At first glance, The Town of Light appears to be yet another ‘trapped in an insane asylum’ game. Yawn. We’ve seen enough Outlast clones to last a lifetime, right?

Italian-based developers at LKA.it are taking a different tack with their horror game, which was recently greenlit on Steam. By creating a landscape based on a real-life abandoned mental hospital in Tuscany, The Town of Light aims to explore the more tragic aspects of being trapped in an authoritative mental institution.

In it, players step into the paper shoes of a former patient, a woman who seems to be suffering greatly from her experiences in the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra.

Voice-over from the thirty second trailer reveal a sinister mode of practice for what was once considered a quite progressive approach to mental rehabilitation:

“I was sixteen, and I was scared. They told me they would bring me to a place where the fear would flit away. That is where I stopped believing. I tried to explain what was happening to me. I was tied to my bed for days. I entered the town of light.”

Very few plot points have been released, but gameplay footage featured on YouTube and elsewhere point to an exploration-based experience. Stepping out on a limb, I’d say you will be traversing the abandoned hospital — closed in 1978 for its arcane and cruel treatment of patients — and collecting some details about the place.

We won’t have access to it yet, because the game is in Alpha, but here’s hoping for a beta or a playable demo sometime in the near future. Updates on the Steam Greenlight page pointed toward a first quarter 2015 release, but since we’re past that, who knows when The Town of Light will be released. Fingers crossed for a soonish beta of some kind.

In the meantime, you can check out the myriad collections of photographs detailing the bone-chilling state of the crumbling institution.