[REVIEW] The Town of Light

 I’m going to warn people right now, this game (and thus this review) deal with historical treatment of mental illness. Which largely means that there is some deeply uncomfortable subject matter present in The Town of Light. If this is something that will seriously bother you, then this is probably a game you shouldn’t play. As it is, if you can handle such depictions without re-experiencing traumas of your own, then I highly recommend playing The Town of Light, because it’s a game like no other.

I also warn you that there will be spoilers in this review, because it is nearly impossible to talk fully about this game without spoiling a few things.

 LIGHT IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD

Developed and published in 2016 by LKA, The Town of Light was initially released on PC, with a PS4 and XBox One release coming the following year. The game is set in a crumbling psychiatric institution in Tuscany, Italy, with the story centred around a young woman named Renee, a patient at that psychiatric hospital during the late 1930s and early 1940s. You experience Renee’s story partly through finding scattered documents in the crumbling abandoned building, and partly through flashbacks, which force the player to relive traumatic events that Renee experienced. From being tied to her bed when she became uncooperative to being sexually assaulted, there is no escape from the horror that Renee experienced during her incarceration at the psychiatric hospital during Italy’s fascist regime.

It’s hard to see footage of this game without thinking of it as a typical horror game. Indeed, when I first played the demo version of the game, I couldn’t get very far through it. I’m a wuss when it comes to horror games, and from the tense atmosphere and explorative nature of the game, I expected jump scares every time I turned a corner, loud dramatic sound effects to make me jump, any of the hallmarks of modern horror games.

But these elements were all absent. The Town of Light is not your typical horror game. It’s not even a typical psychological horror game, since those usually involve crime or a malevolent supernatural entity or something antagonistic to drive the player onward. But here, the only drive is discovering more of Renee’s story, uncovering the pieces of her past and finding out exactly what happened to her while she was a patient at the hospital.

Naturally, this makes for many uncomfortable moments. The game does state at the beginning that mental health treatment and psychiatry have come a long way since the mid 20th century, but that doesn’t make any of Renee’s experiences sit well with me. The game’s content was inspired by thousands of patient reports from the time, thousands of actual experiences that real people did go through. You can  pretend that you’re just playing a game, that none of it is real, but a lot of this was all real for somebody, and in a way, this was the game developers shining the light on a dark corner of history, pulling our attention to it so that we don’t forget what happened just because it’s disturbing and inconvenient.

Much like the patients themselves.

EXPLORATIVE AND SLOW, BUT DEEP

 
Being unlike a typical horror game, there are very few moments of extremely high tension, though that isn’t to say that there are no scary moments. There may not be any ghosts or monsters leaping out at you, but some of the imagery of Renee’s hallucinations will stay with you long after the stop playing the game. Most of the game, though, is very slow and steady with its pacing. Flashbacks are far less common than documents that you find as you explore the old hospital, documents which bring more pieces of Renee’s story to the forefront. You find out more from torn pieces of paper than you do from flashbacks, and at times it seems the flashbacks exist primarily to add more visual flair to the game, to provide an anchor point for people who might not fully grasp the ramifications of what they just read.

That’s not an insult to the player’s intelligence, either. For instance, at one point you will likely find a report regarding Renee needing an abortion after “she had sexual intercourse,” and a vague mention of a police report being filed against the man who broke into the hospital grounds. It’s easy to interpret, from that, that the sex was entirely consensual. If you pay attention to the flashback, however, you can see that the event was much more… non-consensual, to say the least. There’s additional context given, if you know what to look for.

But by and large you’re mostly just wandering around and trying to gather the pieces of the puzzle. It’s similar in that way to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. A game that has a mystery you need to solve, and solving it involves exploring your environment, gathering the clues, and slowly advancing the story at your own pace. If Ethan Carter can be called a walking simulator, then so too can The Town of Light. But that’s not a point against the game, not remotely, and the more I play games like this, the more I find I really enjoy them, and that I’m drawn into the story extremely easily.

It doesn’t hurt that the game’s graphics are stunning, and the places you explore, while dilapidated and creepy, are still a joy to walk through from a design perspective.

