Evading strict censorship around religious and supernatural content, Chinese horror games have long used cultural elements like paper money, ancestral tablets, and red lanterns to evoke horror and tension—yet now, audiences are seeking deeper thrills
On a quiet night in a remote mountain town, Zhang Yutong is sent to investigate a burning coffin—a suspected arson. When her car suddenly breaks down on the way, the detective and her colleague are left stranded in an eerie, unfamiliar village. Beside the car is a derelict wall with “Talk science, break superstition” scrawled across it. Walking down the street, she passes a local grocery store, a clinic, and a bulletin board displaying an obituary, before turning to a red-brick building from which blood slowly seeps. Stepping closer, she is bathed in a crimson light, and time begins to twist into a nightmarish loop. Coffins, wreaths, and paper dolls loom ominously all around her, and a blood-soaked notebook, filled only with the word “debt,” revealed when she takes a candle to illuminate the darkness, seems to haunt her at every turn.
Wracked with panic, the 25-year-old stumbles away, desperate to flee, but her path is blocked by a phantom hearse. The vehicle’s back door creaks open, and Zhang finds herself walking toward it, unable to fight the urge to see who, or what, lies inside. Waking with a fit, she discovers she’s been admitted to the town hospital.
This haunting scene sets the tone for Firework, a Chinese horror game released in 2020 in which Lin Lixun, played by Zhang above, is tasked with solving the case of a widow’s desperate attempts to protect her daughter from her deceased husband’s parents. The torment begins when they cast a spell intended to rid the wife of her soul, aiming to turn her body to a vessel for their dead son. The game draws players into a world of sorrow, grief, and fear, offering a deeply unsettling yet goreless experience of Chinese horror based on local mythology and folklore. “It resonates so deeply,” says Zhang, a secretary in the medical industry living in Zhejiang province. “Chinese audiences might not be afraid of American or Japanese-style horror, but we’re truly terrified of the Chinese-style ones. This kind of fear is deeply ingrained in our DNA. We understand it on a very profound level—probably much more than people from other countries.”
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