Red Candle Games: A Taiwan Story That No Charm Could Stop

On January 13, 2017, a horror game set against the backdrop of 1960s Taiwan's White Terror era — Detention — launched on Steam. Two years later, the follow-up Devotion was completely banned in China over a paper charm bearing the words "Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh," and to this day cannot be purchased on Steam. Five years after that, the same studio released Nine Sols, sold 800,000 copies, and won the 2025 Sony Indie Game Award. Red Candle Games' ten years represent the most dramatic arc in Taiwanese indie gaming: telling stories from their own history, being banned from the largest market, then proving with their next game that they were still there.

Six People and a Classroom

Red Candle Games' predecessor was called "Prism Observer Studio," founded by six people in September 2015: Yao Shun-ting, Wang Kuang-hao, Wang Han-yu (brothers), Chiang Tung-yu, Chen Ching-heng, and Yang Shih-wei. ¹

The core concept came from an idea Yao Shun-ting had in 2013: to make a horror game out of the repressive atmosphere of Taiwan's martial-law era. The setting was a remote mountain high school in the 1960s; Taoist folk religion's paper charms and joss paper were the visual elements; the White Terror period's informants and blacklists were the narrative backbone. ²

On January 13, 2017, Detention launched on Steam.

📝 Curator's Note
Before Detention, games with Taiwanese historical subject matter were almost nonexistent. Japan had Taiko no Tatsujin and the Eiyuu Senki series; the West had the Assassin's Creed franchise. But no game had ever used Taiwan's own history as its material. What Red Candle did, in today's terms, would be called "original IP development of cultural heritage" — but when they started in 2015, that phrase wasn't yet in vogue.

The NT$260 Million Proof

Detention's results exceeded everyone's expectations.

The game quickly climbed Steam's global bestseller list. The 2019 film adaptation earned NT$260 million at the Taiwanese box office, becoming that year's top-grossing Taiwanese film and the only domestic film to break the NT$100 million mark that year. The film won five awards at the 56th Golden Horse Awards. ³

In 2020, PTS and Netflix jointly released a Detention TV series — 8 episodes, set in the late 1990s, echoing the film's 1960s timeline. ⁴

A game → a film → a TV series. Detention completed the entire path of cross-media adaptation for a Taiwanese game IP — and every step succeeded.

The Charm Incident

On February 19, 2019, Red Candle released their second game, Devotion — a first-person horror puzzle game set in a 1980s Taiwanese apartment building, telling the story of a father whose obsession with folk religion leads to family tragedy.

On launch day, simultaneous Twitch viewership broke 100,000. Sales surpassed one million copies within days. ⁶

Then someone discovered a paper charm in the game's environment.

In the four corners of the charm were the words "ne ma ba qi" (呢嘛叭唭, a string of nonsense sounds). In the center, in seal-script red characters: "Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh" (習近平小熊維尼). ⁷

The incident exploded within hours. Chinese distributor Indievent announced the termination of their partnership. Devotion was removed from Steam's Chinese region, then disappeared entirely from Steam worldwide. Detention was also flooded with negative reviews by Chinese players in retaliation, its approval rating dropping from "Overwhelmingly Positive" to "Mixed." Red Candle's Chinese publishing license was revoked, and investors sought compensation. ⁸

Co-founder Yang Shih-wei later reconstructed events in an interview: the charm was placeholder art that a member of the art team had put in during development. The planner was swamped and said "just throw something in for now," and then forgot to replace it. "It really was just an error — we thought everything that needed to be changed had been changed." ⁹

Whatever the truth, Devotion has been absent from Steam ever since. It was briefly listed on the GOG platform, but was quickly pulled under pressure. Red Candle ultimately set up their own independent storefront on their website, bypassing all third-party platforms.

⚠️ Disputed perspective
The central dispute in the charm incident is this: does a piece of placeholder art from the development process constitute a political statement? Red Candle said it was an error; the Chinese side treated it as deliberate provocation. The consequences of this incident extended far beyond the fate of one game — it made every Taiwanese game developer with eyes on the Chinese market realize that the threshold for political risk was far lower than anyone had imagined.

Nine Sols: Coming Back Through the Work

After the charm incident, Red Candle went silent for five years.

On May 31, 2024, Nine Sols launched on Steam. The genre was a complete pivot: a 2D side-scrolling action-adventure with a Taoist sci-fi setting, an ancient mythology worldview, and high-difficulty combat emphasizing parry mechanics. Players take the role of the avenger Yi (羿), slaying nine "Suns" in a world fusing Eastern aesthetics with cyberpunk. ¹⁰

On launch day it debuted at ninth on Steam's global hot sales chart. By its one-year anniversary (May 2025), cumulative sales had surpassed 800,000 copies. Steam approval rating has held steady at 95% or above, with over 16,000 player reviews. In November 2024 it launched on PS5, Xbox, and Switch, with day-one inclusion in Xbox Game Pass. ¹¹

In 2025, Nine Sols received the Sony Indie Game Award (PlayStation Partner Awards), recognizing outstanding indie game works from the Japan/Asia region. ¹²

Red Candle did one thing with Nine Sols: they proved that after losing the Chinese market, a Taiwanese indie game studio could still survive — and survive very well.

✦ From a White Terror high school classroom, to a 1980s Taiwanese apartment, to a mythological world of Taoist-punk. Each of Red Candle's games tells a different story, but the underlying DNA has never changed: Taiwanese cultural elements, placed inside game genres the whole world can understand.

How to Be Remembered

Red Candle Games' ten-year arc distills every possibility and every risk facing Taiwanese indie games.

Detention proved that Taiwanese history can be game material — and the whole world will buy it. Devotion proved that a single paper charm can make a game with over a million sales disappear from the earth. Nine Sols proved that a banned studio can stand back up through its next work.

In 2026, Red Candle remains lean in team size — never listed, never acquired, never pivoted to mobile. They are still the studio those six people started; their work has simply been recognized by the Golden Horse Awards and honored by Sony.

Devotion is still not on Steam. But Red Candle is still here.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Games Industry and Digital Entertainment (zh only 台灣遊戲產業與數位娛樂) — The full panorama of Taiwanese gaming, from distribution to original IP
• Big Universe Twin Swords (zh only 大宇雙劍) — Red Candle's predecessor era; the starting point for Taiwanese games telling stories in Chinese
• Taiwan Players' Moments of Madness (zh only 台灣玩家的瘋狂時刻) — Another side of collective Taiwanese player behavior

References