Dave ah Let's put a pin in story discussion. Let's take a little music break and we'll come back and we'll kind of reset, set up what the story is about and talk about how this game delivers it. 00:14:04.41 Dave At the beginning of the spoiler section, just a quick ah tip, if you're sensitive to content warnings, please check doesthedogdie.com for this game. I don't want to spoil what the content warning is, because it literally spoiled what happens in the game right now. But that website's really good. It's not just about animals dying. It will have all kinds of potentially triggering content listed on there. And this is definitely a game that you know. If you think you might be sensitive to things like that, definitely go check it out. So I'll reiterate this with details at the beginning of the spoiler section, but for now, we'll leave it at that. Now, devotion is set in the 1980s in Taipei, which is the capital of Taiwan. You play as a screenwriter named Feng Yu Du, and in the game, it will be listed out as Du Feng Yu, as Chinese and Taiwanese names are written. 00:15:00.80 Dave Feng Yu lives in a small apartment with his wife Gong Li Fang and young daughter Mei Shin. And at the beginning, you're sitting on the couch. Li Fang is making dinner, talking about the progress that Mei Shin has made after a year of working with her mentor. 00:15:19.11 Dave Dinner is ready, so she calls Meixin, but Meixin doesn't come. They keep calling Meixin, and as the calls keep going and going, the scene warps, and you switch from the normal, you know, early evening apartment to this dark horror version of the apartment. You're alone, and you're off to explore. And what you are exploring is this family's history throughout, uh, the 1980s. So you go through four time periods, 1980, 1985, 1986, and 1987. And this, uh, you get like the slightest hint of a mystery right at the beginning, like why is Mei Shin not coming to dinner? And then it shifts and suddenly you're all alone, left to explore this stuff. Did this hook you at the beginning of the game? 00:16:12.63 Jill Yeah, I mean, it's such a good way to, so I mean, I'm going to actually go off the rails here and go farther back. 00:16:18.34 Dave okay Okay. 00:16:19.20 Jill But just to answer your question, it is a great way to start the action of a game to present someone with like a very normal, like everyone goes into this game knowing it's a horror game. 00:16:31.16 Jill There's no one in here that thinks like, oh, this is going to be a happy game. 00:16:31.24 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 00:16:34.78 Jill Uh, so. 00:16:35.67 Dave Look at the key art. You know, this is a horror game. Yeah. 00:16:38.56 Jill So you know that something is going to be wrong and you want to figure that out but you are also as a human being hesitant because it's you know you're already scared. um But jumping to even even before you get anywhere near the game it is so funny to me how inadvertently taking this game off of every platform has made it scary from even getting it because it it breaches into touchstones like maybe the ring or or things of that nature where you this is not something you can just get this is not something that you just go to the store and pick up you have to know where to get it it's only in one special place you have to do weird things to pick it up so it's kind of like already setting the tone which works really well for this game i'm like it's not in an intentional 00:17:31.03 Jill design element but like maybe more people shouldn't do this because it put me in a very particular mood it's not where you know it's not in steam where all my other games are listed like it's in a special folder i have to go to and then when the game opens because i had just been playing Nine Sols um the opening is exactly the same uh so it's got the like red candle games it's got a little like uh 00:17:35.38 Dave Uh-huh. 00:17:55.21 Dave Oh, okay. Yeah. 00:18:03.40 Jill Oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Warning down at the bottom. That's like, there is cruelty in this game. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting that they've kept that. So I'm already feeling like. 00:18:18.05 Jill When you watch, I watched for a long time Game of Thrones on Netflix. So when Netflix popped up, like they did like opening, I always expected the next sound to be. 00:18:27.25 Dave Uh-huh. 00:18:29.81 Jill but bu but i' And so I've psychologically seen that and expected to see an action souls like game. 00:18:30.91 Dave Oh, yeah, yeah. 00:18:39.56 Jill And suddenly I was in this really creepy psychological horror game like that. like put me right into the mood. 00:18:50.52 Jill I'm like this, everything about this is unsettling. It is weird. It is not the way things are supposed to be. And now I'm just sitting here listening to someone talk to me while they are making dinner and it's not okay. 00:19:01.99 Dave Uh huh. 00:19:04.68 Jill Like. 00:19:07.63 Dave It does have a little bit of that like forbidden game ah type of feeling, right? 00:19:09.59 Jill Mm hmm. 00:19:12.93 Dave I bought this a long time ago. I had to put a shortcut on my desktop so I wouldn't forget that I own it because a unit like you said, it's not my Steam library, stuff like that. um And then that apartment is designed in such a way that it's like a normal apartment. 00:19:28.75 Dave but it looks kind of creepy. 00:19:30.36 Jill Mmhmm. 00:19:30.41 Dave um It's a first-person game, but when it begins, you don't see Li Fang at all. You just hear her off in the other room. um And the the design of the apartment is one of my favorite things about this game, like the way that it starts out normal and then, you know, transitions into this like dark horror version of the apartment, but then you go through like, 00:19:54.76 Dave I don't know, 10 to 20 other different versions of the apartment throughout the game and like the subtle ways that it changes the. 00:20:01.28 Jill Yeah. And it's so good how well they have hooked it into your brain where you can just look at something and be like, Oh, this is this year's version of it. 00:20:12.07 Dave Yeah. 00:20:12.79 Jill Even though you are for the most part walking through the door and it tells you, even if you didn't have that, you'd be like, Oh, okay. So now we have pictures of the little girl being this old. So we have to be at this time period. 00:20:25.22 Dave Yeah. 00:20:25.80 Jill And we know kind of where the relationship between everyone is. And ah it's so good. 00:20:31.19 Dave Yeah, um I love the dolls also as, you know, they have scenes that they want to show you where there have to be people, but I think that this is a practical choice, you know, not modeling realistic looking characters. 00:20:43.91 Dave Cause like the graphical fidelity of the game is quite high. It's not, it's not, it's stylized, but it's not super stylized. 00:20:48.13 Jill Mm hmm. 00:20:52.08 Dave So instead of modeling human characters, they use these life size wooden dolls in place of them. 00:20:56.92 Jill Yeah, like mannequins y'all. 00:20:59.39 Dave They're creepy. 00:20:59.41 Jill They're scary. 00:21:00.47 Dave Yeah. 00:21:00.79 Jill There is something psychological like in human development for some reason that we like uncanny valley situation where you have a humanoid shape that's not human and it breaks you out and this does this so well both as like a it wouldn't be as scary if you just had 00:21:14.25 Dave Yep. 00:21:22.73 Jill all of the characters sitting in there and acting out roles. It's so much scarier to have them be a bunch of mannequins who turn and look at you during different situations like. 00:21:26.09 Dave yep Yep. 00:21:32.57 Dave Yeah, like you might turn your back and they might shift a little bit or there might be more of them than there used to be or something like that. They're not used 00:21:40.51 Jill And you say might because like you are sort of arguing with yourself. So like, did it move? 00:21:46.80 Dave Yeah, sometimes. 00:21:47.11 Jill Am I making that up? 00:21:48.53 Dave Yeah. 00:21:48.91 Jill And then sometimes it's very clear that they moved. 00:21:51.29 Dave Yeah. But it's not like, um, like they're not used for big jump scare moments or like, they don't come to life and, you know, attack you or anything like that. 00:21:59.21 Jill Right. 00:22:01.34 Dave They're just little shifts in the fact that the mannequins are creepy by nature and are used to great advantage here. 00:22:12.82 Dave Um, so you are moving between these time periods and the game will put you in, uh, you do like an opening section and then the meat of this game is this section where you're traveling like in a kind of nonlinear way between these time periods. Like it sets up, this door goes to the 1980 apartment. This door goes to 1985, yada, yada, yada. Um, 00:22:35.51 Dave You go through these sections, you will learn about the history of the family and the characters. Feng Yu is a screenwriter. Li Fang is a former pop idol and actress who retired to focus on family life. Then they have a young daughter, Mei Shin. 00:22:55.69 Dave So Um, I really like how, you know, it's almost like exploring at your own pace. It's almost like, uh, you're not like following specific leads based on what you're most interested in, but you are piecing this together in a nonlinear fashion. And I found it really interesting to learn about these people. 00:23:17.75 Jill Yeah, it's so well done. Again, I was saying, like you know what apartment you're standing in at all times. Of course, like any good game, you start out without all the scary stuff, essentially. 00:23:33.02 Dave Yeah. 00:23:33.64 Jill like You are just learning. okay like you get little hints you get tiny little pricks of like okay things might not be going well and you're getting like the tracks laid for you um we are learning about Obviously, the being a screenwriter, being an actress, those are very glamorous things that seem really cool, ah but you can start to very quickly see that they are also very pressurizing and 00:24:06.31 Dave Uh-huh. 00:24:07.55 Jill um And then in the jobs you start to see some gender roles that are being poked at here because culturally speaking ah you like obviously you are playing as the husband and the husband should be 00:24:14.72 Dave Yep. 00:24:25.73 Jill making the money and taking care of the family and has control over what's going on. ah But this person is obviously not being very successful in like, I i don't think that he sold a script for like years and years, and they've got money issues that start coming down and then 00:24:42.00 Dave Yeah. 00:24:45.77 Jill You have a super attractive and popular and famous pop idol as your wife. um She obviously expects certain standards, but you're not allowing her to go back to work and be fulfilled in that way because of the traditional cultural expectation of the wife staying home and taking care of the kid. 00:25:01.89 Dave Yeah. 00:25:09.26 Jill And then you have a kid who is also on top of all of this sick or Is she? 00:25:17.21 Dave Right. 00:25:18.67 Jill um So you've got a lot of things kind of simmering under the surface, even in this early beginning part where everything seems kind of normal. And you're just going around the apartment and like seeing little pictures of things or reading little clips of things on the wall or watching little TV snippets. 00:25:40.70 Jill um And it seems pretty normal to begin with. That's not normal. not normal. 00:25:49.63 Dave It is not normal for sure, but um I'm glad you brought up the theme of exploring the gender roles and cultural expectations in the game because that's a big thing that plays into why characters do some of the things that they do. Another one that's brought up is religious fanaticism and what could drive somebody to like place their beliefs and place stock in those kinds of things, cults and things like that. um Like you mentioned at the beginning, the things that are really driving the characters here aren't fantasyland things like a zombie outbreak or something like that. It's very real ah dynamics and pressures, whether it's like 00:26:38.82 Dave cultural pressures or just the literal pressure of like hey we're running out of money like you know we're having issues uh or whether it's a ah sickness or something like that it's all rooted in superhuman stuff which um you know got to give red candle a lot of credit here because i thought the writing especially because this is you know translated, we're not reading the original text in the original language. 