This review contains spoilers
Spoilers only discussed at the bottom of the review
It seems every other year brings us a new horror-themed walking sim built in Unity, and following my less-than-satisfying experience with Layers of Fear, I was admittedly uneasy booting-up The Town of Light. After all, if there was one good thing Layers did, it was definitively prove the futility of crafting a horror outing without the threat of death (fatalities being a nonsensical concept in such graphic adventures), and so I was not looking forward to prancing around another frowzy abode serenaded by jump scares.
And yet, to my surprise, I found myself enjoying developer LKA’s debut title, perhaps because it wasn’t trying to be a gimmicky horror outing. See, The Town of Light is best described as a ghost story, the kind we would tell each other in grade school to drum up spooky mythologies about a person, place, or thing. And while frightening, they were more-often intriguingly unsettling: an allure would envelope them as they forged haunting remnants in your mind. This isn’t me likening Town of Light to a children’s phantasm- far from it, what you’ve got here is a serious drama inspired by a disturbing era of psychiatric care. But I make the adolescent comparisons due to the type of feelings it elicited in me; you know, that irresistible heart-thump as you thought about coming face-to-face with the spirit of Bloody Mary herself.
Here, Mary has been replaced with Volterra, an abandoned asylum that once housed protagonist Renée. She’s returned an unknown number of years later to figure out what exactly happened to her there, each wing triggering a fresh batch of memories. Before delving into the plot, one thing I must praise LKA for is its opening title card encouraging sufferers of mental disorders to seek out help due to the advances in modern medicine. Too often, I feel many video games exploit the (rightfully-derided) treatments of older institutions without taking into consideration the effect popularizing such motifs will have on contemporary individuals ailing from an illness but unsure about whether or not it’s okay to get aid. Yeah yeah, I know these are video games and shouldn’t be taken that seriously, but there’s a diversity of players, and any bit of advice will always go a long way.
As walking sims rest their laurels on their narratives, it’s a bit hard to talk about Town of Light without intentionally spoiling events. For the first 2/3s of the game, writer/director Luca Dalcò thankfully forgoes experimental storytelling in favor of a chiefly linear chronicle summing up Renée’s stay, with additional flashbacks tossed in courtesy of select items she happens to find in the hospice. There’s a bit of an unreliable narrator in Renée given her traumatic past, however, enough wording is thrown your way to prevent substantive confusion….that is until the final act wherein the developers opt to abandon this two-way paradigm (and Volterra itself) in favor of a new area psychogenically set in memoria.+ It’s a strange decision that almost derails the goodwill brought about by its preceding parts: the pacing becomes draggish, the visuals unnecessarily trippy, and the premise of a person revisiting her past replaced with the past itself. I suppose the steelman interpretation is that uncovering the truth concurrently caused a nervous breakdown in Renée due to her being unable to comprehend reality, but the outright changing of hospitals makes me wonder if more content was originally intended that had to be cut for the sake of time.
Regardless, the story did hook me for the majority of my playthrough, largely due to the absence of filler. Every task you complete advances Renée’s journey of introspection, and players are immediately rewarded a sizable chunk of background info with each progression. Renée’s life is heartbreaking, and knowing her biography was inspired by true accounts from the real-life Volterra tinges the whole odyssey with a disturbing sorrowness, leading to an ending that shocked me.++ That being said, you’ll come across aspects that I thought seemed too exploitative, even by early-20th century bedlam standards.+++
As was stated in the first sentence, Town of Light was assembled in Unity, and while I’m nowhere near a game designer, I’m under the impression that it must be significantly easier to use than Unreal given its prevalence amongst the indie community. Unfortunately, the drawback is Unity requires extra effort to mould its figures past their default waxy appearance, and too many indie devs simply don’t have the manpower to do that. This is particularly true for the creators of walking sims, and I was subsequently expecting to be greeted with the familiar shapes and geometry of Dear Esther and Layers.
