this is just walking simulator. walking simulator with weirdly told confusing story, bad voice acting and tons of text to read.
and don't get me wrong, i don't mind reading notes in video games but sometimes they can be a sign of lazy told story, and this is the case in the town of light. the story tries to have an impact on you by telling you at the beginning that "it's all based on real events", so you can think that story presented in this game could've happened in reality. but the problem is that, the story is told in weird way that you get confused very fast about what's actually going on here. some people said that they cried a lot by the ending and the whole game but i couldn't feel any strong emotion while playing this. i also realized that man, i don't care about this characters at all, i couldn't connect which anything that happened in this game that i ended up just not being moved by the story. it's a consequence of really boring storytelling which is based on going from point a to point b, reading a note and waiting for cutscene to play (which are slides of drawings btw).
environments in this game are also not good. all rooms in this building that you'll spend most of your playthrough look the same and not interesting in any way. the game also tries to create this uncanny vibe and make you feel scared but while it works for maybe first 20 minutes then you just get used to this. walking in this game is also painfully slow and this game just screams for sprint button or faster walking, becouse the slow pacing just creates even more boring and tedious experience.
while speaking of mechanics of this game, there is a system of choices that you'll be forced to make and that choices will have impact on the story, but that aspect is also handled badly. it's not explained to you how that exactly works. just after you answer a question then one of four symbols will appear on your screen for a second and that's it. you need to figure out yourself what does that even mean and how will that impact anything you do in this game. besides that, there aren't any puzzels really. i mean, i just don't know if you can call that puzzles becouse the solutions are so obvious it doesn't require any thinking.
also i'm not a person who knows how italian mental hospitals worked in 40s so i don't know if anything that they showed here is accurate to reality, that's why i didn't mentioned this aspect in my review. i just think story told in this game isn't good and meaningful in any way. it tries to be deep but at the same time, this game doesn't know what it wants to say by showing you all this. there's almost no conclusion for all things that happened in this game.
the town of light with it's badly told confusing story mixed with dull pacing and poor environment design creates a painfully boring experience that you'll regret spending your money on.

Reviewed on Mar 23, 2024


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