The dark truths behind The Town of Light

In the crumbling bathrooms of an abandoned asylum, on a hilltop in rural Italy, I feel a strange sense of déjà vu.

I’m being taken on a tour of the former Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, a sprawling asylum complex that, at one point, held 6,000 inmates. It was closed in 1978 following reforms to mental healthcare in Italy. I say ‘tour’, but we’ve dipped under chicken-wire fences and snuck into a building laced with broken glass. Using the light from our phones, we work our way through a warren of ruined wards, up a stairway choked by collapsed doorways, into communal showers and solitary baths.

I’ve been here before, on the screen of a monitor with a controller in my hand. The buildings of this ruined hospital form the basis of The Town of Light, an interactive psychological drama developed by Italian studio LKA. Setting a first-person game in a ruined asylum may sound like a recipe for survival horror, but LKA’s project is very much grounded in reality. The Town of Light is a detailed mimic of the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra as it stands today, a digital simulacrum, from the peeling architecture of the institution’s Charcot pavilion, to the graffiti that’s accrued across generations of squatters.

In The Town of Light, players trace the story of Renée – a 16-year-old woman stalking the remains of Volterra asylum, segueing into memories of her internment during the 1930s. She’s part ghost, part urban explorer, following a route between memories of institutional brutality. Although the game’s environments have been lifted from real life, LKA’s Luca Dalcò tells me that Renée is a composite, of hundreds of hours of research into the lives of patients from Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra.

(Above: The Town of Light’s version of Volterra asylum)

“I read a lot of psychiatric profiles,” says Dalcò. “Read a lot of books. Talked with witnesses. I decided the ethical question was: should I recreate the history of someone, or should I create something completely new. If I create something completely new, it needs to be real enough; otherwise, the whole idea of the game doesn’t make sense.”[gallery:5]

So what is the idea of the game? Although it has a scattering of object puzzles, The Town of Light can hardly be classed as interactive entertainment. Renée’s story is tragic, all the more unsettling for its grounding in the lives of former inmates – many of whom now lie in the asylum’s graveyard, marked only by patient numbers. “People who worked in the hospital back then didn’t have tools to treat people,” Dr. Paolo Di Piazza, a psychiatrist at ASL Tuscany, tells me. “They tried ergotherapy – making people work – as a way to treat them. Besides that, they didn’t have many ways to help. Back then patients didn’t even have names a lot of the time, or didn’t own possessions. When they entered the asylum everything was kept from them.”

Dalcò tells me his project is intended as a game, not a documentary, but there’s undeniably an attempt to document the history of Volterra’s asylum through Renée and her experiences. With a weight of real lives on its back, can The Town of Light find its feet?

Documentary games

“If you talk about a movie, it could be a comedy, it could be a drama,” Dalcò says. “When you talk about the word ‘game’ it’s automatically self-limiting.” Indeed, the link between games, fun and play is a tricky one to negotiate if you’re aiming to tell a story that encompasses sexual abuse at the hands of a real-life institution.

What I’ve played of The Town of Light is ambitious, but flawed. The environments are richly detailed but inert. There’s little to interact with away from the developer’s path, running between animated cut-scenes that, while harrowing, veer dangerously close to the “horror asylum game” tropes its developers want to distance themselves from.

The fact Renée’s world is a replica of reality is also an issue when it comes to level design. While comparable exploration games, such as Dear Esther or Gone Home, can weave a narrative through spaces specifically authored to tell a story, the real-life architecture of Volterra’s asylum isn’t made for the player’s purpose, and can therefore feel directionless; especially in comparison to the developer’s prescribed paths.

Dalcò has a background in theatre, and The Town of Light could be seen as a site-specific play of sorts, but there were times while playing when I wished LKA had abandoned the pretence of objectives and taken a looser approach to exploration, turning these virtual spaces into archaeological sites, full of documents and records from the real Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra.

[gallery:7]

“There were two stones of the region: alabaster and the mad,” Angelo Lippi tells me, referring to the Volterra’s twin reputation for mining alabaster rock, and for housing the mentally ill. Lippi worked as a social worker at the asylum in its final years, until Law 180 (known as Basaglia Law after its main proponent, psychiatrist Franco Basaglia) reformed Italy’s psychiatric system. He talks about the difficulties facing a town after the institution closed, about how it came to terms with its own history. It’s a fascinating, dark history, and one that The Town of Light – despite the roughness of its execution – is dedicated to keeping.

This intention makes The Town of Light infinitely more interesting than the majority of cookie-cutter shooters and brawlers. While it doesn’t quite settle on a balance between game design and documentary-making, it’s a sober piece of work that wants to tackle serious questions about Italy’s historical attitude to mental health.

More generally, it’s a record of a building. The actual ruins of the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra may be mostly abandoned, stuck in development limbo and cordoned off from visitors, but the virtual imitation is open to all. It raises intriguing questions about how games can be used to document real, inaccessible spaces, or to serve as records for both personal and national histories. “To not repeat mistakes, we should remember these stories,” says Di Piazza, when I ask him what he’d like to happen to the asylum ruins.

“I really think this building should become something else, not be abandoned, but become a museum or cultural institution. It’s a way to respect the humans that were here – to not leave it abandoned.”

With the help of an Italian game studio, the buildings of the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra have indeed become “something else”.

[gallery:16]

The Town of Light is currently available for PC, and will be out on PS4 and Xbox One sometime in Q2/2017.