Devotion, the indie horror game from Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games, is now on sale on the developer’s site. The game was pulled from sale on Steam after a backlash from Chinese players who had discovered a piece of art hidden in it that likened Chinese president Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.
Since its delisting from Steam, Devotion has been largely unavailable for purchase. Red Candle Games tweeted in December that Devotion would soon be available on GOG, but GOG quickly backtracked, claiming that it had received “many messages from gamers” and, based on these, “decided not to list the game in [its] store.”
Devotion was also made available in a limited run of physical copies, but only for sale in Red Candle’s native Taiwan – so it’s been difficult or impossible to get your hands on a legitimate digital copy of the fascinating game for about two years now. Fortunately, Red Candle has now made both Devotion and its other game, Detention, available for sale directly from its own store, and the games are completely DRM free.
The base game edition of Devotion currently costs $17.08 (about £12.30), and you can pick up the game bundled with its official soundtrack for $20.68 (£14.89). The complete collection, which includes Devotion, Red Candle’s other game Detention, and both official soundtracks, is priced at $33.56 (£24.16).
If you’re interested in Devotion, it may be a good idea to hop on the opportunity to buy it now. Considering how quickly other points of sale have been shut down in the past, there’s no guarantee that whatever hosting service Red Candle is using now will remain available for long.
We’ve purchased and downloaded a copy of Detention for testing purposes, and it works just fine – you don’t even need to install it. You’ll simply have to unzip the file you download from Red Candle.