The agonising journey in the former Volterra’s asylum, between real history and fiction.
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Town of Light has just released on PS4 and Xbox One, with the PC version also getting a significant update. Thus we’ve taken another look at LKA.it’s psychological thriller.
We were pretty harsh with The Town of Light – the first game developed by the promising Italian indie outfit LKA.it – when it first came out on PC in February last year. Although we saw excellent qualities inherent in the explorative first-person thriller adventure, the title suffered from significant technical issues, ranging from dramatic frame-rate drops to awful bugs, to the point that on one occasion we were even forced to restart the game. In general, The Town of Light lacked polish, something that heavily contrasted with the detail put into the game’s content, where important historical research was conducted with regards to the Italian mental hospitals in the first half of the Twentieth century.
Within a year and a half of its original debut, the psychological thriller is preparing to debut on PS4 and Xbox One for the first time, an occasion that has allowed the studio to fix several key issues that the game had suffered from on PC, and it finally offers to the player an experience that – even on a technical level – is fulfilling and intriguing. Yes, the effort LKA.it put into this new version of The Town of Light, at least on the PlayStation 4 version we tried and re-played in its entirety, was really scrupulous and attentive, giving the game a new lease of life. Although there are no substantial innovations from a content point of view (the experience is pretty much the same as we played in 2016, although there’s a small addition to the story), the visual upgrades made for the console version are impressive.
What left us really surprised is the quality of the lighting effects, which brings the dark and gloomy Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra to life, although the digital reconstruction of the former asylum, which has been in disuse for several years, was already very accurate in the PC version, but thanks to the many visual improvements made, the console version is far more realistic and even more detailed. This isn’t only in regards to the lighting effects that pierce through broken windows and collapsed roofs, but the surroundings are also impressively detailed, which does justice to the meticulous work done by the studio in this interesting project.
Losing yourself in the several desolate and ruined rooms of the former asylum of Volterra, accompanied by the dramatic and disturbing memories of Reneé, these improvements bring the experience to a new level. In the version we tried, there were a few pop-ups and frame rate drops during some loading screens, but this was pretty isolated and didn’t compromise in any way The Town of Light’s experience compared to what happened with the previous PC version.
In this regard and looking back, the original PC release of The Town of Light now feels more like an Early Access version of the game. The incoming console upgrade refreshes and updates the experience, and now it is far more deserving of your attention. Back in February 2016, we recommended that you give The Town of Light a chance, primarily because of the themes it explored and its exciting story, and now that LKA.it has significantly improved the weaker side of the game, there’s even more reason to check out this intriguing and engrossing title.
Continue onto the next page for our original review.
Washed we were and buried, Of incense did we smell. And after, when we loved They gave us electroshocks For, they said, a touched Can never love.
(The Holy Land, Alda Merini – 1984)
One of the saddest and at the same time most shameful chapters of Italian history from the last century, is the lawfull regulation of the psychiatric hospitals which started in 1904, when more and more of these institutions started appearing at an alarming speed across the country. More like prisons and places of torture – where the so-called ‘crazy people’, often political opponents, homosexuals or simple rebels, were hidden from the eyes of respectable society – the psychiatric hospitals, otherwise known as asylums, were places where the most unspeakable violence was inflicted, where humanity was forgotten, giving way to an unexpected brutality.
The Town of Light is the first work of the Florence-based independent Italian studio LKA.it, and it has the ambitious and difficult task to trace, through the fictional story of a sixteen-year-old girl called Reneé (a fictitious patient of Volterra’s asylum – a place that very much existed), the atrocities that took place within these circles of hell. Electroshock treatment, cold showers, untold violence: The Town of Light opens the player up to a dark and terrible world, where the horror isn’t generated by jump-scares or other recurring elements that we see in contemporary horror games, but that depends on the tragic reality of these historic events. Because the biggest positive of this explorative adventure by LKA.it lies in painstaking historical research, thanks to careful consultation of the files and medical records of Volterra’s patients, it offers a cruel look at the brutal reality of the Italian psychiatric system during the ’30s and ’40s.
A first-person psychological adventure (as defined by the developers themselves), The Town of Light accompanies the player inside the ruins of Volterra’s asylum, closed – like all the other Italian psychiatric buildings – following the enactment of Basaglia’s Law in 1978 (called this because of an important Italian psychiatrist and neurologist, Franco Basaglia, who supported a major revision of the psychiatric system). Exploring the ruins of this old hospital – still open and rebuilt in the game with great fidelity – the player traces Reneé’s memories in an attempt to reconstruct the chronology of events and the causes that put the teenager inside the asylum.
From a gameplay perspective, the game is mainly focused on two mechanics: the exploration of the environments in order to collect medical records, and solving some simple puzzles. Later, in the second part of the game, we’re introduced to a choice mechanic which allows the story to follow one of many different aspects of Reneé’s life. About an hour and a half from the game’s start, the story begins to branch via a number of choices, and these allow the player to delve into aspects of the plot that he or she thinks are the most interesting (it also offers some replay value of the experience).
One element that we really appreciated from this mechanic is the fact that the game doesn’t seem to ask the player to take a firm position on the events as told, but rather offers insight into a very complex period in Italian history that was characterised by great poverty, ignorance and the oppressive presence of Fascism. As we said, the historical reconstruction is really commendable, and it all flows through the use of newspaper articles, posters and so on, and with great simplicity it allows the player to discover some facts regarding Italian history in the first half of the 20th Century.
Another aspect that we really enjoyed, besides the meticulous reconstruction of the interior and exterior of Volterra’s hospital, is the graphical style used during the cutscenes, which reminded us a lot of contemporary Italian graphic novels. Thanks also to the contribution of excellent performances by the actors, these sequences elegantly direct the player into Reneé’s memories – sometimes confused or sometimes imagined, who can be sure? – in an attempt to reconstruct the logical thread of thought and to better understand the fierce reality that existed in those places.
However, The Town of Light is not perfect in all its areas. The exceptional and striking nature of the plot, accompanied by an extraordinary historical reconstruction, is somewhat overshadowed by several technical issues that we encountered in the game. Leaving aside a couple of annoying but rather serious bugs – in one case we even had to restart a chapter as a scripted sequence wasn’t activated and we couldn’t move forward in the game – one of the most significant defects lies in a continuous frame-rate drop, along with pop-ins, and a general lack of definition, probably also due to the choice of graphics engine (Unity – we understand they used an older version) that fails to offer a satisfying experience, at least from a technical perspective.
That said, we recognise the good work done by LKA.it as a whole. Since this is their first game, we want to be more forgiving. Although the experience was tainted by an unsatisfying technical element, The Town of Light is a unique offering in the gaming scene, which exploits interaction and mechanics in order to explore one of the most dramatic periods of Italian history. Well narrated and emotionally engaging, The Town of Light is a good starting point for the Italian studio, even if technically speaking there is still a lot of work to do.
Keyword: The Town of Light