YMMV / Devotion

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Feng Yu is either a man broken by a combination of his own mistakes and a horrendous cult, both of which end up murdering his daughter... or he is a vain, cruel egomaniac who constantly refuses to admit his own laziness and lack of talent and murders his daughter because he puts his fragile ego above his daughter's needs. Both viewpoints are also not mutually exclusive. How sympathetic he is - or isn't - is up to the player.
  • There's a minor version with Mentor Heuh. It's absolutely certain that she's a manipulative con artist who doesn't care about her cult members' wellbeing as long as they still give her money, but there's still the matter of her final advice to Feng Yu. Was the ritual profound-looking nonsense that Heuh cooked up without thinking of the consequences, or was she deliberately trying to kill Mei Shin to tie up loose ends before she fled town?
  • Some Taiwanese and Sinosphere players posit that Feng Yu is actually dead, Driven to Suicide by the enormity of what he had done. The game is his journey through Purgatory as he endlessly repeats his sins, the fate of people who kill themselves in Taiwanese folklore. They also point out that the same folklore holds that ghosts cannot perceive themselves in reflections or pictures, similar to how Feng Yu is not seen in the game, and covered or closed eyes being a recurring motif that also serves to symbolize denial.
  • There's also a theory that Li Fang is actually dead, either by murder - as part of the ritual to save Mei Shin - or suicide. Proponents of this theory point to a snake whose head is not visible as Mei Shin is pushed into a lake, Li Fang's old career props disappearing into the wine to be replaced by a snake, and the bigger ballerina doll on the birthday cake missing her head.
• Awesome Music: The two songs in the game, The Lady On The Pier and the ending theme by No Party For Cao Dong are both beautiful.
• Complete Monster: Mentor Heuh is the leader of the cult of Cigu Guanyin and the one responsible for the death of Du Mei Shin. A con artist who manipulates troubled people into worship, Heuh extorts money from her followers, and once convinced a cancer patient to forego chemotherapy in favor of her faith healing, leading to his death and the son confronting her in fury. When the mentally ill Du Feng Yu seeks her aid, she preys on and exacerbates his insanity, turning him against his wife, Gong Li Fang, by telling him that she is possessed by evil spirits, leading to him subjecting her to Domestic Abuse. Promising to cure his daughter Mei Shin of her sickness with a ritual, she has him painfully cut and bloodlet himself before having him trap Mei Shin in a bathtub filled with snake wine for seven days and dissuading him from saving her, leaving Mei Shin to drown and shattering Feng Yu's mind.
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming:
  • The story you read to Mei Shin when you're putting her to bed, which is about a daughter's love curing her father of illness and even features moments where Mei Shin makes funny little additions to the story like rescuing the chubby bear with soap or giving the deer glasses so they can see. Mei Shin's journal entries even mention this as making her feel a lot better.
  • There’s a scene where Feng Yu is upset over one of his scripts being rejected. Mei Shin, in return, makes the shredded script into an origami tulip. When you enter the 1980 apartment, the clue you get for the flower pot is “you’ve turned my deepest misery into a comforting flower”, meaning that Mei Shin did that to cheer her father up.
  • In a tragic way, given what happens, Mei Shin learns to calm herself down by folding origami tulips, the flower in the story that cured the father. She even uses her father's screenplays for the paper, and Feng Yu has a script where he shows (through the father character) how much it means to him that the screenplays the world rejected are "treasures" in the eyes of his child.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Feng Yu is a once successful screenwriter whose career prospects have dried up after a string of box office bombs. Throughout the game, you collect segments of some of his rejected manuscripts, and reading them makes it painfully apparent why Feng Yu can't get his work optioned — they're all inane, pretty re-imaginings of his real-life problems with no narrative tension, and just like they'll tell you on the first day of any creative writing class, a story with no conflict isn't a story at all. ^note Of course, Slice of Life fans would argue otherwise. Feng Yu may even have been able to find his niche with the genre if it hadn't already been declining in Taiwan during the 80's.
  • The man in the mirror section might feel odd during a first playthrough, but during a replay, there is a big foreshadowing: At the end of the walk he says "Go on, it's just ahead. Now claim what you deserve - your greatest hope." as he points to the bathroom door. Inside stand a dozen masked Mei Shins asking him to let her out. The message of the man in the mirror was for Feng Yu to open the door for his daughter to save her life. Instead, Feng Yu starts praying...