00:27:03.52 Dave I got to give credit to the writing, the localization for really driving these things across. um i I really legitimately looked forward to every note that I found or every description of every item that I picked up because I was really, really interested in what it was going to say. 00:27:17.86 Jill Yeah. 00:27:22.15 Jill And how it was going to piece together. And then ah there were a lot of times when you go on later in the game where you come across something and you immediately recall like, oh, that's going to be, that's why that was important. 00:27:33.87 Dave Yeah. 00:27:38.05 Jill I do want to, like you talked about the religious fanaticism, and I just want to shout out that they did, my boy slash girl, Guanyin, real dirty here because Guanyin is a bodhisattva of like compassion um and this this religious figure who comes in sort of later in the game 00:27:47.15 Dave Oh yeah. Hmm. 00:27:59.21 Jill um as a way ah setting themselves up to be the path to health for this little girl um is really twisting a figure who should be in all other respects absolute just compassion and understanding and a good, a feel good type of religious figure. 00:28:25.84 Jill And for some reason that bothers me just that much more, you know. 00:28:29.49 Dave Okay, I so I did a little bit of you know, very light research about that that figure and in this cultural perspective, it's the one that they're modeling it after is the household guardian spirit of the the toilet, which sounds ah like it sounds like juvenile or something, but it it comes from a, you know, a long time ago when, you know, you need ah guardian spirits for every part of the place or something like that. um But I think that the role here or the like the the twisting of it from this, you know, seemingly benevolent spirit, whether 00:29:09.92 Dave Whether it's one cultural interpretation or another, it's the people who are twisting it for their own benefit rather than like, this is not a story about an evil God or something like that. 00:29:19.88 Jill Yeah. 00:29:21.15 Dave It's the people who are twisting it for their own gain, which I think, you know, again, we're back to that very human level here. 00:29:29.25 Jill Yeah. And it's so scary. 00:29:33.57 Dave It is. 00:29:34.57 Jill It does lead to an ending which has elements of the supernatural, which I find very interesting. 00:29:34.93 Dave Yeah. 00:29:43.20 Jill And I don't know if we want to get into it right now, or we want to talk about kind of the middle section ah before we go forward. But I do just want to just quickly see that I think the ending of this game has gotten a bit more flack than it should have. 00:29:49.96 Dave Yeah. 00:29:57.50 Dave Oh, wow. I have not heard like backlash against this ending. I thought the ending of this game was incredible. 00:30:03.40 Jill I thought it was really cool, but there were people who were like, oh, it was doing really cool things being realistic and grounded. 00:30:03.69 Dave Like, yeah. 00:30:09.40 Jill And then it wasn't i'm like, no, we're going to talk about that. 00:30:10.38 Dave Huh. Oh yeah, we'll talk about that for sure. um One other thing about this, so like you're going through the different time periods in these different apartments and part of this also is ah like very light adventure game gameplay where you're like picking up a key item that will help unlock something and maybe like you pick up something in 1985 that helps you unlock something in 1980 that gives you a lore note or like another key item, um all with the purpose of you have to put together this ah like this metal plate that unlocks the last apartment. um So this is not a game with super heavy gameplay. But what did you think about this, you know, light adventure gaming stuff? 00:30:54.40 Jill I thought it was exactly the sort of gameplay you need for this kind of experience. 00:31:00.52 Dave Mm-hmm Yeah 00:31:00.96 Jill um and And again, because I had just been playing Nine Sols, which is a very fast and fast pace and like fluid movements and everything, um it was so interesting to see this team take on this, or I guess probably reverse, but for me it was Nine Sols and then Devotion. 00:31:20.12 Jill um to see this team's take on slow movements and like slow is not really the right word but like lingering and you're not really you don't really have a run like you kind of do 00:31:35.62 Dave Yo, know you walk super slow. Yeah. 00:31:38.50 Jill And there are times when you would really like to run. 00:31:40.93 Dave Uh huh. 00:31:42.10 Jill um But it is scarier for the fact that you are it gives it takes away control to some degree, and that is always a scarier thing. 00:31:53.69 Jill And I do enjoy this. And I think there is also a very well done um element of you always sort of know where to go and what you're doing. 00:32:06.73 Jill It is very subtle and like the use of light and the use of mannequins freaking pointing you out of the way or like knowing sounds like sound design in this game is really, really good. 00:32:20.47 Dave Yep. 00:32:20.87 Jill Um, kind of all pushing you to not get lost, to not, I was never in a position where I was frustrated. I'm like, okay, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this origami flower or whatever, you know, it's like, oh, okay, I got it now. 00:32:35.22 Dave Yeah. 00:32:38.52 Jill So they did a really good job of pointing both, like, literally sometimes pointing, but also just designing why is pointing you in the right direction. 00:32:50.60 Dave Yeah, I think so like the question in my head, when I play something like this is because the gameplay elements are really light so like the question is, would this be better if it was a walking sim, and you just didn't do this stuff. And I don't think that this game would be. ah you know, two reasons. Number one, it gives you a reason to go in this nonlinear way through the story in it. It makes putting the pieces of the story together ah a more fun exercise than a walking sim would be like a much more linear straight shot through the story, unless they really changed up how it worked. um The other part is the items that you pick up. 00:33:30.37 Dave In contrast with a lot of adventure games, you know puzzle items are all important for the story. And so like you pick up a dress, it's an adventure game puzzle item, but it's also important for the story because that dress is important for the history between husband and wife in the story here. 00:33:37.90 Jill Yeah. 00:33:49.90 Dave So that kind of stuff kind of makes this worth doing, even though it is very, very simple. The only gameplay thing that I did not like is there's a chase sequence late in the game that I thought was just kind of misplaced and didn't seem like it fit. 00:34:00.56 Jill yeah who 00:34:04.73 Jill I think. I would have been okay, I would have been more okay with the chase scene but I think there was one turn or one door where it just wasn't like right in front of me so I can't like the problem with having a monster chase you who can catch you in a horror game is that it's always scarier having the monster chase you than catch you and once the monster has caught you 00:34:16.48 Dave Mm hmm. 00:34:32.19 Jill once, twice, three times, you're sort of like, okay, nothing bad happens. 00:34:33.69 Dave yeah 00:34:37.28 Jill like I know this now. So it's just a matter of getting through. So if you can design a chase scene that keeps that tension, and never really allows for the thing to catch you, like that would have been better. 00:34:54.50 Jill um As far as gameplay, 00:34:56.97 Dave Yeah. 00:34:57.26 Jill change-ups go though we have a couple of sections where you go from this kind of first-person adventure slow action to a whole different things like 2d platformer side-scrolling beautiful beautiful like at one point you are in a storybook and And it's so pretty and it's like, okay, I I really enjoy this because I've been kind of bogged down in the Mundane ish like it's creepy and it's mundane ish like the the apartment and and what you're doing and and to suddenly be in this fantastic world of beautiful bright colors and fun creatures it was 00:34:58.28 Dave Mhm. 00:35:06.74 Dave Oh yeah. 00:35:19.77 Dave Yep. Mhmm. 00:35:48.98 Jill both refreshing and at the same time made going back into the real world just kind of that much scarier. 00:35:57.64 Dave Mm hmm. 00:35:58.49 Jill So I really appreciated those moments of fantasy. 00:36:03.62 Dave Yeah, and it's you know, it's not a super long game. So when you talk about breaking up gameplay, usually we appreciate this or I appreciate this in longer games where I would be like, I've been doing the same thing for five hours. It'd be nice to have something different to do right now. But this game is so short that you have a few quick things that break up that rhythm of exploring the apartments and they're super visually impressive. 00:36:29.64 Dave um the one you mentioned, its use in the story is really, really good. I'll talk about that a little bit later, but that stuff is good. 00:36:36.40 Jill Mm hmm. 00:36:39.58 Dave So um Let's, uh, let's talk about this game the way that it does horror. Cause I got some other stuff I want to talk about. 00:36:48.65 Jill OK, let's hit it. 00:36:49.06 Dave Um, we talked about the dolls. Um, there are some jump scares, but it's not a jump scare game. Um, in the, and yeah, there's a couple. 00:36:55.67 Jill Right. I think it only got me about twice. 00:37:01.67 Dave Yeah. With that, with that monster. Um, and the monster is. Interesting from a story perspective too. Can't wait to talk about that. Um, this is one of those games where we say, this is really cool. 00:37:14.43 Dave Come back in a half hour. 00:37:15.23 Jill We'll get to it. 00:37:15.75 Dave We'll talk about it. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah, I think there's a lot of times when like, something subtle will happen that will give you a little bit of a start, but it's not like things jumping out at the screen at you. 00:37:28.90 Dave I think this game is super smart about how it makes horror and like makes you uneasy with other stuff like the FMVs that you watch. FMVs in a non-FMV game are always a little bit creepy. 00:37:41.59 Jill Yeah. 00:37:41.79 Dave so 00:37:42.15 Jill And then you add in like a little girl singing and I don't know why that is so much creepier, but it is. 00:37:48.01 Dave Oh, we've all seen a horror movie with a weird little kid, right? So we know. um there is ah like when you When you're like watching the TV and you see there's a singing competition that you watch or the the commercials were oddly creepy to me too. 00:38:08.63 Dave they're just From all I can tell, they're just regular commercials. from you know They're not in English, of course. Maybe that adds a little bit to it. but they're older, like vintage commercials from the 80s. 00:38:20.31 Jill Yeah. Like if you look at 80s, 90s commercials, like commercials, I grew up watching and we're like, that's totally normal. If you go back and watch them now, you're sort of like, Oh, that feels weird. 00:38:33.97 Dave Some of them are weird, especially the gaming commercials from the nineties. 00:38:35.19 Jill Yeah. 00:38:38.20 Dave They did some weird shit in gaming commercials back then. 00:38:39.54 Jill They did some very strange things. So like it's, it's an element of taking something from its place in time where it had cultural touchstones that made it acceptable and kind of like a fish breathing water. Like you take it out of the water and suddenly you are hyper aware of how weird and upsetting in some cases these things can be and that's exactly the feeling that you get with these commercials. 