The village of Gravoi, somewhere on the island of Sardinia, is a cluttering of cobbled alleyways, concentric stairways, and shaded nooks where a wheezing tourist might take refuge from the heat. In the boiling sun, overlooking the tinselled Mediterranean Sea, it’s the ideal backdrop for an Instagram shoot: billowing dresses, floppy straw hats, leggy prawns splayed across a white porcelain plate. At night, however, Gravoi provides the blueprint and backdrop for a nightmare. Its architectural swirl of dead ends, religious shrines, and silhouetted iron gratings describe a hellish, claustrophobic warren. It’s this latter reality in which Saturnalia, a survival horror game set in a shifting village, is principally set. Described by its makers as a “procedural death labyrinth”, it is a place of horrors both physical and psychological into which the game’s four protagonists are inexorably drawn.
The group arrives to the village for the Festival of St Lucia, a masked gathering infused with Catholic symbolism that coincides with the winter solstice. Everyone is passing through for a different reason. Anita – your starting character – is a geologist who, for the past year has been assessing the mines beneath the town for a prospective buyer. Pregnant with the child of a local churchman, with whom she has enjoyed a secretive affair, Anita is desperate to flee the debris of her recent choices. Paul is a photojournalist and orphan, who left the village as a child. He hopes his return will add substance to the translucent memory of his late parents. Drug addict Sergio also left Gravoi years ago, at the end of a relationship to an older, gentleman lover. The split left a lasting emotional wound. He has returned to the village for an emotional reckoning. And, lastly, Claudia, the daughter of the owner of a local bar, La Principessa, who for too long has ignored the strange circumstances around her aunt’s suicide. Each character has a secret they are trying to conceal or one they hope to expose.
Two obstacles stand in the way of the ensemble cast’s emotional objectives: the night and the creature. Silent Hill had fog; Saturnalia has darkness: a cloying, gloopy substance that reduces visibility to a few feet and makes navigating the village enduringly difficult. There are street signs, maps on every corner, and little bonfires to act as waypoints, but finding your way remains awkward, even after hours of familiarity. Strike a match and the wriggling light will afford you a few extra feet of visibility, but matches are a scarce commodity that are best saved for exploring the mines, where there is no ambient light at all.