  • Cigu and Guanyin have nothing to do with each other. The latter is the popularly-worshipped Goddess of Mercy, the former is a toilet goddess with a minor cult that has faded out of public consciousness. To put it bluntly, the cult is a bullshit Scam Religion that worships a made-up deity (or fictitious aspect of a popular deity), cherry-picked from religious beliefs extant and long past, hinging on Guanyin's reputation as a goddess who blesses and saves the unfortunate and imperiled.
  • Zigu's origin stories have aspects that echo elements from the game as well.
    • As He Mei, she was taken as a concubine, underwent physical and verbal abuse, and was murdered in the bathroom either by her husband or by his jealous chief wife. The husband would hear her restless spirit crying in the bathroom afterward, so sacrifices are offered to appease her, just as Feng Yu perceives the masked Mei Shin begging him to let her out, and mutilates himself to "save" her.
    • As Consort Qi of the Han Dynasty, she was an accomplished songwriter (echoing Li Fang's past career and Mei Shin('s parents)' ambitions), who would play an annual game of Weiqi with her husband. The winner gets to make a wish that would come true all year, and the loser would suffer from illness all year (but can be alleviated by cutting off a lock of hair and praying to the North Star - that is, curing/preventing prolonged illness with a ritual, which was what Feng Yu tried to do to Mei Shin). Qi won every time and wished for peace in the kingdom. The Chinese title of the game translates to "fulfilling a wish". Qi was murdered by Empress Lü via mutilation (similar to what Feng Yu went through in his Vision Quest): her eyes were gouged out, her limbs cut off, her eardrums punctured, and she was locked in either a toilet or pigsty (same connotations of filth) to die. This is all because she was jealous of Qi and her son Liu Ruyi, as Emperor Gaozu felt Ruyi made for a better heir to the throne than then-Crown Prince Xiaohui (Empress Lü's son). Xiaohui was fond of his half-brother and tried to protect him from attempts on his life even after he was made King of Zhao. The deaths of Consort Qi and King of Zhao caused Emperor Xiaohui to snap and descend into decadence, deluding himself in a reality that does not exist, like Feng Yu. Qi was an innocent woman who died by the machinations of a manipulative woman in power, just like Mei Shin who died because of Hueh.
  • In the duet version of The Lady on the Pier, Li Fang is the person who sings the last line, and possibly the only one left alive in the Du family by the end (unless you subscribe to the fan theory that Feng Yu murdered her as part of the ritual to save Mei Shin, or that she died in some way).
• Fridge Horror:
  • The game's title screen shows the darkened Du family living room, with only the ambient noise of the fan, the TV static, and a far-off dog barking. After a few minutes, someone can be heard knocking loudly in the apartment. It's likely that this is Li Fang, a concerned neighbor, or the police at the front door. Or even worse: it's the sound of Mei Shin banging on the bathroom door.
  • What if Mei Shin’s death wasn't caused by alcohol poisoning, but by a snake bite? This article tells of a Chinese women who was prescribed snake wine for treatment of her illness, and it turns out that if improperly produced, the snake could potentially still be alive. For all we know it wasn’t the alcohol that killed her, it was the snake.
    • There are no good options here. She could have gotten alcohol poisoning, been bitten by a venomous snake, drowned, or starved to death. Even hypothermia may have killed her.
  • The Mei Shin copies in the Vision Quest sequence get a fully new horrible meaning once the ending is known. They just stare at Feng Yu, begging to be let out and for him to open the door, most likely being what Feng Yu heard during the seven days.
• Genius Bonus:
  • People who had studied Buddhist saints and/or Guan Yin worshippers would realize that some things presented about Cigu Guanyin by the cult don't add up, further suggesting something is wrong with the mentor and/or the temple as a whole:
    • Guan Yin is a goddess of mercy, and would never demand blood sacrifices. As a matter of fact, worshippers of Guan Yin are required to consume only a vegetarian diet on certain days of the Chinese calendar month, while the more devout worshippers convert to vegan completely.
    • Cigu is most likely based on the goddess Zigu. Sources differ, but she is referred to as the Lady of the Latrines because she was trapped and murdered in the toilet and now governs the bathroom, appointed by the Jade Emperor out of mercy. Worshippers of Zigu summoned her in the latrine using a doll and informing her that it's safe for her to emerge, and Mei Shin is symbolized by a teleporting ceramic doll.
