The Town of Light Review

Intro:

At first glance “The Town of Light” looks like every other first person horror game. Set in an abandoned asylum for mental illness you’d expect there to be supernatural presences and jump scares aplenty, but thankfully developer LKA subverts those expectations by delivering a hard hitting look at the treatment patients received in these facilities instead.

Story:

You play Renée, a former patient of the asylum who is revisiting years after its closure. As much as this story revolves around Renée and her horrible time at the facility, I’d say the real subject of this psuedo-documentary is the institution itself.

Based off a real asylum in Voletrra, Tuscany, LKA have meticulously recreated a genuine, era-appropriate facility ripped straight from the pages of history. The developers spent a lot of time researching and faithfully recreating, and it shows. The hospital is the star of the show, and the dark happenings within its walls only highlight this further.

When Renée is recounting stories or events is where the game starts to fall flat. Whilst the setting is something to behold, the narrative here is muddied and confusing. This might be fitting, considering her mental illness, but it doesn’t make for a particularly engaging narrative. A stilted script and some bad voice acting also fail to help the situation, and quite often I found this stunted attempt working against the bigger-picture stuff LKA was otherwise excelling at. I would have liked Town of Light to be a bit more subtle and quiet at times, feeling that this approach would have helped tell a more impactful, immediate story than Renée’s current one.

Gameplay:
It’s often a challenging game to play – and not for the reasons most gamers will expect. This isn’t a game full of difficult puzzles or strenous combat scenarios, instead it is much more similar to walking sims such as Gone Home or Everybodys gone to the Rapture. Instead it’s challenge comes from its overwhelmingly ominous tone and upsetting subject matter. Through animated cutscenes we see plenty of examples of institutionalized abuse of the young patients by looming, threatening figures – torture in all but name.

There are puzzles dotted around the facility but they never present much challenge and instead serve simply to break up the rather relentless story. They’re serviceable but ultimately throwaway, but I’m not sure a more challenging game would have been a good thing. RKA know what they’re trying to achieve and, for better or worse, achieve it. What is an unexpected challenge, however, is knowing where you’re supposed to be going to progress. That ambigious tone of the narrative also bleeds into the gameplay itself, never quite telling you what you’re supposed to be doing, and as such I found myself wandering around lost far too often.

Presentation:

The Town of Light is a good looking game, as we’ve come to expect from the genre, with pretty graphics showcasing horrible environments. Whilst this game isn’t the horror you expect going in, it certainly leans on a fair few tropes to make your stay in the asylum as creepy as possible. Whilst I’d been assured there wasn’t any horror elements in the game, it didn’t stop the oppressive, spooky atmosphere from putting me on edge all of the time.

The only stumbling block is when the game decides to throw some rendered characters in the mix (instead of the animated ones that populate cutscenes). They look… off, and it all comes off a bit awkward as these leering models wobble around at you. It certainly aids the creepy charm, but I don’t think that’s what LKA were going for here. I wish they’d relegated people to the cutscenes, because they don’t help any scenes they’re in otherwise.

Conclusion:

“The Town of Light” is an often upsetting look at the history of mental illness and our treatment of it, but the game stumbles at times in making this an engaging experience. It’s confusing and stilted nature might lend some narrative credit to its lead character, but this direction often gets in the way of its overarching – and admittedly more interesting – vision. This well researched look at the heinous conditions of asylums in the early 20th Century is a worthwhile one, however, and interested parties should certainly apply.