Luckily, more work has been done by LKA to distinguish Town from its contemporaries, and while you can still tell it’s Unity, not once did I catch sight of any ceraceous decor. More importantly, the game moves away from the madhouse motif popularized by other titles set in psychiatric units as Volterra looks like a place that’s simply rundown, not plagued by spectral wraiths: the wallpaper is yellowing and peeling, tiles to lightswitches are caked in grime, furniture/wood is scratched-up and molting, the glass is bleary if not fractured, and any papyrus you happen upon appears as though it needs to be held with oven mitts. It’s not so much that the inhabitants mysteriously vanished as they just had no reason to stay here anymore.
During cutscenes, Town switches to one of two styles, the first a penciled motion comic reminiscent of a rough version of the Dampyr series, the second in-engine 3D models. The former is melancholically beautiful, its hard markings combining with a gray/black color scheme to hit this interesting middle ground between childrens’ sketches and an adult’s hazy recollections. The latter, unfortunately, leans too heavily into uncanny valley territory, and while I understand the eeriness was deliberate, I have a feeling the jarring facial and limbic animations probably weren’t intended.
There are other graphical setbacks beyond those scenes. Bookshelves and decaying wallcoverings aren’t implemented well at all, being more akin to a sticker someone taped over the base material over an authentic replica. You’re also blatantly controlling a camera instead of a person, which wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t so apparent- Renée phases through foliage, while carrying any item in your hand turns your character into a floating apparition.
I also feel more detail could’ve been tossed into the many optional areas of Volterra and its accompanying grounds. The aesthetic veracity is definitely commendable, but the lack of personalization prevents any of the adjacent chambers from being worth checking out; once you’ve seen one dorm or courtyard, you’ve seen them all. In addition, it would’ve been kind of cool if particle effects like dust getting kicked-up were incorporated into the game, but at the end of the day I can’t criticize a title for not having things I wish were in it unless they’re so basic as to be expected…which brings me to the abysmal sound design. The first thing you’ll notice are the dual footstep tones: you have one for hard surfaces, the other for grass/dirt, and later you unlock a third for puddles, but that is literally it. You’re gonna be stepping on a lot of terrain, manmade and naturale, not to mention dealing with velocity shifts mandated by the storybeats, and yet there’s no variety- it’s the same phonograph playing the same preprogrammed record on repeat. That singularist approach extends to squeaky hinges: cabinets, windows, big doors matter not! It’s an equally sonorous juncture for any swivel. Perhaps most disappointingly is the lack of ambience- again, the realistic approach is commendable, but there are some things a video game is meant to exaggerate for the sake of immersion, and unknown dins inside an otherwise abandoned asylum would’ve gone far in that direction.
Voice acting is okay. Minus a few lines by one of the doctors at the very end, Renée is the only person you’re hearing, so the drive of the entire story basically weighs on her shoulders ala Atlas. The issue I had with English performer Flaminia Fegarotti is that it seemed like she was more in a radio drama or audiobook session than the theatrical production the game clearly was going for. See, Renée often talks to herself, and so you needed an actress skilled at shifting between the personas akin to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve or Willem Dafoe in the first Spider-Man. Fegarotti isn’t bad by any means, however she fails to make these unnatural inner conversations enticing. That being said, she triumphs in the cutscene narrations wherein she’s able to focus on breathing life into a fragment from Renée’s horrifying childhood. And to those who advocate playing the game in Italian, I tried that briefly and had identical qualms with Daniela D'Argenio.
Music is the sole aural area that is consistently great, and a lot of that has to do with Davide Terreni and Alessio Belli’s indulgence in harmonies typically associated with early-20th century gothic yarns. There’s an emphasis, in particular, on the piano, and its chiming never lets you forget the tragic undertones of this manor you’re lumbering through.
