With games like That Dragon, Cancer and The Beginner’s Guide releasing recently, we seem to be stepping into a brave new era in video game storytelling, with some developers moving away from the fantastical, instead stepping into the biographical. The Town of Light looks to continue this trend.

Creeping through dilapidated mental asylums is nothing new in video games: shining a torch into shadowed rooms, tiptoeing through eerie corridors, and hiding from supernatural threats. But while The Town of Light might share this setting, cheap scares are not on the agenda. This is a more human story, one of a fictional girl revisiting the very real place where she endured the horrifying treatment methods of the mental institution in the 1940s.

At its peak, the Volterra Asylum in Tuscany, Italy housed over 4,500 patients. The first patient that social worker Angelo Lippi ever met was a healthy man in his mid-twenties who was locked inside the asylum, despite no signs of mental illness. The man was a six-year-old orphan when first incarcerated in the now defunct Italian asylum for stealing food. He was sentenced to a term in the hospital under a ‘moral diagnosis’.