The Town of Light (PS4)
My father once said that every war movie is a horror movie, and in a similar vein, I’d like to put forth that anything involving early 20th century psychiatric hospitals is inevitably horror as well. While psychology is an incredibly beneficial science, our early understanding of it was fundamentally flawed and lead to incredibly unethical and outright horrific actions done in pursuit of treating mental illnesses. The Town of Light has no pop scares or monsters for its brand of horror, instead depicting the awful experience of a girl who ended up in such a hospital back in 1930s Italy and relying on the real world atrocities to provide its disturbing material.
The Town of Light begins as Renée returns to the dilapidated psychological hospital many years after her time there, her fractured memories guiding her through the abandoned building that is being slowly reclaimed by nature. Seeing certain rooms and finding certain things around the old hospital remind her of what happened to her here many years ago, the player navigating this narrative exploration game entirely in the first person view to make the story more personal. For the most part your involvement will be taking Renée from room to room as the story told in flashbacks progresses, the direction sometimes unclear unfortunately and the hints you can get on where to go sometimes not usable at parts for whatever reason. Mostly you’ll just need to worry about finding the right area to be in or the right object to click on, but there are some very straightforward minor puzzles that gate progress without being too much of a bother. What is a bit more annoying though are how often the vital notes and photos that help you experience some flashbacks or learn more about Renée’s time at the hospital are obscured by the game’s lighting engine.
The Town of Light tries to make its playable area intricate and detailed, emphasizing the decay of the place while adding the haunting beauty of nature encroaching on this decrepit old mental hospital to make it feel even more forlorn in its emptiness. Much of the old equipment from its active period has been left behind, but oftentimes you’ll find beds overturned, equipment jammed into some side area thoughtlessly, or graffiti depicting surreal imagery adorning the damaged walls. However, the light peeking in through windows and cracks is sometimes blinding or needlessly distracting. The stark white papers with important details on them can sometimes blend in with the light, and at other times the light might hit a spot that makes it look meaningful but what looks like important areas being highlighted just happens to be how sunlight entered through a hole in the wall. While navigating the hospital is already a little frustrating because of the sometimes loose guidance, trying to find all the notes to finish Renée’s diary, trigger the next memory, or learn more about the hospital is complicated needlessly by the asylum’s visual design.
The Town of Light is definitely a game that lives and dies by its narrative though, the small gameplay nuisances not nearly as important as the plot that unravels during your exploration. Sadly, it doesn’t really seem to do enough to make the narrative as effective as it wants to be. Renée gradually remembers more and more of her time at the psychiatric hospital, remembering the horrible things done to her and others both out of attempts at legitimate care and deliberate cruelty. As her memories are fleshed more and more, she even begins to question how much of what she knew about herself is true, old notes left by her and the staff starting to seem contradictory. At some points, she even enters an unusual mindscape where the rules of reality are twisted, mostly just for some brief symbolic travel or to take a new look at information in a way besides picking up notes or having small flashbacks when entering a room. The problem is that Renée’s story feels like it relies more on a conga line of horrific medical abuse than a personal journey. The things that happen to her are definitely disturbing and unfortunately plucked from the kind of real life experiences common to this setting, but it feels like a lot of negativity is being piled on with not much more to say about it or any attempt to really have Renée’s involvement be as important as it should be.
Many times when you get a flashback in The Town of Light, it’ll either be brief black and white images of the injustices everyone at the asylum experienced or a longer narrated story where more evocative and symbolic artwork helps relay the awful events that happened while making the staff and others who perpetrate them look like shadowy beings or monsters. Renée reacts to remembering these moments from her past and has a backstory that plays into some of them like her relationship with her mother who committed her to the asylum, but it never commits to any interpretation of her life too strongly. There are parts where you are essentially a voice in her head that contests or supports her reactions to things she’s reading, this leading to a mostly arbitrary split in the story before it rejoins to reach the same end, that too feeling like the game can’t decide on one solid route to be followed in Renée’s personal journey. You’ll pursue one angle of her life only for it to be dropped, invalidated, or feel oddly incomplete, the game avoiding strong statements on what exactly happened and introducing doubt perhaps in an attempt to have the player be as confused as the main character. What is meant to be a deeply personal story unfortunately ends up feeling like a procession of whatever awful things could happen in this old setting while parts of Renée’s life and backstory are forgotten in favor of taking her to the next atrocity.