Finally, we come to the gameplay, which is easy to speak on given the limitations of walking sims. LKA has added a nice ergonomic change from the usual slate- here, you don’t have to drag your mouse in a mock-physics motion to open doors: a single click will do it for ya. Sadly, that’s about the only positive present. On the flipside, your examination point is a small white circle, which makes it a bit hard to select specific things. Not that it matters because, outside of collectible diary pages, there is nothing to hold- just like in Layers, there’s a plethora of empty cabinets and drawers that should never have been put in the game world given how barren they are.
More disheartening, however, is the removal of running, and yes I know the purpose of this handicap is to prevent players from breaking the game’s cinematic structure, but I’ve always said the solution to this is to incorporate slowdowns during such parts, not remove a basic feature altogether. The inability to jog is a particular hindrance because a lot of Town’s plot consists of backtracking between wings and rooms, and having the option to get there quickly would’ve alleviated the discount-Metroidvania feel.
Part of me does wish the game gave better hints as to where you’re supposed to go/what you’re supposed to do next. A large chunk of the time it is clearcut, but there were a number of notable instances which forced me to utilize the hint function, and the revelation didn’t tend to be a logical continuation.
But yeah, that’s about all I have to say. To reiterate, there is a lot to like with The Town of Light. I don’t think it unveils any historical axioms most people aren’t aware of, however, it’s still a well-told story that manages to get to you thanks to a focus on atmosphere over gimmickry. And though it stumbles towards the end, a powerful finale leaves it as one of the stronger walking simulators to come out in recent years.
Note #1 -- periodically, Renée finds notes from the medical staff that give detailed descriptions from their side of the equation. It adds a nice duality to the narrative and prevents Renée’s POV from dominating the space. That said, it is undercut a bit by the speed of the reading exceeding the page roll-up and the inclusion of this dialogue choice system wherein you pick responses to questions Renée asks aloud (no, they don’t lead to multiple endings, making them utterly pointless).
Note #2 -- Going off that, I’m under the impression Renée was meant to read aloud every stationary, but a potential sound bug is present since it’s hit-or-miss.
Note #3 -- this might be one of the few localized games where I did not spot any typos.
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+The next person Renée needs to find is an adjacent building, and heading outside begins a cognitive trip as she hallucinates vehicles, individuals, and weather changes. The unreliable narrator goes into overdrive with her surroundings collapsing into entire realms of darkness, and to be honest, the plot really lost me here. Like, I know what she was reflecting on, but the presentation was so unnecessarily confounding, especially when contrasted with the first and second acts which were relatively straightforward. It also drags massively- one section, in particular, has you wander about finding 15 kid’s drawings, and while you can subvert it early (I did), there’s no indication from the game that you can: and by letting you do that, aren’t the developers basically stating it was a wild-goose chase intended to pad out the runtime?
The “modern day” outright disappears as well, leaving gamers wondering whether anything was real or just a colossal escapade of delirium (or the ruminations of a revenant now that I think about it), which I would not be a fan of given the redemption-esque arc in the story.
++Renée is subjected to a lobotomy, and in spite of there being no gore (and the models having flaws), I was literally unable to watch it without covering my face. I would go so far as to say it was more harrowing than the needle scene from Dead Space 2. And what a fantastic epilogue from the Doctor summing up the stupidity of such a surgical practice, it leading naturally into the credits wherein you see why the game is called The Town of Light: the victims of Volterra live on as spirits. Very evocative, especially against Sóley Stefánsdóttir’s singing of “I Will Find You”.
+++Renée undergoes a TON of sexual abuse. It’s implied it’s the reason she became promiscuous, which led to her confinement in Volterra, and it continues forth inside the walls. That by itself would be fine, but then the writers go on to give Renée a lesbian partner inside the hospital, and then even more carnal toxicity. Not to mention the rest of her life is nothing but a series of chapters in a torture porn novel. Now look, obviously there were actual accounts the writing team drew from, so I’m not accusing them of fabricating stuff, but let me ask you guys if this type of story would’ve ever been produced from a male perspective. Could you see a video game centered around male sexual abuse leading to incarceration leading to a gay romance leading to more lurid crimes? Like I said with TLOU 2, it’s convenient how depictions of homosexual sensuality only arise from the female perspective.
