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In the portion of the game I played – a two hour session that covered perhaps half of the story – there is no sense of the asylum as a functional place. This was partly to provide occupational distractions and therapy, but it may also have been a financial consideration.”
They would have made their own clothes and even learned carpentry so they could carry out repairs. “The patients grew their own crops and raised their own livestock. I only saw the interior of a single building – the game allows you to explore at least two and a portion of the grounds as well – but the institution was a self-sustaining settlement. It's separation from the town is slight but it is a distinct entity, an enormous expanse that runs away from the inhabited areas. It's enough to make you believe in ghosts and the asylum itself is something of a Mary Celeste. Towns like ships at sea, passing so close but never confirmed as visual entities.
The only sign that life existed beyond that mist came when the church bells rang to summon the devout and the dutiful – somewhere, beyond the veil, another set of bells rang out as if in response. Volterra itself is relatively aloof, perched atop hills that, on the day I visited, were draped in mist. It's not isolated in the sense that you might expect. The architecture is beautiful and from the outside, it'd be easy to mistake the building for an extravagant palazzo, though its relative isolation speaks of a building not wishing to impress itself upon the neighbours. Walking through the corridors and rooms of one of the buildings that made up the patient's quarters in the real Volterra Asylum, there was no sense of spookiness or dread. Town of Light might not be a horror game but it is absolutely horrifying and the fact that it's based in the history of a real place, and the wider social history of mental health treatment, makes its terrors and grotesques all the more affecting. There is cruelty and abuse and imprisonment and fear. There are no chase sequences, there's no clumsy combat and there isn't a single supernatural entity in sight. Developers LKA, led by Luca Dalco whose background is in theatre, are insistent that this is not a horror game. This is the story of a game that brushes the tropes of the horror genre aside, and finds its sorrow and terrors in the history of a place and a way of thinking.Īll blockquotes are taken from an interview with Giampaolo di Piazza, conducted with the help of a translator. I also spoke to the team behind the game and Giampaolo di Piazza, a psychiatrist and Vicepresident of the Italian Society of Phenomenological Psycopatology about the history that informs the game.
Upcoming game The Town of Light is set in that hospital and its grounds, and I had a chance to explore both the virtual recreation and the actual buildings. Last week, I visited Volterra, an Italian town that is home to the now-derelict Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, a former psychiatric hospital.