Devotion review - short, smart 1980s apartment horror that channels the spirit of PT
Playing in the first-person, you tip-toe about with a lighter shivering in your fist, picking up objects and applying them to other objects according to simple clues scribbled in the margins of journals or photos. As in Konami's PT, a short-form masterpiece that continues to bedevil designers years after it was removed from sale, you must reckon with both a nasty abundance of blindspots and the apartment's habit of shape-shifting when out of view. The interior design lacks PT's relentless focus, following its corridor around and around as though rewinding a cassette until the tape disintegrates, but there are moments of unease here to equal anything in a horror game north of 2000. The best horror is about doing a lot with a little - a viscous exhalation on the edge of hearing, a skewing of perspective that chases all warmth from a room - and Devotion's deceptively small layout is a mass of stiletto touches that gradually take you apart.

What's most impressive about these apparitions is how sparingly they're wielded. Far from aiming merely to shock, Devotion is a sorrowful account of a family broken on the wheels of history in which every jolt or gruesome object sheds more light upon the cast. It is about an uptight man's inability to play provider to a more talented woman who is obliged to play housewife, and a precocious, sickly daughter who becomes the focus of their insecurities - the keyhole through which they both, in different ways, hope to squeeze into that flawless present. You could call these "universal" themes, and they are certainly familiar touchstones for horror, but Devotion (whose creators have given us some fascinating dialogue with European developers) is as much about a particular time and place as it is a traversing of common ground. It reserves particular space and hostility for the practice of faith healing versus the nascent science of mental health, but also investigates the grooming of child stars and the emancipatory possibilities of TV celebrity for women who might otherwise be chained to a stove.

It's a psychic pressure cooker, a screwing-down of years of bitterness and resentment to the point that the architecture buckles under the stress and bursts into the realm of metaphor. Sometimes the living room is a hospital ward. Sometimes the daughter's bedroom is a meadow. Sometimes the whole apartment is a wind-up puppet show witnessed through glass and water. The tragedy is that for every dozen moments of malice there's a moment of tenderness, a seed that never quite took root. Not all the architectural contortions or changes of perspective are malign: there's a graceful bit of genre-splicing in which father and daughter read a storybook that blossoms into a 2D platform game, altering the plot as they go with a crayon. It's a grace note that echoes the fairytales of What Remains of Edith Finch, but which also, like the fairytales of Edith Finch, speaks to the perils of escaping reality too avidly. There are times when it is healthy to rewrite the story, and times when it's better to work with what you're given.

No comments