It seems every other year brings us a new horror-themed walking sim built in Unity, and following my less-than-satisfying experience with Layers of Fear, I was admittedly uneasy booting-up The Town of Light. After all, if there was one good thing Layers did, it was definitively prove the futility of crafting a horror outing without the threat of death (fatalities being a nonsensical concept in such graphic adventures), and so I was not looking forward to prancing around another frowzy abode serenaded by jump scares.
And yet, to my surprise, I found myself enjoying developer LKA’s debut title, perhaps because it wasn’t trying to be a gimmicky horror outing. See, The Town of Light is best described as a ghost story, the kind we would tell each other in grade school to drum up spooky mythologies about a person, place, or thing. And while frightening, they were more-often intriguingly unsettling: an allure would envelope them as they forged haunting remnants in your mind. This isn’t me likening Town of Light to a children’s phantasm- far from it, what you’ve got here is a serious drama inspired by a disturbing era of psychiatric care. But I make the adolescent comparisons due to the type of feelings it elicited in me; you know, that irresistible heart-thump as you thought about coming face-to-face with the spirit of Bloody Mary herself.
Here, Mary has been replaced with Volterra, an abandoned asylum that once housed protagonist Renée. She’s returned an unknown number of years later to figure out what exactly happened to her there, each wing triggering a fresh batch of memories. Before delving into the plot, one thing I must praise LKA for is its opening title card encouraging sufferers of mental disorders to seek out help due to the advances in modern medicine. Too often, I feel many video games exploit the (rightfully-derided) treatments of older institutions without taking into consideration the effect popularizing such motifs will have on contemporary individuals ailing from an illness but unsure about whether or not it’s okay to get aid. Yeah yeah, I know these are video games and shouldn’t be taken that seriously, but there’s a diversity of players, and any bit of advice will always go a long way.
As walking sims rest their laurels on their narratives, it’s a bit hard to talk about Town of Light without intentionally spoiling events. For the first 2/3s of the game, writer/director Luca Dalcò thankfully forgoes experimental storytelling in favor of a chiefly linear chronicle summing up Renée’s stay, with additional flashbacks tossed in courtesy of select items she happens to find in the hospice. There’s a bit of an unreliable narrator in Renée given her traumatic past, however, enough wording is thrown your way to prevent substantive confusion….that is until the final act wherein the developers opt to abandon this two-way paradigm (and Volterra itself) in favor of a new area psychogenically set in memoria.+ It’s a strange decision that almost derails the goodwill brought about by its preceding parts: the pacing becomes draggish, the visuals unnecessarily trippy, and the premise of a person revisiting her past replaced with the past itself. I suppose the steelman interpretation is that uncovering the truth concurrently caused a nervous breakdown in Renée due to her being unable to comprehend reality, but the outright changing of hospitals makes me wonder if more content was originally intended that had to be cut for the sake of time.
Regardless, the story did hook me for the majority of my playthrough, largely due to the absence of filler. Every task you complete advances Renée’s journey of introspection, and players are immediately rewarded a sizable chunk of background info with each progression. Renée’s life is heartbreaking, and knowing her biography was inspired by true accounts from the real-life Volterra tinges the whole odyssey with a disturbing sorrowness, leading to an ending that shocked me.++ That being said, you’ll come across aspects that I thought seemed too exploitative, even by early-20th century bedlam standards.+++
As was stated in the first sentence, Town of Light was assembled in Unity, and while I’m nowhere near a game designer, I’m under the impression that it must be significantly easier to use than Unreal given its prevalence amongst the indie community. Unfortunately, the drawback is Unity requires extra effort to mould its figures past their default waxy appearance, and too many indie devs simply don’t have the manpower to do that. This is particularly true for the creators of walking sims, and I was subsequently expecting to be greeted with the familiar shapes and geometry of Dear Esther and Layers.
