It was recently announced that the upcoming first-person adventure/horror game The Town of Light was accepted by ID@Xbox, and will be released on the Xbox One sometime this year.
Luca Dalcò, Creative Director at Italian indie studio LKA.it, shared the news on the Xbox Wire blog, explaining what the game is about:
With The Town of Light, we decided to explore mental illness and how mental institutions used to operate back in the 1940s through the eyes of one patient, Renée. She is back to the Volterra Psychiatric Asylum at present day, trying to remember her past and what happened between those walls when she was 16.
You might think we are talking about a horror game with jump scares or zombies, however this is not what The Town of Light is. It’s a journey, a realistic story based on a huge amount of research. The only horror you will find in this game is the truth, which is much more intense than any supernatural presence.
The experience of the main character, Renée, is reportedly drawn from this research, put together from dozens of real people’s stories. The location is a real one too, “carefully recreated” in the game so the player can explore it fully to find documents and other items that help rebuild a story from Renée’s fading memories. While there are some puzzles in the game, it appears to be primarily narrative-driven.
Dalcò also assures everyone concerned about the subject of the game that the studio “treat[s] the topic of mental illness in the most sensitive way possible” and that while they don’t conceal uncomfortable facts about the nature of many old psychiatric treatments, they “would like to acknowledge the tremendous evolution of mental health service across the world.”
The Town of Light‘s exact release date for the Xbox One is still unknown, but it will reportedly release for PC/Mac/Linux on February 26.
