I absolutely love how the human mind works. It is fascinating how the human mind can break, repair itself, and affect the body and psyche in ways we still don't fully understand. The Town of Light explores these ideas with a real-life case. The game is set in a hospital in Tuscany, Italy, called the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra. You play as a woman named Renee who seems to be coming back to this hospital and reliving her experience here. The game's unsettling ambient audio and flashbacks of dark and disturbing sketches are fantastic to experience.
Sadly, that's the only enjoyable part of the game. The entire game has an incredibly slow pace and the usual obscure and abstract way of finding your way around and figuring out what to do. There are way too many doors to open, and there are too many spaces to explore with nothing in them. This hospital is two stories and quite large. With the slow walking pace, I just wanted to experience the story and move on. You don't know you're heading in the right direction until Renee continues narrating the story or a flashback happens. These flashbacks are either pencil sketches or full-on cutscenes. If you press the back button, some chapters will have Renee tell you where to go; however, everything is in Italian, so unless you pull up a translator or can kind of figure out prefixes and suffixes of words, you might get lost based on the signs.
There are eight diary pages to collect and find. These are highlighted notebooks in certain rooms, and I suggest getting them all. The notebook is an insightful dive into the mind of those that are mentally ill and have various psychological diseases. The sketches are haunting and beautifully done. The best part of the game is the narrations of the various hospital records you must find to advance the story. The entire tale of Renee and her fellow patients is fascinating, haunting, and quite disturbing. It also shows how awful the healthcare, especially mental healthcare, was in the 40s and 50s in not just Europe, but all over the world. I work as a nurse myself in a hospital, and it's insane to know that our current modern way of doing healthcare (humanely) is very recent. Like the last 25 years, recent.
I also have to give credit to the developers for accurately portraying a decaying asylum. It looks and sounds just like you would find one in real life. I highly recommend watching The Proper People on YouTube, who are the best urban explorers out there. They have visited asylums in Italy, and the building is very reminiscent of how they stand today. The peeling paint, depressing color scheme, abandoned, rusting bed and wheelchairs, and old and mysterious medical equipment that look like torture devices (some were). Despite all of this, however, the game is very boring and ugly to look at. Even for 2016, the game is teetering on the border of asset-flippy territory. It just looks so generic and low-budget despite some decent lighting effects.
The voice acting is very well done, and the overall picture you walk away with is the narrative of mental health in general and how people are taken advantage of back in the day. The game also explores how orderlies raped and molested the women and lied and were believed. The doctors literally got away with murder, and families were lied to and betrayed without ever knowing it. Thankfully, this is all in the past, but the hundreds of thousands of victims who died and suffered under the guise of humane healthcare is a sad story and something worth discussing even today.