Luckily, more work has been done by LKA to distinguish Town from its contemporaries, and while you can still tell it’s Unity, not once did I catch sight of any ceraceous decor. More importantly, the game moves away from the madhouse motif popularized by other titles set in psychiatric units as Volterra looks like a place that’s simply rundown, not plagued by spectral wraiths: the wallpaper is yellowing and peeling, tiles to lightswitches are caked in grime, furniture/wood is scratched-up and molting, the glass is bleary if not fractured, and any papyrus you happen upon appears as though it needs to be held with oven mitts. It’s not so much that the inhabitants mysteriously vanished as they just had no reason to stay here anymore.
During cutscenes, Town switches to one of two styles, the first a penciled motion comic reminiscent of a rough version of the Dampyr series, the second in-engine 3D models. The former is melancholically beautiful, its hard markings combining with a gray/black color scheme to hit this interesting middle ground between childrens’ sketches and an adult’s hazy recollections. The latter, unfortunately, leans too heavily into uncanny valley territory, and while I understand the eeriness was deliberate, I have a feeling the jarring facial and limbic animations probably weren’t intended.
There are other graphical setbacks beyond those scenes. Bookshelves and decaying wallcoverings aren’t implemented well at all, being more akin to a sticker someone taped over the base material over an authentic replica. You’re also blatantly controlling a camera instead of a person, which wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t so apparent- Renée phases through foliage, while carrying any item in your hand turns your character into a floating apparition.
I also feel more detail could’ve been tossed into the many optional areas of Volterra and its accompanying grounds. The aesthetic veracity is definitely commendable, but the lack of personalization prevents any of the adjacent chambers from being worth checking out; once you’ve seen one dorm or courtyard, you’ve seen them all. In addition, it would’ve been kind of cool if particle effects like dust getting kicked-up were incorporated into the game, but at the end of the day I can’t criticize a title for not having things I wish were in it unless they’re so basic as to be expected…which brings me to the abysmal sound design. The first thing you’ll notice are the dual footstep tones: you have one for hard surfaces, the other for grass/dirt, and later you unlock a third for puddles, but that is literally it. You’re gonna be stepping on a lot of terrain, manmade and naturale, not to mention dealing with velocity shifts mandated by the storybeats, and yet there’s no variety- it’s the same phonograph playing the same preprogrammed record on repeat. That singularist approach extends to squeaky hinges: cabinets, windows, big doors matter not! It’s an equally sonorous juncture for any swivel. Perhaps most disappointingly is the lack of ambience- again, the realistic approach is commendable, but there are some things a video game is meant to exaggerate for the sake of immersion, and unknown dins inside an otherwise abandoned asylum would’ve gone far in that direction.
Voice acting is okay. Minus a few lines by one of the doctors at the very end, Renée is the only person you’re hearing, so the drive of the entire story basically weighs on her shoulders ala Atlas. The issue I had with English performer Flaminia Fegarotti is that it seemed like she was more in a radio drama or audiobook session than the theatrical production the game clearly was going for. See, Renée often talks to herself, and so you needed an actress skilled at shifting between the personas akin to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve or Willem Dafoe in the first Spider-Man. Fegarotti isn’t bad by any means, however she fails to make these unnatural inner conversations enticing. That being said, she triumphs in the cutscene narrations wherein she’s able to focus on breathing life into a fragment from Renée’s horrifying childhood. And to those who advocate playing the game in Italian, I tried that briefly and had identical qualms with Daniela D'Argenio.
Music is the sole aural area that is consistently great, and a lot of that has to do with Davide Terreni and Alessio Belli’s indulgence in harmonies typically associated with early-20th century gothic yarns. There’s an emphasis, in particular, on the piano, and its chiming never lets you forget the tragic undertones of this manor you’re lumbering through.
Finally, we come to the gameplay, which is easy to speak on given the limitations of walking sims. LKA has added a nice ergonomic change from the usual slate- here, you don’t have to drag your mouse in a mock-physics motion to open doors: a single click will do it for ya. Sadly, that’s about the only positive present. On the flipside, your examination point is a small white circle, which makes it a bit hard to select specific things. Not that it matters because, outside of collectible diary pages, there is nothing to hold- just like in Layers, there’s a plethora of empty cabinets and drawers that should never have been put in the game world given how barren they are.