  • In his worship of Cigu Guanyin, Feng Yu removes the bagua mirror in front of his home. In Feng Shui, the mirror is intended to protect a home and its residents from negative outside energy ("sha chi", killing breath, or poison arrows). People unprotected from this energy might succumb to financial, marital, health issues or worse. It's symbolic of Feng Yu allowing the poisonous external influence of Hueh to ruin his house and turning it into a haunted space endlessly looping as he relives his sin, similar to the way Red Candle explores the concept of Taiwanese/Chinese Purgatory in their previous work Detention. Additionally, the house is built in an inauspicious way according to Feng Shui. It's shaped like the letter 死 (death). Their front and back/kitchen door are lined up, letting money and luck simply flow out of the house.
  • The Du family purchases a jar of liquor and hangs it on the wall, hoping that one day, when Mei Shin has become successful, she will open the wine and serve it to honored guests. This is similar to the folk tradition of Nü Er Hong (red daughter's wine), in which the jar will be buried when a daughter is born and opened during her wedding day.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In-Universe example. During the game, it's revealed that Feng Yu used to read his daughter, Mei Shin, a story about a girl's journey to cure her sick, bed-ridden father before it's too late. The story ends happily with the daughter getting help from a Goddess, and successfully curing her father with the power of a tulip flower. In reality, Mei Shin is the one who is sick, and her father is desperately trying to cure her, even joining a religious cult led by a Con Artist whose phony advice leads to Feng Yu killing Mei Shin in an attempt to exorcise her. For an added punch, the story inspires Mei Shin to make tulips with paper, and discovered that it made her feel better and treated her symptoms, but she never tells her father this.
• Jerkass Woobie: Feng Yu becomes an abusive husband and parent and pushes his daughter to her own death... but it's clear that throughout the game, he wants nothing but to love and help his daughter in his own misguided way manipulated by a woman running a Scam Religion and his screenplay career falls in a rut and pushed at the brink of madness as a result.
• Memetic Mutation: Du Mei Shin is often associated with red arowana and Chinese kraits in fanarts.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • If Feng Yu didn't cross it with his Domestic Abuse of Gong Li Fang, he definitely crossed it by locking his daughter in the bathroom until she drowned.
  • Mentor Hueh crossed it even earlier, by telling Feng Yu to perform the aforementioned horizon-crossing act, and outright discouraging him from stopping it despite the risk, despite knowing full well it was a load of snake oil and couldn't help Mei Shin. Taken further when one considers that her building is shown to be overturned as if vacated in a hurry, leaving behind recorded conversations of past victims coming to collect on her. This implies that the reason she deliberately prescribed a method that would kill Mei Shin was to securely tie up the loose end while she skipped town.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Though reception was generally positive at launch, the game is more widely remembered for its removal from Steam after Chinese players spotted Easter Eggs hidden in the game that insult incumbent Chinese president Xi Jinping.
• Spiritual Successor: To Detention. They have similar names, revolve around the protagonist traversing a Dark World resembling a place in their lives (Ray's school, Feng Yu's apartment) to reveal the events of the past, eventually leading up to the present. Both protagonists are also ultimately directly responsible for the events of their games, and both inadvertently killed someone (Mr. Chang was executed because of Ray's betrayal, and Feng Yu accidentally kills Mei Shin with a religious ritual) by putting their trust in the Big Bad (Instructor Bai, Mentor Heuh) who took advantage of them, and the game is also about them coming to terms with their guilt.
• Squick: The final part of the game. In order to "cure" Mei Shin, Feng Yu offered parts of himself. This includes gauging out his eye with a spoon, ripping out his tongue with a fork, and stabbing his hand with a pair of scissors.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Playing through the whole game and coming to understand how much the members of the family cared about each other, and how wrong everything went from what were on the surface good intentions—wanting to nurture your daughter's talents and wanting to save her from illness. The final sequences of the game show how far Feng Yu was willing to go to save his daughter from her "possession", and he so easily could have if he'd put his faith in medicine instead of Mentor Hueh.
  • The part after you survive being chased by the phantom of Li Fang, where she returns to human form, picking up her things and walking out on him.
    Li Fang: Du Feng Yu. I long for the days when life was simple and the three of us were happy.
  • The sequence with the storybook is the most lighthearted in the game, as Mei Shin and Feng Yu read a bedtime story together. It's a very sweet, tender scene that only makes the downfall and heartbreak of the family even worse. Particularly since the story is about a girl trying to find a magical cure to heal her father, not unlike what Feng Yu tried to do for Mei Shin.
• The Woobie: Du Mei Shin, given her inevitable sickness and being treated poorly by her father, Feng Yu, to the point that she died locked up in the bathroom. Made even worse in that, to the very end, she loved her father and did whatever he asked even though she knew that there were safer ways to make her feel better.

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