The Fearful Realism: Chinese Horror Indie Games and the Realist Horror

This paper examines Chinese horror indie games as a distinct subgenre that engages directly with social reality, proposing the term "fearful realism" to describe its aesthetic approach. Drawing on Cynthia Freeland's notion of realist horror, the author argues that these games move beyond the dominant conventions of survival horror and Japanese psychological horror, instead using supernatural elements to surface repressed histories and everyday injustices. The central thesis is that horror in these works is not abstract or fictional but grounded in the lived affects of contemporary and historical experience, and that the games open a space for questioning the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

The analysis centers on two mainland Chinese independent titles, Firework (Shiying Studio, 2021) and Comedy Funeral (Great Fortune and Great Favour Unlimited, 2022), set against the broader context of Taiwan's Red Candle Games, whose Detention and Devotion have drawn more international attention. The author identifies a shared gameplay structure in these titles: diminished action, minimal combat and escape sequences, simple untimed puzzles, and an emphasis on "archival adventure," in which players reconstruct stories from fragmentary memorabilia. In Firework, a police officer reinvestigates a massacre in a mountain village, while Comedy Funeral follows a child into a grandmother's memory space to uncover a history of trafficking and forced marriage. Here ghosts function less as enemies than as embodiments of repressed memory, and the monsters are read as remnants of feudal superstition and patriarchy within contemporary China.

The study situates these games within China's cultural politics, drawing on Laikwan Pang's account of the state's historical hostility toward ghost narratives and on official discourses of anti-superstition that the games appropriate as a realist façade. The methodology combines textual analysis of narrative and gameplay with contextual and intertextual examination of online reviews and community discussions. The author notes that mainland Chinese horror games have received far less scholarly attention than their Taiwanese counterparts, partly due to limited localization that restricts their reach beyond Sinophone audiences. The paper concludes that fearful realism allows these games to archive and reevoke uncanny histories, opening a critical space for reconsidering the relationship between horror, memory, and social reality.