Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games Devotion was removed from Steam last year after players found an in-game item that likened Chinese president Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh. Devotions remained inaccessible since then. A majority of players still dont have access to the game, and likely wont but not all is lost. Devotion and Red Candle Games earlier release, Detention, will be preserved in the Harvard-Yenching Library, according to the studio.

Detention and Devotion will be the first two games added to the prestigious librarys Chinese collection, Harvard-Yenching librarian Ma Xiao-he told Polygon.

It is an incredible honour which belongs to not only Red Candle but also our supporters/players worldwide, the developer said in a Facebook post on Friday. As game designers, never have we thought that our works could one day be added to [Harvard-Yenchings] prestige collection. While we truly appreciate the recognition, we had also taken this opportunity to rethink the possibilities that our games could achieve.

Red Candle Games pulled Devotion offline in February 2019, shortly after the games release date. The team apologized for its critical and unprofessional error, but has not re-released the critically-acclaimed horror game. Detention, a horror game set during Taiwains White Terror period in the 1960s, was released on Windows PC and PlayStation 4 in 2017. Detention was added to the Nintendo Switch games lineup in 2018.

Like Detention before it, Devotion is set in Taiwan, though largely in the 1980s. The story is centered on a family of three, spanning years in an always-changing apartment steeped in trauma.

The Harvard-Yenching Library is part of the Harvard University Library system. Its one of the largest East Asian libraries in the Western world, according to Harvard, with its collection dating back to 1979, where Chinese was first offered as part of Harvards regular curriculum. There are more than 1.5 million volumes in the Harvard-Yenching Library collection.

Games like Super Mario Land and Nintendogs are preserved in the Harvard-Yenching Librarys Japanese collection. Some of these games are preserved in original formats like cartridges and disks and sometimes with accompanying material, like booklets, according to the online catalog. Detention, however, is available for viewing on a single computer in a specific room at the library. Devotion is not yet listed in the online catalog.

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Red Candle Games two titles, Devotion and Detention, added to Harvard library - Polygon