00:39:11.81 Dave Yeah. Also with the sound, with the music and the sound design, you mentioned the sound design before, but like this game is, is just full of, you know, creepy knocking in the background or the wind blowing or the rain or just generally unsettling stuff happening all the time. 00:39:24.13 Jill hey 00:39:29.78 Dave Great for that. 00:39:31.13 Jill Yeah, you can hear the TV and it's like, I haven't done that since I was a kid, you know, like, cause it's, that's just anyone who's younger than us. 00:39:36.49 Dave Uh-huh. 00:39:39.98 Jill And I don't want to think about that because I don't want to think about how old I am, but I won't understand what hearing your TV sounds like. But I can remember when you're booting up like an old game or like an old TV show or something like the humming, the like buzzy sound that a TV makes. 00:39:55.67 Dave Yeah. 00:39:58.28 Jill And then this game. recreates that in such a good way. I'm like, I hate that you're doing this to me, but I also really love it so good. 00:40:07.00 Dave Yeah, it goes into that atmosphere. um This game is also this game also has a lot of very atmospheric background music, like a Silent Hill or something like that, whether it's You know, just, you know, some tones or something, or there are a couple parts that have the, that kind of trademark silent Hill, like industrial sounds, you know, when it's, it's time to get your blood pumping a little bit. 00:40:34.16 Dave They'll do that. There's vocals in some of the songs and the vocals are distorted. 00:40:35.50 Jill There's one. 00:40:38.73 Dave A lot of weird stuff. 00:40:40.34 Jill There's one year, I can't remember, I think it was 86 where there's a storm in the background and it's constantly like threatening to open the windows and break through things. 00:40:44.05 Dave Yeah. yeah 00:40:52.34 Jill And it's just that much that's, you know, it's not scary. It is just a storm that happens, but it just starts the tension a little bit higher than, you know, a normal sunny day. 00:41:06.68 Dave Yep, also in the sound is um 00:41:15.17 Dave for lack of a better word, and I don't know the instruments, but like traditional East Asian instruments that make up the um the music. Anytime there's a melodic song or something like that, they're using these, you know, local instruments in there. And there is one like an actual song with a person singing that is used in different forms throughout the game, sung by different people and the way that that plays into the story. ah But I like the touch of using the instruments, you know, local to Taiwan in those, you know, traditional sounds for everything that's not industrial banging or a storm out in the background. 00:41:55.24 Jill Right, it's almost every element of this game is woven into another element and another theme and it all sort of backs each other and ah makes for a really solid experience even before you get 00:41:59.40 Dave Uh-huh. 00:42:11.11 Jill the characters in the plot. It's just, you know, this is a game about cultural or familiar, familial expectations. So you have a lot of that woven into the background already. So you kind of if you know, it's not like it's not in your face. But you are as a human being just kind of trained to pick up on those kinds of cues. And they have done this so, so well. 00:42:40.10 Dave Yeah ah so like there's a lot of games I think where you play and they're like this game is set in Washington state and you play it and you're like I don't know could be Washington might not be who knows ah this game definitely puts you in that that Taiwanese setting I feel like even if you've never been to Taiwan you definitely get the sense that it's coming from all places. The way the apartment is designed, the stuff hanging on the walls, like the big family portrait. um There's a lot of stuff we'll talk about in the spoiler section where I'm going to make comparisons between the Taiwanese cultural thing that's in the game and the Korean cultural thing that's in you know my personal life experience. um That big family portrait is one of those things. ah The way the calendars look, 00:43:29.45 Dave you know A lot of the stuff around the apartment, those music, the sounds, all of that stuff puts you in that place really, really well. So like you could give someone this game and they would not mistake it for another place. 00:43:44.07 Jill Mm hmm. 00:43:46.26 Dave really impressive. Also, just a quick shout out. I don't think we said this yet, but I think the fact that I did say part of this, but that's, you know, brains, uh, the fact that this takes place in one location that's reused over and over again, so they can like use the bones of this apartment and then There are so many different variations of it and the creativity is wild the for how these different places look like the use of light, the use of you know, maybe some fantasy elements, the use of those dolls, the use of you open up this room and it's it's full of stacks of paper and it's you know, all the ways that that um that they like creatively 00:44:36.01 Dave Kind of like them, they're telling you a story with the way the apartment looks every single time. And you kind of have to like to sit and be like, ah why is this room full of the stacks of papers? What does this mean? All of that stuff is really, really good and super creative. 00:44:48.96 Jill Yeah, they have a very, very small space to work with and they use every single inch of it at every part of the game. 00:44:54.19 Dave Yeah. Absolutely. Anything else that we want to shout out about the game in the non-spoiler part before we, uh, before we dive into the story? 00:45:06.39 Jill I don't think so. I think we should get to spoiling. 00:45:10.10 Dave Yeah, well, before we get to spoiling, we got to wrap up the non-spoiler part here by ah talk giving our recommendations. 00:45:14.45 Jill Okay. 00:45:18.05 Dave So I think it's pretty obvious that both of us enjoy what this game is doing. So Jill, what kind of person do you think devotion appeals to? 00:45:29.59 Jill I was gonna be self-deprecating, but I think this is a good game. I mean, I know people who are the sorts of people that play Dredge, looping back to our earlier episode, who only go out and and in the daytime and don't even want to see the nighttime stuff. So like, maybe that, if you're that level, maybe this isn't the game for you, but if you're at all interested it is not a scary game in it will keep you up at night and you know monsters trying to get you sort of thing it is very much um scary because it is so familiar and understandable and relatable um and it follows people to a conclusion which actually happens in in real life perhaps not to 00:46:06.13 Dave Yeah. 00:46:27.84 Jill as spectacular if that's the word uh an extent but if you are the sort of person who is interested in a study of human character if you're someone who is interested in a game that you can pick up and play for three hours and then think about it for as long as the gameplay or more like this is this is probably a game you should check out 00:46:30.96 Dave Mmhmm. 00:46:52.35 Dave Yeah, I think that number one, if you like horror games, this is unqualified, like you got to play this. I think it's one of the best horror games I've ever played. Uh, for all those reasons we talked about before and the story will really stick with you. Um, and I think that it is, as you've said, and we, we chatted about earlier, it is that. 00:47:14.62 Dave that human core behind the story which is it's why I'm finding myself drawn to psychological horror games more than other kinds because I love you know this game is going to be a really fucked up character study and I really love that and this game is that and it's just really good at that um and you make a good point too that like that's where the horror comes from is these explorations of motivations and acts and then like the of course the sound design and the the visual creativity and stuff like that. But it's not you know it's not like I watched The Conjuring and it scared me so bad I couldn't sleep. like It's not that kind of horror. It's more of a lingering thing when you think about what happened in the story in this game. 00:48:04.80 Dave where I think that's what will stick with me is, you know, they had this, this idea for how the story is going to play out and how they're going to explore the characters and why they did the things that they did. And that stuff will stick with me. So I think it's excellent. 00:48:21.57 Jill Yeah, it's also surprisingly relevant if you are perhaps connected to someone who might be irrationally attracted to leaders that are charismatic and promising things. 00:48:36.51 Dave Uh 00:48:37.20 Jill ah So ah you might find it a little too close for comfort just because of things that are happening in the present day. 00:48:42.59 Dave -huh. 00:48:44.78 Jill But like, that's another good sign of art. A good piece of art should be relevant and be able to point to things in times far past when they were made. 00:48:57.84 Jill And I think that's why this is going to be such a good game for as long as people are playing games. 00:48:58.11 Dave Yep. Yeah, this, the 00:49:08.26 Dave What this game is talking about is timeless for sure. And you can apply it to lots of different situations. So, uh, no more story, no more story until the spoiler section. Let's finish out the, uh, with a little bit of housekeeping and as always, the guest goes first. So Jill, please tell people again about the Indian former, the indie council, and where people can find you. 00:49:31.73 Jill Yeah, you can go check out the indie informer just google it I guess Indianformer dot.com is a website dedicated purely to indie games and indie gaming and what's going on right now what's going on is Gamescom and there's a lot of Gamescom stuff and 00:49:37.66 Dave ah huh 00:49:52.36 Jill a lot of indies pop up and come out of that and there are a lot of really cool things. I think during Opening Light Live my highlight was Hardly, which looks really cool and it's gonna be some sort of fun narrative game but it's just been revealed so we don't know that much about it. 00:49:59.60 Dave Uh huh. 00:50:11.66 Jill ah Likewise, the indie council is a collaborative podcast, so it doesn't really belong to the indie informer. 00:50:20.49 Dave Mm hmm. 00:50:24.00 Jill It is an equal partnership collaboration between the indie informer of 6.1 indie, Jenny Windham, who runs Geeks of Grounds, and then Janet Garcia, who is PEND Pixels, and some people may know her from Min Max, and kind of funny before that. 00:50:35.11 Dave Mm hmm. 00:50:42.20 Jill And we all come together to talk about everything that's happened in the week for indie games all the great games we've been playing and it's very dangerous to listen to it because uh it's dangerous to be on it because we're all just like enthusiastic and happy and talking about uh the things that we are enjoying but that means that you put several more things on your list of oh i gotta play that by the end of the show 00:51:09.03 Dave Oh yeah. 00:51:10.91 Jill And so you end up with all of these things that you can't possibly have enough time to play, but you should go watch it. 00:51:17.89 Dave Yeah, it's a good time. Um, I'm a fan and, uh, I'm a fan of the indie informers coverage. I try to shout it out in my discord server whenever there's a, you know, interesting review up there for something I'm interested in playing. 00:51:29.87 Dave Um, also on the indie council, Jenny Windham, former guest on the podcast, we did the animal episode together, uh, She's great. 00:51:36.46 Jill Oh man, she's fun. 00:51:38.33 Dave Janet's great. Mike is great. So good times. Um, I'll put links to everything down in the show notes so everybody can check out everything that you're doing and it's highly recommended. 00:51:49.16 Jill I thought you were gonna go like, Jenny's great, Jan's great, Mike's okay. 00:51:52.78 Dave Yeah, i don't I don't know Mike well enough to do that yet. 00:51:56.19 Jill To tease him like that, I do. 00:51:57.37 Dave Yeah, ah okay. Well, I'll let you do it then. 00:52:00.01 Jill We love you Mike. 00:52:00.55 Dave Shout out to Mike, yeah. um For this podcast, you can support these same ways as always. Ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Podcast Addict are super helpful. 00:52:13.03 Dave ah Likes and comments on YouTube so people find the episode, which is what we want. That's what my dog wants too. He wants people to find the episode. 00:52:21.82 Jill I'm so excited about it. 00:52:21.99 Dave i Yeah, you can join the Discord server and the dog's quieted down. He's not so excited about Discord, but Discord's a great place. My server is a lively and welcoming community talking about games. 00:52:35.66 Dave Hopefully people in there are talking about devotion this week. You can listen to my other podcast called a top three podcast where we do top three lists and draft topics and things like that. 00:52:46.41 Dave And last but not least, if you want to support monetarily, patreon dot.com slash real Dave Jackson is the place. You can vote for games I do on the show. 00:52:56.43 Dave There are bonus episodes like the one about detention, red candles game before devotion. ah Forgive the slip up with the protagonist's name, but I think that's a good ah solo chat about that game. 00:53:09.89 Dave So patreon dot.com. 00:53:11.30 Jill It was all intentional. It was just to like, get you farther into the horror element to get your brain a little twisted. 00:53:17.53 Dave Exactly. Exactly. I'll pretend it was a mistake, but did Jill know the truth of the episode there? 00:53:24.11 Jill Uh-huh. 00:53:25.06 Dave So, uh, we're going to take a break and when we come back, it will be full spoiler time for devotion. 00:58:45.42 Dave Okay, we're back and it's full spoiler time for devotion and a couple things before we dive into it. Number one, this is not going to be a linear walk through the story. So you can't listen and assume that what happens at the end will be held to the end of the episode. 00:58:59.68 Dave So if you haven't played, please go play it. 00:58:59.69 Jill Yeah. 00:59:02.15 Dave It's three hours long. Go play it, support the developers. Uh, it's a good time. It's a, yeah. 00:59:06.70 Jill Even if we went linear, the game is not linear. So. 00:59:10.61 Dave That's true, yeah. it's a And I was gonna say, it's a good time in air quotes. It's a good game. um The other thing is the content warnings, which I said I would give more details on. ah This game includes lots of stuff that people might ah not want to see in a game, including self amputation. 00:59:28.14 Dave There is eye stuff. 00:59:28.15 Jill Yep. Yep. Yeah. 00:59:30.20 Dave ah Someone gouges his eye out with a spoon, so that's not great. And the first person, by the way, 00:59:36.23 Jill yeah 00:59:36.38 Dave ah And then child abuse, domestic abuse, gaslighting, and of course the death of Mei Shin at the end of the game. So, or the implied death of Mei Shin. 00:59:47.96 Dave So you don't see it, which is good, but um 00:59:50.83 Jill You mean we don't all just walk off into the happy sunset? 00:59:54.65 Dave We do walk into a happy sunset in a way, yes. 00:59:56.02 Jill There we go. That's all we need to know. 00:59:58.80 Dave Yeah, so happy ending for Devotion, yeah. um I wanted to start the spoiler section by talking about Feng Yu, the main character, because this is a game where you, ah it plays with your expectation that you're the protagonist and you are in the right. 01:00:14.95 Dave ah You have this inherent want at least i do to like your protagonist and to want them to be correct and all of those things and you're not you are the bad guy in this game you are the cause yeah 01:00:27.94 Jill There's a definite creeping feeling of like, am I the baddie? 01:00:32.64 Dave Oh yeah, ah Feng Yu is basically ah selfish, obsessive, um will not yeah will not take help, ah controlling all of those things. 01:00:41.01 Jill Egotistical. um 01:00:47.57 Dave And the way that this all plays out into how The death of his daughter is very, very interesting the way that this the way this goes. So I don't know if I actually mentioned that he's a screenwriter, but he's not successful. He has had a lot of scripts rejected recently and the one that did make it to screen got terrible reviews. 01:01:13.81 Dave So he is not successful. And I think this is like the first thing in his journey towards what he does is this puts a um like a self-conscious 01:01:27.74 Dave feeling into him where he's like, I'm failing at my job, but my culture dictates that I need to be the one providing for the family. But his screen, right? 01:01:38.67 Dave His screen and you, you read one of the screenplays, uh, throughout where you pick up little bits and pieces of it throughout the game. And it's awful. Like it would be the worst movie you've ever seen. 01:01:47.24 Jill yeah It's not good. Yeah. And it's all very telling as to who he is and what he thinks ah things should be because it's all very like the woman says exactly what I want her to say to the man and the man is the greatest and everyone worships him. 01:01:54.55 Dave Yeah. 01:02:01.28 Dave Yeah. 01:02:04.63 Dave yep 01:02:04.68 Jill And also very telling in the way that he takes notes. 01:02:05.03 Dave Yep. 01:02:10.44 Jill um and what the notes are saying and how he thinks that they're absolutely ridiculous um in that it's sort of like people don't want this kind of story anymore and he's being told this outright by a I don't remember exactly if it was someone who had worked with him or a close friend. 01:02:29.76 Jill I think maybe but a bit of both was like giving him a like ah real heart to heart on like you need to change and adapt for new audiences and what's going on and in the world. 01:02:31.92 Dave Yeah. 01:02:41.11 Jill And he's steadfastly refusing and holding on to this idea of this is what's made me, um we assume, successful in the past. 01:02:52.65 Dave Yeah. 01:02:53.16 Jill And it is not working anymore. And he doesn't know how to like his inability to adapt and change and his ah psychological rigor is ah is the core problem in almost all of this. 01:03:11.46 Dave Mm hmm. 01:03:12.51 Jill If he were capable of taking any such bending at all, he would not break later in the game the way he does. 01:03:18.51 Dave Yep. 01:03:21.98 Dave Yeah. And instead he, you know, forces his will on everybody around him. He projects his, you know, dreams onto his kid. Um, there's a part in one of the scripts where it says something like, you know, the father asked the daughter what she wants for a gift. 01:03:40.28 Dave And she says, I don't want anything. I want my parents to be happy. And it's like, come on, man. Like ah ridiculous. 01:03:45.92 Jill Yeah. But it's also, again, developers, very smart. Red Candle Games has done a great job. It is not only a bad thing for him as a human being, but it is a very good note on societally, should we be allowing this sort of person to control other people's lives? 01:04:01.19 Dave Mm hmm. 01:04:13.70 Jill And why is this person in a place to control like his wife and his child and if the wife had equal footing if she culturally and like the if the people around her even because the people around her are also in this culture so they are 01:04:17.41 Dave Mm hmm. 01:04:32.44 Jill telling her to you know can't you just kind of patch things up and like you should just say yes and and be okay with him and like cater to his whims and stuff if she were able to be a full partner in this 01:04:36.95 Dave yeah 01:04:48.38 Jill marriage would they be having as bad a time because she was again very successful and she gave it up to have the family and the fact that she had to give things up is perhaps we're poking a little bit at like why would she have to give all of this up to be 01:05:02.62 Dave Yeah. Mhm. 01:05:06.48 Jill you know, to have the perfect home life. And why does she not, why does he not have to give up his dreams? And like, there is a lot going on under the surface that they are not actually like saying, it's just a lot of through the story and what is happening that you're kind of like, yeah, this wouldn't be happening except there's a perfect storm set up through all of these through lines and whether or not that's a good thing. ah It's a really good social commentary. 01:05:40.59 Dave Yeah, there's a lot of ways that they present you with situations that show you you know this expression of gender expectations and the roles that husband and wife should play. And they just show it to you in the way that people react to it and conversations that they have as real people and not telling you how you should feel about it you just see it and you're like okay that's it's interesting that this is the way it works and there's a couple of examples of that ah you met the one you mentioned is when ah lee fong talks to her mom on the phone and her mom gives her the some version of like 01:06:15.77 Jill Mm hmm. 01:06:20.56 Dave We see this in other areas too, like some version of like, I went through this, you can go through this too, right? um she tells her like, you know, don't make this public, it will look bad for you, people will gossip if you know if you make a ah scene. 01:06:40.25 Dave um key She says, keep bedroom troubles in the bedroom when that's, I don't, she never brought that up to her mom, like, yes. 01:06:46.41 Jill Right. Like this is not a problem where he's not okay in the bedroom. Like this is a situation where like my entire life is being controlled by a person who is inflexible and cannot see that he is going to destroy us all. 01:06:52.83 Dave Yeah. 01:06:59.77 Dave Yeah. 01:07:00.03 Jill Literally and figuratively. 01:07:02.44 Dave Yeah. um There's the part early in the 1980s section when they're talking about the move in process where ah there's this huge list of stuff to do to prepare for the housewarming party. 01:07:15.84 Dave And it's just assumed to be her work to do, ah which 01:07:20.37 Jill and Yeah, she's very vocal about how later on that she is obviously, she hasn't said anything at the time, but this is obviously something that has stuck with her for so long because later on when she's, spoilers, I guess, leaving him, um she points back to this as being like, we weren't even like, 01:07:28.84 Dave Yeah. 01:07:36.10 Dave Yeah. 01:07:41.03 Jill in the house properly like we weren't getting our stuff together i was doing all of this and he was trying to pretend like everything was great and and like rain money down on people and have like this great thing like everything was fine i'm the one who was in the kitchen doing the dishes at midnight while he was sleeping like a baby it's like y'all i feel that 01:08:05.59 Dave Yeah, this ah this kind of hit close to home for me because again, I mentioned earlier, um I have, you know, I lived in South Korea for a long time and I'm not saying these are like direct 100% parallels between Korean and Taiwanese culture, but ah my mother-in-law deals with this, with the the expectation that this kind of stuff is her work. And, ah you know, friends that I know that are more my age, 01:08:34.35 Dave um kind of, you know, dread family holidays, because if they're married, some of this stuff is their job because they are the, you know, the wife of, you know, this family's son. 01:08:46.67 Dave So that means they get to do all the cooking for six hours to prepare for the holiday and stuff like that. And, you know, yeah. 01:08:51.87 Jill And even if you're not in that situation yourself, ah going to another person's family who might have more traditional gender roles, now are you suddenly 01:09:01.26 Dave Mm hmm. 01:09:05.37 Jill kidnapped into the cooking and cleaning brigade while all of the husbands get to sit around and like to have fun and watch games. 01:09:10.64 Dave Yeah. 01:09:13.84 Jill It's very interesting... like Again, we're talking about Taiwan in Devotion. 01:09:20.78 Dave yeah Yeah. 01:09:20.81 Jill and it's very culturally ah and It's mixed up in the culture, but like there's nothing here that's unrelatable. you know There are things that you will see in your own life from this game. 01:09:31.30 Dave For sure. 01:09:33.77 Jill you're like Okay, yeah. 01:09:36.27 Dave Yeah. You don't need to have personal experience in Taiwan or East Asia or anything else. You'll just, you'll just see this, um, around. 