Red Candle Games’ 2019 horror game Devotion is moving closer to a rerelease after a storm of online controversy led to the studio’s decision to pull the game from sale early last year.
As spotted by the folks over on ResetEra, Devotion is launching a second time, only this time around as a physical PC game released and sold only in Taiwan. The dev team notes in a (translated) follow-up Facebook post that it may pursue other launch plans down the line.
“We understand that this limited physical version of Taiwan will definitely not satisfy all players who are looking forward to being online again, but based on this, the team will continue to try various possibilities, and please give red candle more trust and patience,” reads a translation of that post.
Devotion itself became the target of online criticism and review bombing after an in-game art asset was discovered to feature a meme mocking Chinese president Xi Jinping. The dev team issued a statement on the meme shortly after the controversy began branding it as an accidentally-included placeholder asset, but the statement did little to calm things down. The game was eventually pulled from Steam for “technical issues that cause unexpected crashes and among other reasons,” with the added note that its absence would “ease the heightened pressure in our community.”