Award-Winning Thriller The Town of Light Heading to Xbox One this Year

I am from LKA.it, a small studio based near Florence, Italy. We are really excited to be able to announce that our first game, The Town of Light, has been accepted by ID@Xbox and will be released in 2016. We are a small team working on our first game and being accepted is an incredible honor.

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.

Renee is one of the outcomes of this research, a character crafted putting together dozens of real stories. She is a fictional character for sure, but her journey is one that happened to a lot of people in the past.

The game take place in a real location, too. 7000 square meters of Volterra Psychiatric Asylum has been carefully recreated and can be fully explored to reveal documents, machinery and secrets that will unveil a non-linear story based on your choices, on what you decide to believe or not. Renee is confused, her memory is fading, and you are the one that can help her.

We decided to treat the topic of mental illness in the most sensitive way possible, without hiding which kind of therapies used to be applied to patients when the science was young and hospitals were heavily understaffed. There are good and bad characters you will encounter, as well as good and bad memories you will face.

The Town of Light is heavily story-driven, with some puzzles to solve and a lot of documents and information to find while playing. Whilst the game uses an artistic interpretation of old psychiatric institution for dramatization purposes, we would like to acknowledge the tremendous evolution of mental health service across the world.

If you want to know more about Renee, you can read about what’s happened before the beginning of the game here. We hope you’re excited for The Town of Light. Stay tuned for more news!