01:09:44.85 Jill And it's telling that both of us remember this detail to the same degree as like the chase scene, you know, so like they are treating both of these topics with the same gravity. 01:09:51.67 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 01:09:59.12 Dave Oh, you know what? That's a good point. I wanted to bring this up and I forgot when I would. Now's the time. I love how they tease this early on, because there's the Li Fang ghost monster that chases you. 01:10:06.27 Jill Let's do it. 01:10:11.62 Jill Yeah. 01:10:14.17 Dave I love that it didn't turn out to be that my wife is evil. um And that's like the cause of the problem here is that my wife is evil. 01:10:20.57 Jill Right. 01:10:21.91 Dave It's just the way he views her because of how she has tried to take her life back and like she eventually goes and she does go back to work and then she does leave him. 01:10:34.71 Dave ah And I think that she leaves him. If I'm getting the timeline right, she leaves him and then he makes this drastic action with Mei Shin when she's gone. 01:10:45.39 Dave um But this is just the way that he views her as this monster, not that she is the antagonist in the story. 01:10:45.96 Jill I think so. 01:10:51.38 Jill Right. 01:10:54.76 Jill Which also again points to how this game is so good because there are no monsters. 01:11:00.60 Dave Yeah. 01:11:00.74 Jill It's just human psychology. This is what he has turned her into. Like you're seeing a physical manifestation of his psychological demons. 01:11:11.75 Dave Mm hmm. 01:11:14.26 Jill And they look like her because, I mean, it started out the first like a broken piece of his armor was getting bad notes on his scripts. By the time we get to his wife leaving him, he's like torn open psychologically. And, and ah she was really, I think, the major 01:11:39.32 Jill death of his ego. To have his wife be successful, leave him, she's succeeding without him. 01:11:50.29 Dave yeah. 01:11:51.20 Jill um and and And we talked about gossip too, and part of the reason the mom brings up gossip is because they are both in an industry that is geared towards gossiping. like ah They're both famous and in kind of the entertainment industry, which kind of runs on these sorts of tasty things. So she's out there like in public, 01:12:18.85 Jill being asked about these things and talking about these things, she can't really like she has to choose either to stay silent or like be really loud about what's been happening to her and that she decides to be really loud is something that absolutely is starting to destroy his psychological um version of himself where he is the lord and commander of his life and it's so good. 01:12:45.14 Dave Yeah. 01:12:48.96 Dave Yeah. 01:12:48.99 Jill Like there's so many layers and they're playing with all of them and I love that. 01:12:52.55 Dave mrs. He just can't handle that he can't control her. He can't handle that she's successful without him. ah there's There's One part earlier when she wants to go on TV and she's gonna wear this dress. That's the important dress, but I think it's like low cut or something. 01:13:13.18 Dave and 01:13:13.35 Jill It's like um it is her it was her signature ah dress when she was 01:13:20.33 Dave Yeah, when she was famous before. 01:13:21.52 Jill when she was famous. um And it's not low cut. It is a sort of dress that has slits, which was not, it wasn't originally meant to be like a sexy dress. 01:13:29.46 Dave Oh, right, right, right. 01:13:33.56 Jill It just kind of took on that persona after using it culturally in different ways. um And it's like this beautiful red silk dress. 01:13:45.34 Dave Yeah, and he's mad because her wearing a revealing dress will reflect poorly on him. And so like, this is all about him. 01:13:54.42 Jill yeah 01:13:54.85 Dave All of this is all about him. so 01:13:58.46 Jill I also really like, just as a, this is kind of a side note, but I really love that the developers, I like seeing where things were going, like, oh, he murders her because in domestic situations like this, that's kind of what happens a lot of the time. 01:14:03.09 Dave isnt 01:14:17.28 Jill Like your percentage of being murdered by your partner is very high if you start to get into these and to these problems. 01:14:23.27 Dave Yeah. 01:14:25.39 Jill And I do believe that he'll hit her um at some point in the game. 01:14:29.17 Dave Yeah, I do think so. Yeah. 01:14:30.79 Jill um So like as you get increasing levels of violence in the domestic sphere, the chances of getting murdered by your partner are very high. So the fact that actually she's out living her best life. 01:14:44.35 Jill She got out and she's famous again. I'm like, I mean, she's not going to have a good time after, after the daughter situation. 01:14:46.87 Dave Mm hmm. 01:14:51.63 Dave Right. 01:14:52.00 Jill Um, but like, I'm, I really appreciate they didn't take, they're not, they're using tropes, but they are not, um, sitting in them. 01:14:52.98 Dave Yeah. 01:15:01.18 Jill They're not like that. 01:15:04.10 Jill be using the easy way out and being like, wouldn't it be really scary if you walked in and he'd murdered her and stabbed her to death? And it's like, actually, I think it's actually more psychologically terrifying that he is falling apart because she's doing well. 01:15:18.44 Dave Yeah. Mm-hmm. It's definitely more interesting that way, that just the way I, look and this is why we're spending so much time just talking about him as a person, because the way that, the way he is as a person and the way he reacts to what everybody else does, just like everyone else, his wife and Mei Shin are very, seem like very normal people. 01:15:44.84 Dave with normal desires, and he just can't handle it because it's not exactly the way he wants them to be. and Yeah. 01:15:52.81 Jill but also, again, great writing. He's not the monster either. Like, you're seeing 01:15:59.35 Dave Right. 01:16:00.98 Jill a lot of his flaws and failings as a human being, but you can understand where those are coming from. He feels he has a lot of pressure to be the provider, to be perfect, to make sure that the home life is all going 100% according to plan, and culturally he's being told that's his job. 01:16:12.08 Dave Mm hmm. 01:16:20.52 Jill So there is something that is ingrained in him from a very early age to say like it is my job if my wife is going out and like doing something that like proves that I am not covering all the expenses if she has to go out and get a job it is my feeling like that's where he is and you can understand that perspective and that he is also a loving father like i I don't think there's an argument that says he doesn't love his daughter he wants her to be well he wants her 01:16:45.41 Dave Yeah. 01:16:55.66 Dave Mm hmm. 01:16:56.60 Jill He wants her to be this perfect little child that, you know, wins everything and does great grades and all of that. 01:17:03.03 Dave Yeah. 01:17:03.96 Jill But like, he also is spending all this money and time and effort on making sure that she is well. 01:17:08.00 Dave Mm hmm. 01:17:12.48 Jill And whether or not she needs it. it is a question I think that is perfectly ambiguous in this game. I don't think there is ever really a yes or no as to whether or not she is actually physically ill. 01:17:22.14 Dave Yeah. 01:17:29.43 Dave Yeah, so rewind just a little bit because you have a phrase that you said kind of unlocked like where to talk about Meishin and that's things being ingrained from an early age. 01:17:33.32 Jill Rewind. 01:17:45.36 Dave And this is another ah cultural thing that I'm familiar with. Um, there is a ceremony on a child's first birthday and I forget what it's called in the game, uh, because, uh, Chinese, Taiwanese words are like, um, Teflon. I will not grab onto them, but, uh, in Korea, it's called Dol Janshi and it's the exact same ceremony. You get a one year old baby, put a bunch of objects in front of them, whatever the baby grabs signifies. 01:18:14.63 Dave their career direction or the direction their life is going to go. So people are like, I hope they grab the money. That means they're going to be, they're going to be rich or they're going to be motivated to make a lot of money or I hope they grab the microphone. 01:18:26.21 Dave Then there'll be a singer and stuff like that. And so Mei Shin has this, um, at the beginning and kind of shows like Mei Shin is under pressure from a the age of probably one 01:18:38.93 Jill From the age you're not even conscious. Yeah. 01:18:41.01 Dave Yeah, she's too young to have aspirations even until the end of her life. She's still too young to have serious aspirations. 01:18:50.08 Jill Right. You can tell that the only things that she wants out of life is to be her mom or her dad or to make her mom or her dad proud of her. 01:18:58.63 Dave Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the way that this kind of manifests is, and I think it comes from like feng yu being so just ah what's what's the word, like so self conscious about himself and feeling like, you know, well, I didn't make it now my kids got to make it. 01:19:18.55 Dave So ah they 01:19:19.30 Jill right living vicariously through your child. 01:19:21.53 Dave Exactly. They push this kind of dream of stardom onto her ah where you see the shit the thing that she really likes to do, she likes to draw and she likes to sing and be like her mom. So they put her in these singing contests and there's one that plays. I think it's like three times you get increasingly more of the performance and you find out that she lost. 01:19:45.13 Dave Uh, she came in second place. 01:19:45.54 Jill By one point, 01:19:46.87 Dave Yeah. By one point it's, it seemed like it was rigged to, you know, let the defending champion win, but she, I, so back to her sickness, I think what happened is she has anxiety. 01:19:52.65 Jill Mm hmm. 01:20:01.41 Jill Yeah. 01:20:01.99 Dave And, uh, the physical thing that's happening that makes people think she's sick is that she has panic attacks or anxiety induced asthma or something like that. It gives her trouble breathing, but it's coming from this pressure from her parents or at least one of her parents too. 01:20:17.98 Jill Right. And of course she can't communicate that because she probably has no idea that that's even what's happening. You would have to kind of understand the social dynamic. 01:20:25.92 Dave Yeah. 01:20:29.53 Jill Like children just don't have the life experience to be able to communicate. Like I get sick when I'm freaking out and I only get like 01:20:34.34 Dave Yeah. 01:20:40.80 Jill this kind of sick or I'm not actually like always it's so telling to talking about the the singing competition that it is both parents failings it is not just the dad putting pressure on her the mom is also even though we don't see this directly but the girl is like singing the song her mom was famous for So obviously the mom has some sort of like, I am also living vicariously because I can no longer live out my fame and fortune and be a part of this life anymore. 01:21:20.28 Jill But I can, I can still have a part of that if my daughter's doing it. So you can go back to her sickness and see it is both parents that are doing this to her. 01:21:33.13 Jill um And the doctors are trying to kind of put it politely as much as possible to like, 01:21:40.58 Dave Yeah. 01:21:41.10 Jill suggest she's not ill in any real way in any in any taking that right back hold on she is not sick in any uh physiological way 01:21:45.54 Dave Yeah. 01:21:53.56 Dave Yeah. 01:21:56.17 Dave So this is another cultural thing that they touch on here. And another example of dad being stubborn about his views about the world and things too, which are probably informed by culture around him. um But when it's suggested that she is not, you know, she doesn't have a disease or something the way that he thinks ah that she should seek psychiatric care, that's a hard, 01:22:23.96 Dave stop for him. He will not entertain the idea that that's a real thing that should be explored. 01:22:24.87 Jill Right. 