[4] Set in 1960s Taiwan of the White Terror period, students Wei and Ray find themselves trapped and vulnerable in Greenwood High School (翠華中學), which is located in a remote mountainous area.

During the White Terror Period in Taiwan, Greenwood High School junior student Wei Chung-ting (魏仲廷) falls asleep in class as Instructor Bai (白教官) arrives to ask teacher Miss Yin Tsui-han (殷翠涵) about a certain book list.

After performing a ritual where she cuts Wei's throat and collects his blood, Ray wanders the rest of the school, avoiding different kinds of ghosts, solving puzzles, and finding clues, as her story is slowly pieced together.

Inspired by the way her mother got rid of her abusive and philandering father by framing and reporting him to the authorities, Ray gives the list to Instructor Bai, a military officer, hoping it would get Miss Yin fired.

Believing herself responsible for Chang, Wei, and the other students' deaths, coupled with the bullying she received, Ray jumped off a school building.

His journal reveals Miss Yin spent the rest of her life abroad as an activist but died of lung cancer before she could return home.

So they scrapped the original idea and made their second prototype with a Taiwanese dystopia setting inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

[7] As the project expanded in scale, Yao was joined by 5 others and together founded the studio Abyss Watcher (眺望者工作室), later renamed Red Candle Games.

In addition, the soundtrack includes songs by Teng Yu-hsien that were banned by the military government in the 1960s such as "Bāng Chhun-hong" and "The Torment of a Flower".

[10][11][12] Rely on Horror gave the game a 9 out of 10, saying that "every facet of Detention moves in one harmonious lockstep towards an unavoidable tragedy, drowning out the world around you.

[16] Detention as well as Red Candle's next game Devotion will be preserved at the Harvard-Yenching Library, the largest collection of East Asian works maintained at an American university.

Produced in collaboration with Taiwan Public Television Service (PTS), the Chinese-language original series premiered worldwide on Netflix exclusively on 5 December 2020.