Natural disasters, illnesses, accidents, breakages, or even deaths: when a series of consecutive tragedies engulf a family, it’s often said that tai ương has befallen the unfornate victims. The term is also the name of a recently published Vietnamese horror game that has been making waves amongst gaming communities both nationwide and internationally, thanks to its layered narrative, chilling atmosphere, and meticulously crafted game environment.
Tai Ương is an especially fitting title considering the mysterious deaths that plague the family of young Lê Đặng Nhật Huy. Upon starting the game, new players are immediately transported into the first-person perspective of Huy, amid the funeral of both his parents, Nhật and Loan. On the side is a smaller shrine to his younger sister, Huyên, whose passing preceded theirs not by much. Even though the window is wide open, letting in a stream of bright sunlight, the room feels oppressively claustrophobic, compressed by the caskets and altars.
A double funeral is the first thing players experience in game.
You take a few steps to arrive in front of their framed photos and kneel down to bow. On the last bow, you open your eyes just to catch a glimpse, in the peripheral of your vision, of the bloody body of Huyên where her altar sits. You start to suspect something is amiss about her death. Later, you move away from home to a rental and embark on a journey into lucid dreaming, at the behest of an eccentric medium, in hopes of unraveling the enigma behind your family’s tragedies.
When everyday normals become corrupted
The first chapter of Tai Ương (The Scourge) begins in a fashion entirely familiar to fans of horror cinema and games: a supernatural encounter compels a main character to find answers, just to learn that some curiosities are perhaps best left unsatiated. Nonetheless, Rare Reversee Gaming Beaztek Studio, the indie teams behind the production, chose to execute this common hook in an exciting, unprecedentedly Vietnamese setting.
The setting is inspired by old apartment blocks in Saigon from the 1990s.
Tai Ương is without a doubt the most impressive portrayal of Vietnam we have been blessed with in a game to date. Some standout set designs include the 1990s home where the family lived when Huy was first born, the gritty Saigon tenement that acts as the story’s setting, and the hellish dreamscapes that Huy wades through in the last chapter. In other creative mediums, like cinema or literature, faithful recreations of our everyday realities in Vietnam are a great cause for delight and perhaps even pride, but in a horror role-playing game, the more what the character is going through parallels with real life, the more heightened the sense of uncanny dread.
A Honda Cub was a signifier of wealth when Vietnam first became open again.
The environment of Tai Ương is familiar in the most frightening way: Vietnamese players will immediately connect with the little decorations and design of the game. Here is the dimly lit corridor you might have played hide-and-seek with friends. There, a mid-century bookshelf that once housed your school certificates and childhood toys. Over there, on the altar, a platter of bananas sits amid photo frames. But wait, did the eyes in the photos just move?
How many things do you recognize from this image?
The puzzles in Tai Ương are overall not too complicated, but for the majority of the game, there is little to no instruction, leaving players to figure out what to do by painstakingly ransacking every nook and cranny of the setting to look for clues and hints, and by dying repeatedly at the hands of the villain.
This process of exploration, however, is not tedious and can be quite intriguing for those patient enough to do a little homework while playing: the game setting is enriched with a motherlode of lore-building fragments that come in a variety of shapes and form, such as newspaper cutouts, handwritten letters, torn photographs, and even a radio program telling ghostly stories. As Huy progresses through the stages, players will discover alongside him in real time the bits and pieces that reveal the darker sides of his family dynamics.
There's a lot (quite literally) to learn about this dysfunctional family.
My first run at the game was peppered with these little moments of recognition. For one, Saigoneers who grew up in the 1990s will eventually realize that the squalid apartment block in game is inspired by the former President Hotel at 727 Trần Hưng Đạo Street, one that was demolished a few years ago. Just by reading the letters that are scattered across the game levels, there’s also a lot one can learn about Huy’s family history, such as his true parentage or his father’s infidelity, and more.
Ultimately, narrative and lore are two of Tai Ương’s shining strengths that make the role-playing experience rewarding and immersive. Control, physics, and animation, on the other hand, are at times quite underwhelming. The animation is robotic, and the control can be aggravatingly clunky for a game that requires you to sneak around monsters and undertake life-or-death time challenges.
In this nightmare, here is Vietnamese culture, both good and bad
At Saigoneer, we often feel compelled, in everything we do, to showcase Vietnamese culture in its brightest, richest, and most worthy of celebration. It is not a hard job. Vietnam has a rich spiritual life and harbors deep respect for higher beings, as evidenced in our ancestral worship, Đạo Mẫu traditions, and extensive network of temples and pagodas. From young to elderly, members of Vietnamese families are close-knit and highly dependable for one another during hardships. Vietnamese society has a strong sense of community where neighbors, passersby, and even complete strangers can rise to the occasion to care for those in need.
Spirituality is a major part of Vietnamese culture, past or present.
These three qualities are all positive traits, but at times, amid our extolment of their virtues, it’s easy to forget that they too possess a darker side that can take over, causing grievous harm, trauma, or even death. Overindulgence in spirituality breeds superstitions that detach humans from reality. Tight family bonds mean that generational trauma and abuse are just that harder to escape from. And a society all too eager to involve and pass judgements makes keeping up appearance a desperate and exhausting struggle.
A demonic ritual in the game with architectural elements inspired by Chùa Thầy in Hanoi.
The tragedies in Tai Ương serve as bone-chilling examples of how these ugly sides of Vietnamese culture can drive a family to their gruesome demise. Certainly, the in-game consequences are much more dire, amplified by the manipulations of a demonic supernatural being, but many of Huy’s toxic family dynamics are immediately recognizable in our daily life, sometimes right within the very walls of our home.
Desperate for a son after over a decade of infertility, Nhật and Loan asked a local shaman to perform a perverse dark ritual that did result in Loan being pregnant with Huy; it’s implied that the shaman sexually abused her. She kept her trauma a secret in fear of public opinions and Nhật’s abusive tendencies. They eventually conceived Huyên naturally, but showed obvious gender bias to Huy. His needs and whims were met without questions, sometimes to the detriment of Huyên — like how Loan sold Huyên’s long hair to buy Huy a new pair of shoes, or how Huyên had to quit school during the family’s tough times so they could focus on Huy’s education.
Water puppets are a recurring imagery as stand-ins for human in the dream sequences.
With every memory, family misfortune, and loss that Huy and the player discover in game scenarios, Tai Ương slowly unveils an imperfect family trapped in the confines of societal expectations and their socioeconomic caste. One particular creative decision from the production team that struck a chord with me is how each family member is portrayed in the dreamworld as a water puppet. It demonstrates the team’s conscious effort to keep the setting rooted in our cultural heritage, but also strategically links to the game’s overarching social commentary about their actions — controlled by an unknown force, unable to escape the entrapment of outside expectations.
Even though the story behind Tai Ương is a familiar one, it doesn’t make it easier to live through firsthand. The fast-paced, at times mortally urgent rhythm of the game might make it hard to take a moment to fully appreciate and digest its rich narrative and robust gaming setting, but Tai Ương’s acclaim really comes from the feelings it leaves behind after the fright has faded and the adrenaline has subsided: contemplation, hope, bittersweetness, relief, wistfulness, perhaps a tinge of regret too.