01:22:30.35 Dave he's ah He just says, my daughter's not a lunatic is his quote. And that's the end of that. like There's no exploration down that path whatsoever, which is an interesting ah you know 01:22:40.67 Jill Right. 01:22:45.39 Dave We have gotten better as a culture in the last decade plus about mental health and normalizing, you know seeking treatment for these things. 01:22:56.26 Dave um Therapy, even when you're not you know going through it as a valuable tool for good mental health. ah This is the 1980s in Taiwan. ah So this is, I don't wanna say this is all the dad's fault. 01:23:10.94 Dave I'm sure that a lot of people would probably react this way. 01:23:13.31 Jill Yeah, if I were in my childhood and my parents, a doctor came to my parents and said, you should seek a therapist, my parents would absolutely have had the same reaction, angry. 01:23:16.31 Dave Yeah. 01:23:27.10 Jill Like how dare you suggest that my daughter is a lunatic, it is insane, is something like that. Where is it now? That's just sort of like, I'll, 01:23:39.66 Jill drop in and be like, Hey, anybody who is dealing with anything, you all should go to therapy. You know, everyone's really, that has become a much more open thing that has become accepted to the point where I'm like, I don't know if people younger than us understand how stark that difference was. 01:23:43.89 Dave yeah 01:23:55.33 Dave Mm hmm. 01:23:55.90 Jill Um, but again, it's, uh, you don't need to know. Taiwanese culture to understand what that stark difference looked like. 01:24:06.17 Dave And it's not, you know, it doesn't have to be Taiwanese. I mean, it's Taiwanese because this game's in Taiwan, but it's just like the other things we talked about. It's not, you know, this isn't local to Taiwan. 01:24:16.62 Dave This is probably everywhere in the 1980s, you know, it's, you know, not even, not even like 15 years ago or something. 01:24:19.82 Jill Mm hmm. Yeah. 01:24:25.71 Dave This is, it's almost like ancient history as far as, you know, mental health and mental care goes, you know, uh, hmm. 01:24:32.02 Jill Yeah. And then they also talk a lot off handed. It's not something that comes up directly to you, but they talk a lot about what the parents are kind of doing to make their daughter better. um So I believe the mom is trying to get her to take all these different vitamins and all these different pills. And we do see that a little bit later. And the dad is turning to religion, spiritual medicine in some sort of way. 01:25:03.00 Dave spiritual medicine. Yeah. 01:25:06.33 Jill I guess it is something that, like quote unquote, helps. And he thinks it helps because she gets better, but it's like one of those coincidence kind of things where she, I don't know if the daughter gets less pressure or if this is after she's, no, it's not after she's lost. 01:25:32.00 Jill Maybe it's when she's getting into the competition and they're both excited and happy for her, but somehow the pressure has kind of taken off of her. 01:25:39.47 Dave Yeah. 01:25:40.31 Jill And then suddenly she's all better and they don't put it together that it was the lack of pressure or the lack of um anxiety. 01:25:41.78 Dave Mm hmm. 01:25:50.85 Jill He connects it to the fact that he took her to this mentor. 01:25:56.53 Dave Yeah, it's ah it's right after the second place finish in the singing competition when she gets much worse. So it should be simple, you know, cause and effect. Look at this, you know, she was fine. And then the singing competition and now she's sick again. 01:26:13.99 Dave What conclusions can we draw from this? But he's not that kind of person. he He thinks that he has all the answers. um And I think that there is a possibility that talking to this mentor, talking to somebody who's not her parents, may have served as a sort of therapy in a way to help her help her out a little bit. And like, maybe there were some little techniques for like, Hey, if you feel your, you know, if you feel your breathing getting like that, here's something that you can try. There might've been something that was genuinely helpful there. Um, but it is probably in combination with a lack of high pressure situations at home. 01:26:56.41 Jill Yeah. It's so interesting that this mentor is as much the antagonist as anything in this game, because this is a person who you discover in great detail later is very good at figuring out what people's weaknesses and failings and fears and doubts are and using them for her financial gain. 01:27:07.32 Dave Yeah. 01:27:20.68 Dave listen Yeah. That's, I mean, that's cult leaders, right? Like that's how cults work. That's how people get into stuff like that is. 01:27:32.80 Dave something that will help you either find a place to belong or that appeals to helping, like you said, finding those weaknesses that can be exploited to get people to join. 01:27:43.86 Dave And that's how she makes her money from these people. 01:27:44.24 Jill Yeah. 01:27:47.44 Dave And that's one of the things that drives the money problem in the family is that she requires a lot of money. 01:27:54.82 Jill h 01:27:54.94 Dave And Ah Feng Yu is giving a huge portion of the family's money to her for this continuing treatment. 01:28:01.71 Jill And it's. And he, and they don't ever say, he doesn't ever say, and a lot of the time I don't think the game ever says giving money to her. They say giving money to Guanyin. 01:28:15.25 Jill Like they talk about giving it as an offering to this to like a spiritual figure. 01:28:24.55 Dave Yeah, this spirit yeah the framing of it. 01:28:26.10 Jill But Yeah. 01:28:27.06 Dave Yeah, so it's not it's not this woman. 01:28:28.27 Jill So it's like. 01:28:29.84 Dave It's it's for the the spirit 01:28:32.58 Jill Right. and they're kind of hiding the reality from reality. So it's like it's so much harder and so much more ingrained in him to be able to pull him out of that situation because now he believes that he is connected to a higher being. And that helps his ego because I am special. I am beloved of a higher being, a greater purpose. Um, 01:28:58.63 Dave Yeah. 01:28:59.20 Jill And getting him pulled out of that situation was like, no, actually you've been fooled. You have been tricked by someone and you're giving money to a charlatan who is like bleeding you dry is a much harder conversation when someone has convinced themselves. 01:29:15.77 Jill Actually things are bad because I haven't given enough money to whatever the powers that be. 01:29:23.38 Dave yeah 01:29:25.77 Dave it's ah It's almost like the worst thing that happened to Mei Shin is that the mentor helped her out at the beginning, and that gave Feng Yu all the confidence in the world that like this is where the results are. 01:29:32.64 Jill who 01:29:38.91 Dave unlike The doctors, they don't know shit. 01:29:41.05 Jill Yeah. 01:29:41.41 Dave She knows how to help, and Sigu Guan Yin is the path to ah healing her. 01:29:43.34 Jill Right. 01:29:50.36 Jill It is such a good example of that adage of like, charlatans are always sure of themselves and and like knowledgeable intelligent people are very rarely sure of themselves so it's so much easier to believe someone who's like a hundred percent this is what you have to do and it will work versus someone who's like we might need to seek other things this might you know so it's a great way to show this is how people fall into these traps in a 01:30:00.13 Dave Mm hmm. Hmm hmm. 01:30:25.76 Jill a very compassionate way. This is not trying to make us feel like the father is stupid or like, how could you fall for this? You can really see how easy it would be to go down this path. 01:30:39.50 Dave Yeah. And you said earlier, and this is like, this is kind of the ultimate expression of that, that he very clearly loves Mei Shin. And the reason he's getting in with this, you know, this, this mentor, this fraudster is because this is where he thinks the results will be to heal Mei Shin. 01:31:00.66 Dave So he loves her obviously. And there's that scene with the storybook where like, uh, they had to cancel a vacation because, um, 01:31:07.09 Jill yeah 01:31:09.94 Dave He said it was because the weather might cause one of these events of her respiratory symptoms. um But she, Mei Shin, was sad that she couldn't go on a trip with her parents. 01:31:22.44 Dave So he goes in and he reads the storybook and he indulges all of her little kid ideas about how the story should go. And it's like, you get to see for like this brief, you know, 20 minute section, him just being like a wonderful father. 01:31:31.25 Jill That was so hard. 01:31:37.69 Jill Mm hmm. 01:31:37.80 Dave ah So you really do see like, he's not a good person. But he will take the time and he's expending all this energy in other directions to help his kid out. 01:31:48.97 Jill Yeah, and it is something so heartbreaking. When you realize that the daughter has been trying to get his attention and show him 01:32:01.20 Dave Mm hmm. 01:32:02.15 Jill her worth, in a way, um by making these little origami flowers, which in the story, the flowers represent the thing that heals the father. 01:32:04.45 Dave Yep. 01:32:17.33 Dave Mm hmm. 01:32:17.37 Jill um So I mean, she is literally obsessively making these. 01:32:23.21 Dave Mm 01:32:23.40 Jill they're like At one point, you have like a whole room of them or something. 01:32:26.89 Dave hmm. 01:32:27.31 Jill and you will learn kind of towards the end of the game that she has to her mind made the perfect version of this origami flower and she's put it at the back of the story and the next time he reads the story he will see it he will know that she loves him he will understand her worth And then you realize he's never seen it. 01:32:52.45 Jill He's never come across it until we assume after she's passed. 01:32:52.68 Dave Yeah. 01:32:57.95 Jill The timing gets a little confusing as you go along because you can say one way or the other. 01:33:02.87 Dave Mm 01:33:04.08 Jill like Maybe he's looking back after having had her passing and seeing this and has kind of rattled his brain and he starts to go off the deep end or maybe it was before and that's what pushes him. 01:33:10.03 Dave hmm. 01:33:20.32 Jill But it's really sad to see this storybook, which was a symbol of their good relationship and how much they loved each other, um to see it ignored that he had not picked it up again. 01:33:35.19 Dave Yeah, basically like through that whole storyline when they're talking about how Mei Shin is making these origami flowers and all of that, he's just obsessively like working on scripts that are never going to get picked up or doing stuff with the mentor. so It's it really sad, just like you said, she's doing everything she can as a, ah you know, a little kid and he's just, you know, ignoring her. 01:34:02.58 Dave Another example of him being like, you know, I know what's going on. Nothing else really matters right now. 01:34:07.51 Jill Right. 