More disheartening, however, is the removal of running, and yes I know the purpose of this handicap is to prevent players from breaking the game’s cinematic structure, but I’ve always said the solution to this is to incorporate slowdowns during such parts, not remove a basic feature altogether. The inability to jog is a particular hindrance because a lot of Town’s plot consists of backtracking between wings and rooms, and having the option to get there quickly would’ve alleviated the discount-Metroidvania feel.
Part of me does wish the game gave better hints as to where you’re supposed to go/what you’re supposed to do next. A large chunk of the time it is clearcut, but there were a number of notable instances which forced me to utilize the hint function, and the revelation didn’t tend to be a logical continuation.
But yeah, that’s about all I have to say. To reiterate, there is a lot to like with The Town of Light. I don’t think it unveils any historical axioms most people aren’t aware of, however, it’s still a well-told story that manages to get to you thanks to a focus on atmosphere over gimmickry. And though it stumbles towards the end, a powerful finale leaves it as one of the stronger walking simulators to come out in recent years.
Note #1 -- periodically, Renée finds notes from the medical staff that give detailed descriptions from their side of the equation. It adds a nice duality to the narrative and prevents Renée’s POV from dominating the space. That said, it is undercut a bit by the speed of the reading exceeding the page roll-up and the inclusion of this dialogue choice system wherein you pick responses to questions Renée asks aloud (no, they don’t lead to multiple endings, making them utterly pointless).
Note #2 -- Going off that, I’m under the impression Renée was meant to read aloud every stationary, but a potential sound bug is present since it’s hit-or-miss.
Note #3 -- this might be one of the few localized games where I did not spot any typos.
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+The next person Renée needs to find is an adjacent building, and heading outside begins a cognitive trip as she hallucinates vehicles, individuals, and weather changes. The unreliable narrator goes into overdrive with her surroundings collapsing into entire realms of darkness, and to be honest, the plot really lost me here. Like, I know what she was reflecting on, but the presentation was so unnecessarily confounding, especially when contrasted with the first and second acts which were relatively straightforward. It also drags massively- one section, in particular, has you wander about finding 15 kid’s drawings, and while you can subvert it early (I did), there’s no indication from the game that you can: and by letting you do that, aren’t the developers basically stating it was a wild-goose chase intended to pad out the runtime?
The “modern day” outright disappears as well, leaving gamers wondering whether anything was real or just a colossal escapade of delirium (or the ruminations of a revenant now that I think about it), which I would not be a fan of given the redemption-esque arc in the story.
++Renée is subjected to a lobotomy, and in spite of there being no gore (and the models having flaws), I was literally unable to watch it without covering my face. I would go so far as to say it was more harrowing than the needle scene from Dead Space 2. And what a fantastic epilogue from the Doctor summing up the stupidity of such a surgical practice, it leading naturally into the credits wherein you see why the game is called The Town of Light: the victims of Volterra live on as spirits. Very evocative, especially against Sóley Stefánsdóttir’s singing of “I Will Find You”.
+++Renée undergoes a TON of sexual abuse. It’s implied it’s the reason she became promiscuous, which led to her confinement in Volterra, and it continues forth inside the walls. That by itself would be fine, but then the writers go on to give Renée a lesbian partner inside the hospital, and then even more carnal toxicity. Not to mention the rest of her life is nothing but a series of chapters in a torture porn novel. Now look, obviously there were actual accounts the writing team drew from, so I’m not accusing them of fabricating stuff, but let me ask you guys if this type of story would’ve ever been produced from a male perspective. Could you see a video game centered around male sexual abuse leading to incarceration leading to a gay romance leading to more lurid crimes? Like I said with TLOU 2, it’s convenient how depictions of homosexual sensuality only arise from the female perspective.