Now Featuring Half the Content
Without even trying, we’re all connoisseurs of pooping. Everyone poops after all. We can all appreciate a solid, relieving dump, the kind which requires almost no toilet paper. We’ve all suffered megaton shits which tear out of us like the Chestburster through poor John Hurt. We’ve also had the opposite where mud flows like water. Ultimately, we poop, and we’re better for it.
Now, imagine if you just stopped pooping halfway through the bowel movement. Imagine just storing half of that nugget in your body, getting up, and returning to your day. Savor that awfulness for a moment.
The Town of Light on the Switch is exactly like that sensation. The game is total excrement, a porting disaster so horrendous you’d think the developers hadn’t played it. It’s entirely possible they didn’t because if they had, they would’ve caught the bug which stops progress completely halfway through the game. And yet, the Nintendo community stopped giving shits (or never gave any) and moved on. Otherwise, someone would have noticed the bug, but here we are with a broken game, four months since the game came out and two months since I notified the publisher of the issue.
I don’t know if the Town of Light redeems itself in the second half. I can only review the first half. Keeping with the spirit of this theme, I provide you a half of a review.
What is it?
The game follows the fictional Renée in modern-day times as she returns to the very real asylum, the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, in Italy. Closed in 1978, the psychiatric hospital has succumbed to decay. Broken furniture, papers, and weeds are the sole residents, and graffiti artists have left their marks along the walls. As she wanders the abandoned facility, Renée recalls her memories of when she was committed in the 1940s, piecing together the trauma she experienced to understand the horrors perpetrated by the ward’s staff.
Renée comes prepared, however, to deal with the demons of her past. In addition to walking, she can interact with objects, turn on her flashlight, collect journal pages, turn off her flashlight, and monologue. Wherever you wander, she prattles on about her behavior, sometimes offering direct clues to where you must go. Occasionally, you—presented as some voice in her head—can respond to her incessant narrating to help or hinder her mental health. Whichever you do impacts the gameplay as much as my attempts to complete the game.
For the one half of the game you can experience on Switch, the Town of Life also offers a single puzzle. This puzzle happens to be the one which can’t be completed, but for players unaware of this fact, it comes off as the most challenging and confusing of puzzles. The average gamer (the average being taken from a sample of one gamer) will take upwards of 15 minutes to mess with it until he gives up. Add to this two hours-worth of looking up strategies online, restarting the game, uninstalling and reinstalling the game, deleting the save data and restarting again, and you have yourself a singular puzzle which tortures you with replay value.
What’s good?
- The developers recreated the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra with remarkable dedication and accuracy. The level of passion they invested into their research and recreation of the landmark is incredible. We can only wonder how the Town of Light on Switch would have played if they dedicated the same amount of effort into porting it.
What’s bad?
- The Town of Light is broken. As I have learned from the publisher, “the button is off set [sic] on the boiler” in the aforementioned unsolvable puzzle, and there is no way to push this button otherwise. With no way to progress (to my knowledge), be it through a cheat or chapter select, the Switch port is an incomplete game. On principle, this type of game cannot score anything other than a 1 out of 10.
- The porting process involved the developers shoving the game through a garbage disposal, slurping out the resulting sludge, and placing a price tag on the coagulated mess. Textures are beyond blurry, assets pop in and out, and the framerate skitters everywhere. Any tone the game had is absent along with all lighting effects. For instance, the developers designed the outdoors scenes to be bright and slightly cheerier to contrast the dark, grim hallways of the hospital. This disparity symbolized the freedom of the outside versus the hopelessness within the walls. With the Switch version, the outside is permanently flat and foggy whereas the inside of the hospital is generally well-lit, eliminating any need to use the flashlight or turn on the lights. In a sense, this change symbolizes how everything about the game is fucked-up.
- Renée’s story often seems exploitative in how depressing and gruesome it is. As the developers state, Renée is based on multiple stories of actual patients in the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra. As a result, she seems to have a bingo card of mental health symptoms and trauma. These traumas are then graphically presented in still animated scenes. On one hand, I like how the Town of Light does not shy away from the atrocities committed in the hospital, but the story seems almost indulgent in making Renée suffer. Perhaps the full game justifies the bleak presentation, but other works like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Girl, Interrupted have provided better glimpses into the lives of patients in mental hospitals.
- The Town of Light plays too linearly. Most doors, corridors, and other sections of the grounds are inaccessible until your next task takes you to them, so exploration is discouraged. Even if you do wander, Renée will remind you—almost exasperatedly—that you’re not going where you should. Whereas Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch made linear progression seem natural through the design of the houses, the Town of Light must stick with the floor plan of the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, which could act like a labyrinth. Rather than allow players to get lost and find their way to the story, the game presents an overly strict tour guide who chides you for being curious.
- For the Switch version, the developers slapped together a few videos of them talking about the game and called that good enough for a “Deluxe” release. These videos feature varying levels of video and audio quality, but they all offer few new insights into the story or history behind the game. You’re better off reading the articles others have written about the Town of Light, which is disappointing considering these developers researched the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra in such depth.
What’s the verdict?
Even on PC and consoles, the Town of Light is not a great game. In the unlikely event in which the developers do patch the Switch version, it will still be a poor port. Those with a perverse interest in this game after this review can get it on PC. At least with that version, you can see how the developers cared deeply about telling this story and talking about mental health. With the Switch version, you can see how those same developers didn’t give two shits about maintaining that integrity. I would be more outraged if this port had any financial success, but considering nothing exists online about the Switch version other than promotional material, the Town of Light seems to be as much of a commercial failure as it is an overall failure. Fortunately, time has already begun washing this shit-streak away from our collective memory.
Arbitrary Statistics:
- Score: 1
- Time Played: Over three hours
- Number of Players: 1
- Games Like It on Switch: Night in the Woods, Fractured Minds