01:34:09.30 Dave Cause I know how to fix this. 01:34:11.15 Jill If he could get out of his own way, everything would work out. But because he can't, that's the ultimate downfall of this character and all the characters around him. 01:34:15.72 Dave Yep. 01:34:23.09 Dave and sir 01:34:23.21 Jill Because he, because he is going to fall and because of the position he is in, in, in this family and in this life and in this culture, if he falls, everyone falls with him. 01:34:34.17 Dave Yeah, at least the way he sees it. Yeah. 01:34:36.18 Jill Yeah. 01:34:37.62 Dave so this like I think the the compounding kind of like erosion of his control over the family with his wife getting ready to leave or even like leaving again timing is really weird because it's a very if you try to like talk about what happens and where it falls in Like the timeline of when Machen dies and what is the game? 01:35:02.51 Dave Is it him exploring his mindscape and his memories? It's one of those where it's like your character is working through the inner workings of their like subconscious to discover the terrible truth about what they did that they have repressed or something like that. 01:35:16.89 Jill Yeah. That's sort of the camp I'm in. The whole game starts after her death and he is working through the fact that his daughter was dead. 01:35:19.88 Dave Yeah. 01:35:23.11 Dave Yeah, I, yeah. 01:35:29.56 Jill Like it probably in my head cannon, like it probably has only been 01:35:29.71 Dave Yeah. 01:35:36.55 Jill long enough for it to settle into his brain that she's dead like it isn't for my mind it's not been a long time since she's died and now he's like oh how did I get here and he's going slowly losing his mind 01:35:36.82 Dave Mm hmm. 01:35:51.87 Dave Yeah, it's kind of a show. So it's really ambiguous at the end of the game after you find out what happened to Mei Shin. There's a scene with him sitting on the couch in front of the TV. The TV is on like all static and he's just kind of sitting there motionless, but his pose is such that he might be dead. He might not be. He might be asleep, something like that. So. 01:36:15.87 Dave various avenues where he could be forced to travel through his, you know, his psyche and uncover what happened here. So um let's talk about what happened to Meishin. So Uh, he gets more desperate that, you know, she gets really sick after this competition and obviously the mentor can help. So she walks him through this ritual, uh, first, I think, um, for him. So there's a ritual for him and then the ritual for her. The ritual for him is the one where you go inside, like his inner, I forget what they call it, like his inner palace or something like that. 01:37:00.65 Dave And that's the one where he needs to prove his devotion to, hey, devotion, ah to Sighu Guan Yin by first scooping out one of his eyes, then pulling out his tongue, and the tongue scene is real gross too. 01:37:17.96 Jill Yeah, real brutal. 01:37:19.47 Dave Yeah. ah Yeah, again, eye stuff. 01:37:21.39 Jill Every time this scene is set up so fantastically because by the first ah sacrifice of your eyeball you recognize everywhere you go is going to be worse and worse sacrifice of something and you don't know what it's going to be or how it's going to and you walk up to these slow walk you're in some kind of supernatural realm at this point 01:37:33.05 Dave Yeah. ah Yes. 01:37:48.53 Jill um you are slowly walking up to a pedestal by pedestal um and there is some sort of implement there and for the most part you have no idea what you're gonna do with these implements so like the first one with the eyeball i was like okay this could be an eyeball scooper you know but but the tongue one i was so taken back because i had i was like what on earth are we supposed to do with this hook like thing 01:38:01.14 Dave Yeah. 01:38:06.73 Dave Yep. 01:38:16.44 Dave who 01:38:17.98 Jill And then you just put it on like, oh. 01:38:20.61 Dave It's really gross and like, just, just think about it like this. what it would mean to pull your tongue out and like, you know, physically, like the tongue is not, you know it's much bigger than you think it is. 01:38:29.70 Jill Right. 01:38:33.13 Dave And it's like it would be an ordeal to pull it out. It's ridiculous. 01:38:37.68 Jill It's not that he gets to slice it, like he literally has to rip it out. 01:38:39.70 Dave No. 01:38:43.10 Jill And it talks a lot about because this is, this is his psychological, um, construction. 01:38:51.72 Dave this part where he's taking out his eye and his tongue and that stuff. 01:38:54.97 Jill Yes. And even in the game, it is set up like that because it is set up as the mentor walking him through a sort of vision through the realms of the afterlife um to retrieve. 01:38:56.13 Dave Yeah. 01:39:03.68 Dave Yeah. 01:39:08.50 Jill I think the idea is that the daughter's spirit's been wandering and they need to get it back. 01:39:13.49 Dave yeah He needs to, I think, it i so the way i I understood it was like, this is step one, before you can do the ritual where the daughter will help, or where Sigu Guanyin will help Meixin, he first needs to prove his worth to Sigu Guanyin by doing this. 01:39:33.31 Jill So this is all of his construction, how he views the sacrifices he's made for his family, essentially. 01:39:42.41 Dave Hmm. 01:39:42.81 Jill So we are seeing not only his take into extreme ah ideas of what his jobs have been, what he thinks he has accomplished for his family. 01:39:57.30 Jill um And if you are thinking from his perspective, if you are the sort of person who's, I'm the sort of person who's ripped my eyes out and pulled my tongue out for my family, to have all of this bad happening to him, to have his wife leave him is something that would be 01:40:07.80 Dave Yeah. 01:40:16.72 Jill Unfathomable. 01:40:18.03 Dave Mm-hmm. 01:40:18.21 Jill Unfathomable. I can't even say that word right now. um So you see a lot from his perspective in this sort of absolutely bizarre, gory, supernatural um situation. 01:40:31.84 Jill and ah We talked a little bit about ah we teased how some people did not enjoy this particular section of the game because they had praised how down to earth and grounded the rest of the game is. 01:40:41.54 Dave This section, yeah. 01:40:48.23 Jill But I feel like this game is or this part of the game is still down to earth and grounded. It's just his construction of what's happening. So it's not actually happening. 01:40:58.54 Dave That, yeah. 01:41:00.45 Jill I don't think there's any argument that he's actually transported to the afterlife. 01:41:05.20 Dave Right, the only thing that I think actually happened that like analogs with this is part of like ritual number two is there's a blood sacrifice as part of the recipe for it. And I think that that's what, after he rips his tongue out, the third one is he stabs some like scissors through his hand and collects blood in a bowl. And I think something like that probably did actually happen. But yeah, I don't think that this is too fantastical for the story because there's been a lot of fantastical stuff that's happened in here. 01:41:38.97 Jill Right. 01:41:39.31 Dave There's an evil version of his wife chasing him around. There's, you know, you never know what kind of fantasy thing is waiting for you whenever you open a door. Um, there's the part where you walk down the stairs and the big serpent from the folk tale is like drowning in the wine down there, wine or blood. 01:41:54.00 Jill who And that folktale is so interesting too, because like, the snake is a good guy. 01:41:59.10 Dave Yeah. 01:42:02.14 Dave Yep. 01:42:02.99 Jill um And it's twisted again. Repetition of theme, so perfect, becomes a thing of fear, even though it is supposed to be a good thing in the story. 01:42:15.20 Dave Hmm. In the story, it's good. 01:42:16.84 Jill um I think 01:42:17.58 Dave Yeah. 01:42:20.70 Jill I think people may have misinterpreted this because the criticisms I saw made me think back to Fatal Frame, which is one of my favorite of scarier games. 01:42:31.64 Dave Hmm. 01:42:32.53 Jill um and it starts again very grounded and then like a lot of these quote-unquote scary games start with like plausible what's really happening mystery sort of things and then they just dive headlong into like spoilers for anyone who hasn't played Fatal Frame uh dive headlong into like oh you're in hell and it's all demons and then it's like oh this is this is much less scary because now it's just kind of ridiculous like 01:42:56.12 Dave Hmm. Yeah. 01:43:03.06 Jill we've gone and jumped the shark here. But that's not what's happening in this game. 01:43:07.84 Dave Yeah. 01:43:08.05 Jill This is a manifestation of psychology. this is not He's not actually magically in this realm chasing after his daughter's spirit. 01:43:18.83 Jill like This is him It is showing his absolute desperation in a way that you can play. That is not just a like, watch this video to see all the scary things that are going on in his brain. 01:43:29.33 Dave Yeah. 01:43:35.61 Jill It's literally acting out. the elements that are happening to him and how he feels like he has been doing and what he's been doing, how devoted he is to being a good father, a good husband, a good man in general. 01:43:55.49 Dave that desperation, like the the desperation to figuratively scoop out your eye, rip out your tongue, and then stab yourself through the hand is 01:44:05.28 Jill So unnecessary, by the way, if you just need a little bit of blood, like, come on, just. 01:44:08.39 Dave Yeah, you just do the hand thing once the tongue can stay the eyeball can stay, you know, um, but that desperation is what drives him to do this completely fucking off the wall ritual to that. He thinks is going to save the nation. So. 01:44:26.86 Dave The ritual for those who are playing along is a ritual that kind of echoes that folktale about how the serpent saved the village boy and then was crowned a guardian by Sigu Kuan Yin. And so what happens is um the person who's doing it has to prepare a pure wine. ah They need to place a spirit serpent inside, so just put a snake in the wine bottle, offer some blood into a container, mix the wine in there, and then ah the the wording of this, place the subject in the container, ah which 01:45:10.86 Dave a short thing throughout the game in the apartments, there's a wine, like fermentation jug and in the kitchen. And if for a second, I was like, did they put mesh in that thing? 01:45:20.30 Jill Yeah, no, I was oh definitely worried that that's what was going on. 01:45:22.99 Dave Yeah, but it's the bathtub. So this happens, he fills the bathtub with this wine serpent blood mixture, puts Meishin in the bathtub, locks the door so she can't leave, and the ritual is explained as the subject will leave the container alone when fully recovered. Nobody under any circumstances shall interrupt the ritual. 01:45:49.25 Dave Um, and there's a checklist and on the checklist, everything's checked off except that last part where the subject is going to come out. Uh, and the bathroom door has been locked the entire game, except for one part where you have to go wash your hands. 01:46:03.34 Dave Other than that, it's been that forbidden room. 01:46:05.11 Jill And you wash your hands, by the way. You get blood on your hands. I don't like it. It really freaks me out. 01:46:08.84 Dave Yeah, yeah it's ah it's pretty gross. um So the way that this is like plays out is you read the ritual and then um there's a time when you're walking downstairs from the mentor's house into the apartment because the mentor lives upstairs. 01:46:27.39 Dave um 01:46:28.68 Jill Convenient. 01:46:28.95 Dave The first, yeah, convenient. Hey, look, the savior is just up the hall. Look at that. 01:46:32.99 Jill Uh-huh. 01:46:33.60 Dave um So the first phone call is the mentor explaining how to do the ritual. The second phone call Feng Yu has called because it's not working. 01:46:43.97 Dave She's still moving around in there. She hasn't come out yet. It's been a while. And the mentor says, ah you need to be patient. It might take up to seven days and you must show your devotion and don't open the door. 01:46:57.64 Dave And then the third phone call, the mentor's phone has been disconnected. So she has skipped town. She realizes that a kid has died on the floor below me. Um, so she's out of here and You finally, like, once this is all done, you walk in, you open the bathroom door, you feel, you hear the floor is wet and you're just left to, yeah you know, infer what happened to May Shin, just this terrible death in here. 01:47:27.78 Jill Right. And it's again, bringing up all of them, why didn't she, why didn't she leave on her own? She's sick, one, but also she's been told by her father that this is religiously, culturally, familiarly, the thing she has to do. 01:47:45.85 Dave Mm hmm. 01:47:46.31 Jill So she's not left this bathtub of her own will as well, because she just wants her father's approval. She just wants to be loved unconditionally by him and prove that she's the best daughter. 01:48:01.88 Dave And she wants to feel better. Like there's parts where she talks about how like, she doesn't want to be sick, she wants to go sing and she wants to go to school and all that stuff. 