SUBJECTIVITY IS KEY

 
There’s a lot that’s easy to miss in this game. I previously mentioned the flashbacks providing visual context for some of the documents you find, though none of the flashbacks provided new information… to me. I’m also aware that I am the sort of person who has lived a lot of their adult life primed for these cues. I have experienced serious mental illness, which made a lot of this game hit really hard for me. I have seen what happens to women who are outspoken, too visible, or “inconvenient,” and I know that official reports will often not reveal subjective truths.

But therein lies the question of authenticity. It’s established that Renee developed a relationship with another woman named Amara, and how one day, they were caught together in the shower and forcibly separated. You discover a document stating that Renee was found alone in the shower, um, taking care of business herself, so to speak. This prompts an exploration to discover if Amara was even real, whether she was a hallucination, or whether a lesbian relationship was stricken from the records because such things were considered unseemly at best. You do find evidence that Amara existed, and that seems to settle the mystery.

Or does it? Because nothing about those belongings mention a relationship with Renee? Amara may have been real, but the relationship may not have been. There’s a lot about this game that forces the player to read between the lines to discover the truth, if the truth can even be fully discovered. This is the sort of thing that can prompt multiple playthroughs. Indeed, there are parts of the story that can change depending on decisions you make in the game, multiple branches that can be taken, so even if you only replay it for the achievements, there are still some sections that need to be played multiple times to get the full effect. It’s a great motivation to revisit and to see what new things can be found.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES

 
I mentioned that the game doesn’t insult the player’s intelligence, but from many reviews I’ve read of The Town of Light, it seems a lot has gone unnoticed or unconsidered in this game. For instance, most reviews I read talk about how the game takes place in the 1940s.

It doesn’t.

At the very beginning on the game, there is a message that tells you that the current year is 2016. While the game’s story is set in the 1940s, the game itself takes place more than 70 years later.

Now, from here on there are going to be massive story spoilers, so if you don’t want to hear them, feel free to skip the rest of this review.

Good.

Most people talking about the game talk about how you are playing Renee, revisiting the hospital, which is now abandoned. This is established in the game, that you are Renee, that you’re talking to yourself most of the time, and that you’re uncovering the truth about your own life. What happened to you?  Why do the reports you find say different things than you remember? What is the truth?

Which is also true.

But. Look for a moment at Renee’s hands.

 
Those do not look like the hands of somebody who would be pushing 90 at this point.

For all this to add up, Renee is probably dead. In fact, toward the end of the game, there is a scene where Renee stabs herself in a suicide attempt, and there is a strong implication that she died then. You’re playing the game as Renee’s spirit, trapped at the psychiatric hospital that influenced her so deeply, trying to come to grips with her own life, walking through the place and remembering. That’s why certain areas will unlock after certain events, since that is when Renee is ready to see them. That’s why doors open of their own accord to spur you onward. That’s why you will sometimes hear voices outside, or see scaffolding to indicate the place is being worked on, but you see nobody. There is a supernatural element to the game, and that element is you. You, as you search for the truth. You, as you need to relive your life and your memories multiple different times to grasp the whole story.

I find the ending cutscene as the credits play backs this up, as you see stylized ghostly figures around the hospital building, and the image of yourself being led back inside, fading as you go.

Perhaps you are the part of Renee that she lost when she was forced to undergo a lobotomy.

This interpretation puts a whole different spin on the game than the idea that the hospital fell into disrepair in under 8 years and you’re back there for some reason to find out about things that happened only a few years prior. It smooths out all the wrinkles that crop up when you just assume that the game takes place in the 1940s, and adds another layer of wonder and curiosity to the whole experience. Quite frankly, I think it’s brilliant. Even if this wasn’t what LKA had in mind when they were making the game, that this interpretation makes so much sense is a fantastic twist that makes me love the game all the more.

UNAPPRECIATED AND UNLOVED

Frankly, I think this game gets ignored too often. It’s not what many people expect when they hear it’s a psychological horror game, and perhaps that may have something to do with it. People play it and wait for the scares that never really happen. Perhaps the subject matter is too much to handle, and in that regard, I can’t blame people. Parts of this game upset me very deeply. But I knew that was going to happen 5 minutes in, when I saw that I was going to be looking at mental health stuff from the 1940s. If you approach this game as a disturbing “walking simulator” rather than a horror game, you get a much better feel for what you’re going to be in for.

It’s beautiful, it’s tragic, it’s educational, and it’s disturbing. And it’s so well done that I am already interested to see what the developers are going to do next. They set a high bar for themselves with The Town of Light.