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The Town of Light preview: déjà vu for you

It seems we can’t do a preview here at htxt.africa without being assailed by familiarity. First Nick played Battleborn, which was cribbing from Borderlands, and now we’re playing The Town of Light, which looks like every single survival horror game we’ve ever seen.

If it wasn’t immediately clear, The Town of Light is another survival horror game to go along with the successful likes of Amnesia and Outlast, but with a healthy dose of Dear Esther and Gone Home’s walking and exploration.

So when we fired up this game we were fully expecting another “walking simulator” where we stumbled around in the darkness of a dingy abandoned building, and that’s exactly what we got.

The game, which successfully made it through Steam Greenlight, does have a hook or two to differentiate it.

The first hook is the cutscenes that use an art style akin to saturated watercolour, which you can check out in the header image. It’s nothing we’ve not seen before though, and we think the first two Infamous games did them better, but they were nice enough to look at and to break up the walking.

The second is a little more intriguing. Remember the abandoned psychiatric hospital which acts as the setting for the game? The Town of Light doesn’t just use any old fictional place, as the Volterra Psychiatric Asylum is a real asylum that was home to many atrocities that garnered it the name “The place of no return”.

The first screen of the game even forewarns you of it:

Screenshot (2) - Copy

To continue the eeriness, you play as the young Renèe, an apparent former patient of Volterra who returns for some reason. Remember the “past somehow related to the setting” bit? Yeah, that.

We must say that this is actually quite an inspired part of The Town of Light’s design. We already knew about this game’s link to the real world beforehand, so going into the faithfully-recreated asylum turned the Uncanny Valley dial all the way up to “nopenopenope”. We didn’t experience any real jumpscares besides some music volume changes, though, but we got sufficiently creeped out the entire time we played the ~20 minute Alpha build of the game thanks to the eerie atmosphere.

The real location (left) and sceenshots from the game (right)
The real location (left) and sceenshots from the game (right)

Thanks to Abandoned Decay we have some real images of Volterra above. In a strange twist (and because of colour saturation) the game actually looks slightly less terrible than the real place.

Of colour saturation and other such things, the options menu in this short Alpha is superb, letting you tinker with far more settings than we see in even some full-release games.

Screenshot (4)

You can also find certain items along the way which you can examine. Although they didn’t have a use we could find, we assume they’ll either be used as clues to advance the plot or to give you an indication of what to do next.

There isn’t much else we can tell you right now. The portion we played was fairly tame and ended with an Inception-style walk, which required some help from the in-game hint system to get to.

We think Town of Light really needs to double down on the fact that it is taking place in a real world location, as that lends it its most presence and is much more interesting than its cookie-cutter gameplay, but we’ll have to wait for the full release to see if it lives up to its potential.

At this moment that’s “Fall 2015”, so expect it on PC only sometime after the beginning of September.

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