The surrounding sense of fear and oppression isn’t shoved down our throats; instead, just as in filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s horror flicks, the theme acts as an undercurrent for the character’s own personal nightmares.

Most of the creeping madness takes place in a run-down school, and we switch back and forth between two playable characters. Detention’s gameplay is inspired by old-school survival horror, but it’s really a point-and-click adventure. Rather than keeping track of your health and shooting down monsters with limited ammo, you’ll spend most of the game solving basic puzzles and moving the story forward.

Where the game truly excels is in its overall design. The hand-drawn visuals are hair-raising and unnerving. The sound is equally as intense, with eerie laughing and whispering combined with music that takes a page straight out of Silent Hill. And in the place of straight-up shocks are slow-paced scares, the kind that take measures of intelligence and restraint.

It’s all framed against that political situation, with doses of Buddhism and dashes of the island’s culture thrown in for context. Without them, the gameplay and design would’ve felt familiar and possibly a little too dated for my liking.