What an odd beast The Town of Light [official site] is. Per Alec’s preview from Develop last month, it’s Gone Home by way of Silent Hill rather than a traditional horror game. No monsters, no supernatural sub-plot and very little direct threat. A new trailer reveals that you play as Renee, an ex-inmate of Volterra, an infamous and real Italian asylum. She’s returned to the decaying ruin of the institution in the modern day to find the doll pictured above. The doll is not going to turn out to be the physical embodiment of an evil spirit – it’s just a doll she wants back – but the trip could be spooky thanks to realistic atmosphere and aesthetic, produced through thousands of hours of research.

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Horror games have an asylum level: them’s the rules. No, no arguing, it’s statistically proven to be the only environment human beings can be scared by. Well, fun fairs and orphanages too, but the quintessential horror asylum always has aspects of those anyway. Italian-made ‘psychological-thriller’ The Town Of Light is set in an asylum, therefore I presumed it was a straight-up horror game – but I might be wrong. It’s truly about an asylum, it seems, rather than simply using one as a shortcut for scary things. It’s recreating some 7,000 square metres of the real-life Italian asylum Volterra (which was closed in 1978), includes ‘real clinical documents’ and reckons itself to be concerned with ‘the true meaning of mental illness.’

I’m quite a bit concerned that this seems to involve creepy dolls and squeaky doors, but maybe it’s just trailers doing what trailers need to do?

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