There are some moments that are definitely impactful though, these usually being the controllable flashbacks where you are actually able to experience the awful conditions yourself and the confusion of a moment where you are unsure what will happen next. An unflinching look at some of the darker and disturbing parts of mental illness are on show, only slightly weakened by strange character models, but the willingness to commit to presenting such things with such chilling impartiality gives them their strength. Opening up a book full of strange body modifications meant to cure mental illnesses is not accompanied by a scare chord nor is it built up to as some awful reveal. That book is just laying out in the open to be perused if you pick it up. At other points, you see the other patients suffering in the same situation, their own fear easily transferred to the player as you are similarly just as confused on what might be about to happen. Strapped to a gurney with an unclear destination at another point, you are given mild control over your head movement just to emphasize how little control you truly have, and the game treats the moments of real terror instead of psychological instability as something that is awful because of what we know is happening rather than having to fabricate any artificial ways of setting a disturbing mood. If the game used these first-hand experiences much more than still image flashbacks and scattered notes it could have definitely gotten its intended impact across much better, but the scatterbrained story instead mixes its story-telling methods and feels far sloppier for it.
THE VERDICT: The Town of Light is capable of landing some precision strikes on your heart and mind with shocking imagery and constantly piling more and more terrible true-to-life experiences on its protagonist, but it feels like most of the effort went into trying to make you recoil at archaic psychological treatments than exploring the story of its protagonist. Renée and the player move from place to place with sometimes vague guidance to get shown flashes of moments that don’t connect well and are too messy to make the protagonist much more than a victim for a procession of bad things to happen to. If you already have a familiarity with the awful conditions of 20th century psychological hospitals, The Town of Light only really offers you some brief moments that really capture the sensation of experiencing them while the rest is a slow, ambling, and oddly impersonal tour of the cliches of the setting and topic.
And so, I give The Town of Light for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. If shedding some light on a history that is already fairly well known strikes a chord with the player, The Town of Light’s problems with presentation and narrative cohesion will be pushed aside in favor of pure emotional impact. There are some moments in The Town of Light that could be excised and presented on their own as a disturbing digital reproduction of what lift must have been like in such awful conditions, but these impactful moments could afford to keep better company. Exploring the asylum is sometimes confusing, especially as backtracking might be required without much direction on when you need to do so. Renée is definitely the biggest victim of the game’s current design, her personal narrative certainly having the pieces for a greater exploration of someone who underwent all these awful forms of treatment and was heavily abused by a flawed understanding of psychological care, but ideas appear and exit the plot without feeling they contributed too much to the grander story at play. You can empathize with her because it would take a heart of stone not to, but she’s a confusingly constructed character whose story is told in the wrong manner. Trimming out a lot of the minor generic flashbacks in favor of the more interactive moments would do a lot to help you feel her plight, and putting them in a more sensible order and trimming fat elsewhere could make it one powerful through line instead a scattered mess of sometimes disconnected experiences. It might be too much to ask for the game to shift completely to experiencing Renée’s life as it happened rather than looking back at it, but its best moments are the ones where it is viewed as an experience rather than as a set of admittedly stylish dark illustrations or flickers of vague memories.
The Town of Light wants you be uneasy as you play, to be disturbed by what happens, and to be repulsed by how a stand-in for real world women suffered as the world was struggling to understand how to treat people like her. If seeing shocking representations of that might tug your heartstrings it could be for you, and if you’re unfamiliar with the subject matter it could at least be a harrowing introduction to the realities of how we treated mental illness in the past. However, its plot does a disservice to its main character by making her mainly a victim to showcase these atrocities while her own personal narrative fails to really integrate them properly or act on the backstory elements you spend time uncovering. This ponderous retelling of common horrors of early psychology pales in comparison to other stories on the same subject matter, and a few effective moments can’t make up for all the tedious exploration and wasted narrative potential they come with.