If you are looking for a game that will cheer you up and make you smile from ear to ear, perhaps stop now. The Town of Light, from developers LKA, is an exploration into something extremely depressing. Its topics range from patient mistreatment to rape to complete and utter loneliness. While this might sound like a recipe for a game you would never want to play, it offers some engaging insight into a topic games often avoid and will provoke an emotional reaction from players.
I actually played the game slightly weird as there is a diary in the main menu that gives you a very good glimpse into the kind of darkness you’ll expect from the game’s narrative. It tells you about the characters and helps flesh out backstory before you jump into the game itself. I’m not going to say I chose the right way to approach it, but knowing the tone of everything going in helped make it a little bit easier to justify playing through some fairly mundane puzzles and more-often-than-not poorly paced direction.
The Town of Light follows Renée in the early twentieth century, revisiting the mental hospital which she was taken to at 16 years old. The hospital is now abandoned and vegetation grows over all of the walls, with files and books thrown around its grimy insides. There isn’t much in terms of discovery in the game’s environments, but what those seemingly underwhelming rooms mean to Renée is what makes them special. A locker room might just be a locker room to most, but The Town of Light highlights the importance of personal experiences and what that means to game design. Not every room has to be obviously rich in history. Instead, it’s the protagonist’s viewpoint that gives a room value.
Each time I got to a moment where the game was presenting me with a look into Renée’s past, I was excited but also worried. The presentation of her past is done in a sketchbook style with voice over (often devoid of any emotion, which might be intentional but often leans on the boring side) that is aesthetically pleasing and helps bring life to the dead environment around her. If her voice itself wasn’t so dead sometimes, the memories would feel even more palpable, but the game still manages to deliver the punches when it needs to.
The problem is that there are many moments when the voice acting or the writing itself feels “off” from the tone being delivered. It is never happier than the tone, but it is often too monotone to carry the weight of the original score or drab geometry surrounding Renée. The writing could be attributed to the developers being Italian and it generally just feeling like there is some translation issues, but it still hurts the experience. There are even just some grating cues where Renée speaks up and tells the player how they’re doing something wrong, but this just adds to the fact that the game is sometimes a bit too confusing because of its writing.
It happens early on in the game, and if I hadn’t read Renée’s diary in the game menu beforehand, I might have stopped playing because of this frustratingly delivered objective. Renée has a doll that she had during her time in the hospital, which she finds, and this continues the game’s narrative. Well, it would, except you have to find her somewhere “comfortable and warm” to rest. The solution isn’t spelled out to you, which is fine, but what the game defines as “comfortable” isn’t what I immediately thought to be the case, and what it defines as warm I really only solved because it was one of the only interactive parts available to me.
Add to that, the controls which worked most of the time, but sometimes I found myself hitting a button twice for it to work. The movement speed was also not as fast as I’d have liked for a game where you’re walking a lot. It just becomes alienating to have things working against you that ultimately hurt the pacing of the game and its desired effect. I’m sure not having a run command was intentional due to the fragility of The Town of Light‘s main character, but it hurts the pacing between story beats.
It is easy to just knock the game for feeling like it cared more about its story than the gameplay, but there is still something to experiencing something through someone else’s eyes. Authenticity is the selling point of The Town of Light and LKA do not shy away from providing harrowing moments that may seem outlandish but still feel totally plausible in the real world. The craziness of the setting is exacerbated by the fact that you could discover similar experiences in some of today’s hospitals. While this takes place in the first half of the twentieth century, it still has analogs for today.
The gameplay doesn’t ruin The Town of Light and actually really only serves as an inconvenience on occasion, with its worst offense being that it doesn’t really try to be engaging. It saves that for its story and character/historical exploration. I was very satisfied with the game’s presentation and its desire to confront a subject matter that is perfect for a player-driven experience. The immersion into a very specific setting helps make The Town of Light feel necessary to play, even if it isn’t able to fully capitalize on the medium it chooses to use.
A review code was provided by LKA for the purpose of this review.