01:48:03.63 Jill Yeah. 01:48:11.72 Dave And she just wants to feel better too. 01:48:15.25 Jill So like if she had been given the tools to be able to figure out what was going on, to be able to stand up for herself, she probably would have gotten out of that bathtub. But because she wasn't, again, failing both of her parents, but the father especially has put her in a place where she can't defend herself and then is told she has to defend herself in order to prove that she is now cured. and That is such a sad, sad story. It's one of those, like, it could have been so easily prevented and therefore is sadder than if he had just gone in and stabbed her to death. 01:49:00.47 Dave yeah and that's it's a 01:49:04.47 Dave That is what makes this like so interesting to me. because ah like i I think fairly early on, like people can probably jump to the conclusion that he killed her or that she died because of him, but no one would ever guess that this is the way that it happened. This is so creative from a storytelling perspective. um and and so much It's so much more terrible than if he had just choked her to death or something like that. 01:49:33.44 Jill Right, and it would have been over sooner, the way that they 01:49:35.92 Dave Oh yeah, this is a terrible way to die. 01:49:38.20 Jill The way that they pull out the story through these telephone calls and you are so you, the player, are slowly piecing together exactly how she is dying and exactly what's happening to her and the excruciating nature of what she's going through. like ah you know I've been in a bathtub for a couple hours and I'm like, oh, I already feel bad. 01:50:02.02 Dave That's water. 01:50:02.18 Jill like 01:50:02.80 Dave Yeah. 01:50:03.16 Jill Yeah, she's in water. She's cold. Like, it's not being heated after a while. She's just in this cold, snakey, whiny, bloody 01:50:14.25 Dave Why? yep bath Yeah. Yeah. 01:50:16.18 Jill yeah so The alcohol in the wine is going to start eating away. like Just the more you think about what's happening to her in there, and it's such a genius thing that they never show you. 01:50:28.72 Jill They don't show you any of the results. 01:50:29.06 Dave ye 01:50:30.60 Jill They don't show you what has happened. They don't give you your brain that sort of... like It's a weird way to put it, but they don't give your brain that kind of satisfaction. 01:50:40.31 Dave The closure. Yeah. 01:50:41.20 Jill Yeah, to know like, okay, that's what's happened. ah And it's so it's so easy to miss all these implications. 01:50:45.19 Dave Yeah. 01:50:52.34 Jill And if you're not the sort of person who's going to sit there and dwell on what was actually happening, I can assume that you're going to miss out on like, I assume there are people who play this game and just kind of don't understand exactly what happened at the end. 01:50:58.86 Dave Yeah. 01:51:08.53 Dave I can see that if I wasn't taking podcast notes, maybe it would have not. Well, if I hadn't spoiled the story for myself years ago, but, 01:51:17.62 Jill Right. I think part of me too, I think part of but just being human is like, you don't want to think too much about it. So I think there is a temptation to sort of be like, okay, I get the implication something bad happened and I don't want to think too much about it onward. 01:51:34.37 Jill But I think the game is much stronger if you do think about what was going on. 01:51:39.04 Dave Yeah, because it's so like what happens to Mei Shin is so terrible. It's one of the worst deaths I've ever seen in a horror game. 01:51:50.43 Jill i've ever heard of like 01:51:50.67 Dave And yeah, exactly. like It's very fucked up. And so the more you think about it, and that's, you know, this is great psychological horror, because the more you think about it, the more you think about all the decisions that went into this situation, ah the decisions by the mentor, the decisions by her dad, and her decision, as you pointed out, to just stay faithful that hey, my dad is trying to help me and the mentor has helped me before. 01:52:16.13 Jill I've ever heard of it. Right. The innocence of a child that, like your dad, is doing the best thing for you and the complete trust she has of her father is the thing that murders her. 01:52:23.68 Dave Yeah. Yeah. 01:52:27.44 Jill And that's, yeah. 01:52:27.90 Dave It's brutal, yeah. ah So what did you make of the sequence after this? So like you open the door, the screen goes white and all you hear is the wet footsteps. So like, you know, 01:52:43.65 Dave you know, she's been moving around and stuff like that. But you know, you know, she's dead. But um it doesn't show you that what actually happens is it goes to white and there's this dream sequence where she talks to her dad and they go to a playground and stuff like that. What did you make of that? 01:53:01.62 Jill I think this is a continuation of what was happening with the sacrificial scenes. 01:53:09.35 Dave Mm hmm. 01:53:09.68 Jill um i believe that his brain cannot cannot deal with what he has seen in this bathtub. He cannot deal with the fact that it is on him. um I think it would have been it's weird to say it like this, but like a satisfying fairy tale ending to have it wrap up in. He. Yeah, I know. Right. ah He opens the door. He sees the horrific scene and takes finally accounts for his failings as a human being like 01:53:45.28 Jill I don't think they wanted to give you that kind of satisfaction, that kind of conclusion. So the ending is as unsettling as the rest of the game, even though it is this very beautiful dream sequence, but it also perhaps gives you less nightmares. 01:54:07.39 Dave it. Yeah, so it's like, it's nice and pretty. And like, you get to see Mei Shin and she's really happy. And there are, you know, she's, she's like, you know, let's, let's, let's play. And then, you know, let's go home. 01:54:18.25 Dave and it's really twisting the knife because you know what happened to the nation in real life. And it's just this reminder that she was like this little angel of a kid and at the end. 01:54:27.05 Jill Right. And a reminder that he never, he didn't learn his lesson. Like he did not. That's what his brain has. 01:54:31.70 Dave Yeah. 01:54:37.72 Dave It. 01:54:37.75 Jill put in this place of this horrific thing. 01:54:39.40 Dave Yeah. 01:54:40.15 Jill It's like he hasn't learned his lesson. He's not taken accountability. He's still the same horrific egotistical person. 01:54:52.08 Jill All of the things that drew him to murdering his child are still there and continue on and yeah. 01:55:00.43 Dave Yeah. There's I mean, there is an angle to this. I think you could take it Like this, thinking that things are okay now. 01:55:12.58 Dave Like if he's that far gone and he's that broken that this is like, he sees this and it's like, she's, she's okay now. 01:55:23.89 Jill She sees the rituals complete. 01:55:24.25 Dave She's healed. 01:55:26.37 Jill She actually made like, yeah. 01:55:26.68 Dave Yeah. 01:55:30.48 Jill It's interesting that I think there are a lot of interpretations of this and all of them can be true at the same time. 01:55:37.38 Dave Mm hmm. It's a I think it's a good way to end the game. And you're like, definitely right that had the game ended and you saw whatever version of, you know, like a mannequin in a bathtub, you know, a stained red or something like that, like, that would be less it would be almost less effective in a way then. 01:55:59.28 Jill Yeah. Your imagination is always more horrific than anything you see. 01:56:00.91 Dave Yeah. 01:56:04.20 Dave for that specific type of thing. Yeah. And just when those phone calls are playing and you're walking down that hallway and you know, like it's time to open the bathroom. 01:56:14.67 Dave I was like, I don't want to open that door. 01:56:16.74 Jill Nope. Don't want to touch that. Yeah. 01:56:18.55 Dave Cause exactly. Like you said, your imagination, you know, it's, it's going to, it's going to be much more impactful than anything they could make in the game. 01:56:30.01 Dave Ooh, devotion. 01:56:33.01 Jill lighthearted three hour gameplay. 01:56:35.04 Dave but yeah Uh, and a, uh, really, really fun two hour discussion here. So, um, unless there's anything else about devotion that you want to talk about. 01:56:46.14 Jill ah You know, I'm going to think of something in like 20 minutes and be like, everyone get back together. 01:56:48.71 Dave Yeah. That's the way it always goes. so Yeah. 01:56:50.14 Jill We have to say something. But I think, I think we've covered ah everything. 01:56:51.87 Dave At least, uh, yeah. Well, um, I appreciate you taking the time. Um, this, so like. 01:57:02.54 Dave You said you played Nine Sols. I haven't played it yet. I'm waiting for when I have time to do it, but detention is... 01:57:09.52 Jill You're waiting for a time that doesn't exist. 01:57:11.71 Dave I know, I know. This is what we're going to talk about on the podcast very soon. 01:57:13.48 Jill We're going to talk about that. 01:57:16.24 Dave um Detention is really, really good. It's a very different style of horror, but it's a really good game. ah Devotion is incredibly good. 01:57:27.28 Dave And I've heard a lot of good stuff about Nine Sols, and I played the demo, and I enjoyed the demo a lot. And the demo has some really like graphic stuff in it too, like kind of it. 01:57:35.64 Jill Yeah. 01:57:37.29 Dave You see that cutesy art style and like, look how colorful it is. And then someone's head gets ripped off, like, like 10 minutes into the game. 01:57:42.22 Jill Yeah, a hundred percent. 01:57:44.53 Dave Um, 01:57:45.00 Jill There is actually a point in the game where things start getting a lot creepier and you can kind of see they're like horror chops as well. 01:57:53.08 Dave Yeah. 01:57:54.49 Jill But that game is so good. 01:57:54.69 Dave So. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna do it. 01:57:56.86 Jill You should go play it. 01:57:59.13 Dave um But I was gonna say like between this and detention and what I know of Nine Sols, ah Red Candles just, they're they're basically up on that list now of like, whatever their next game is, I'm playing it right away. 01:58:13.13 Jill Yeah. 01:58:13.37 Dave You know, they are just really, really good. 01:58:18.44 Jill And because of how different their latest game is, I am excited because it's not 01:58:22.80 Dave Mm-hmm. 01:58:27.22 Jill I don't know what's coming, you know, as when devotion came out, I'm like, okay, their next game is going to be another type of horror game. 01:58:28.93 Dave Yeah. 01:58:35.09 Jill But then you get soul's like action games and you're like, what? So whatever they choose to do, I hope it's really different. and it seems like they've got a really great foundation for really anything they want to try at this point. 01:58:50.77 Jill So. 01:58:51.24 Dave Yeah, agreed. So, uh, Jill, thank you for taking two hours to talk about devotion, uh, almost as long as it takes to play the game. 01:58:57.45 Jill Thank you for letting me blather on. Oh, what if people do it as a companion and they like play the game, listen to the section that we talk about it and play the game? 01:59:08.54 Dave That would be, I think that would be a confusing experience, but, um, yeah. 01:59:14.15 Jill Go try it out. Someone tell us. 01:59:15.72 Dave Yeah, someone, someone be the guinea pig. Try that out. Uh, but I, I appreciate you taking the time again. I'm looking forward to the next one that we can do. And, um, I will, uh, for everyone listening, I'll throw a link down again in the show notes to the Indian former and the indie council. So you can check out everything that Jill's doing and, um, you know, it's been a pleasure as always. 01:59:37.55 Jill Thank you so much for having me on. 01:59:39.49 Dave Yeah, and for everybody listening, ah if you have made it to the end, as always, you are my heroes. Even if you've listened to the discussion about devotion, this is a game that I think even if you've been spoiled is definitely still worth playing because we cannot possibly describe in words how some of these things look and the way the way your play experience goes as you go through some of these things. So definitely still worth playing. So again, a recommendation. And as always tune in next week for the next game to come out of the backlog.