Often in horror, the home is as important a character as anything else. We want our homes to represent safety and to be spaces where we’re protected from fear. But that’s often an idealized vision of reality. Homes are private spaces, and even the most everyday home has its secrets. Facing those familial secrets can be the greatest horror of all, and Red Candle Games’ Devotion forces players to face that trauma head-on.

Devotion is the second horror game from Detention developer Red Candle, a studio based in Taipei, Taiwan. Whereas Detention takes place within a school in 1960s Taiwan, Devotion is set entirely in a 1980s Taiwanese apartment complex. Using a looping system similar to the mechanics of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s P.T., Devotion revisits a family’s empty apartment over the years. Pulling inspiration from the games that came before it, Devotion builds upon the legacy of the first-person horror mystery.

Playing almost entirely as the family’s father, we experience how the atmosphere changes over time — unpacked boxes, layout shifts, clutter piling up over the years. There are unwashed dishes, leftover birthday balloons, photo albums, stacked books. The apartment is unmistakably a home. Familiar even in its peculiarities, Devotion uses its nostalgic setting to create unsettling tension in the first-person atmospheric horror game. Devotion is, ultimately, a family story that uses Taiwanese folklore and religion to build out a full, rich world. It’s an especially stunning accomplishment in a game that’s set almost entirely in one apartment over a span of three or so hours.

The architectural drama of Devotion’s apartment sets up the framework for the inner workings of the game’s family, each of which has experienced a kind of trauma. The mother, an actress, leaves her work for a quiet life with her new child and screenwriter husband. The family struggles when the father’s scripts don’t sell; all are exasperated by their child’s mystery illness. You can almost liken it to the psychological horror of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House where family drama blurs with supernatural elements, and it’s hard to tell what’s real or imagined.

“We expect our home to be a place of safety and security.”

“While the home is the place where the family gathered and spent time together, it’s also the one place to hide any hideous secrets that may not be observed by outsiders,” Red Candle’s PR director Tiff Liu tells The Verge. “And the dark history of any house, created by its residents along with the things that they’ve done, in my opinion, is what makes a home truly terrifying.”

Margee Kerr, a sociologist and author of Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear, tells The Verge that the expectations of what a home should be play into the fear that’s generated from a game set in those spaces. “Part of fear can be measured by a difference between expectations and what we actually experience,” Kerr says. “We expect our home to be a place of safety and security, where we can be vulnerable and expose our true selves. When you turn that into a place of the total opposite, it’s completely betraying our expectations.”

Because of that setting and its themes, Devotion is drawing natural comparisons to first-person exploration games like Fullbright’s 2013 game Gone Home and, of course, P.T., a 2014 playable teaser for a now-canceled Silent Hills game. (Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor corroborated this comparison, tweeting that Devotion feels like “P.T. meets Gone Home in 1980s Taiwan.”) “It’s fair to say that we were blown away by the craftsmanship of P.T. when it came out,” Liu says. “The atmosphere and the pace of the game were executed flawlessly. As both gamers and developers, it really motivated us to recreate something similar in the horror genre.”

Action in Devotion is subtle. Instead of monsters, the horror is embedded into the empty spaces. Within the gameplay loop, Red Candle builds up expectations for the apartment and then bucks them. Photos nailed to the wall feel familiar, then they’re changed. A door remains locked until it’s suddenly opened. As the game moves forward and its mysteries unravel, the atmospheric elements of Devotion, heavy on Taiwanese influence, shift as reality steadily blurs — whether it’s an ‘80s variety show playing on TV, specific brands of sauce in the cupboard, or a traditional fish dish laid out on the table. Red Candle plays with cultural and spiritual symbols, like the lucky red Arowana fish, to build out an atmosphere that’s supported by devotion and beliefs.

Liu also pointed to other atmospheric games, like What Remains of Edith Finch and Layers of Fear, as inspiration for Devotion, but the developers wanted the game to feel familiar to Taiwanese players. “Taiwan is a country that rarely gets displayed and showcased in games, which in a way, plays to our advantage,” Liu says.

Like Gone Home and P.T., Devotion uses the assumption of the home as a safe space as an entrance into horror. Expectations of the horror genre play into the experience — that in this everyday home, there’s something to be scared of. So even in the quiet moments, the anticipation is feeding our fears.

In this everyday home, there’s something to be scared of

In a 2015 Kill Screen piece by Gareth Damian Martin, “The Corridor and the Corner,” Martin likened P.T.’s hallways to classic ghost-storytelling features, the “and then.” There’s an expectation when following a long corridor in a horror game that the story will turn at the physical corner of the L-shaped hallway. Sometimes it’s a large, shocking change, like a drastic color shift to red lighting and all of the paintings turning to eyeballs. But other times, it’s subtle. “If the corridor hasn’t changed, then something else has,” Martin wrote.

Devotion has hallways, but Red Candle uses doors as the “and then.” Moving from room to room, tiny details change, often seen first through a door frame. A light flickers. A doll, once laying on a creaky bed, disappears. The next time a corner is turned, what was once a string of Christmas lights is now a string of eyeballs. (A reference, perhaps, to P.T.?) Each corner turn starts to establish a pattern, however inconsistent. It encourages players to seek out the game’s next change, to continue exploring even after finding something horrifying.

It’s why Devotion’s had success on Twitch since its debut on February 19th where tens of thousands of viewers are watching streamers play through the first-person horror game. “People who watch game streams often feel rewarded when they see streamers have emotional reactions toward the games they play,” Liu says. “And due to the fact that fear is one of the strongest emotions a person can display, I think [a] horror game in its nature is very attractive for both the streamers and its audience.”

Twitch streamers’ approach to Devotion varies. Some brute-force through the game’s psychological mysteries, unflinching at the intermittent jump-scares and creepy notes. Others peak around every corner, turning back time and again to work up the courage to move forward.

Kerr says that by watching someone play a horror game, we’re forcing ourselves to feel a similar fear or anxiety by re-creating it. “It’s even more immersive when it’s a live stream [over a movie] because it’s happening in that moment,” she said. “There’s a sense of urgency. The removal of that protective frame.” With a movie, the cast has moved on. But in a live-streamed video game, you’re watching a person’s reactions as they happen.

Human response to fear, whatever the approach, is relatable. It’s entertaining. By viewing another person play a horror game, there’s the experience of the fear itself, but there’s also a safe distance. We can imagine how we might react, outsourcing some of the control — or lack thereof — that games use to scare us. Do we take the approaching corridor head-on? Or do we hesitate? Whatever approach, in Devotion, the horror of the home is inescapable.