This article comes courtesy ofDen of Geek UK.
The old asylum certainly looks like something from a video game.
This is the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra, located high in the Tuscan hills of Italy.
and buildingThe Town of Light.
The real-life story of the hospital is a fascinating one all by itself.
At its height, there were nearly 7,000 people living inside its walls.
Largely cut off from the rest of Italy, the asylum was almost entirely self-sufficient.
This was no utopian retreat, however.
Under old Italian laws, patients of mental hospitals ceased to be regarded as citizens.
In most cases, those who found themselves in the Volterra asylum would never leave.
All kinds of people that now find treatment elsewhere.
There were also divorced women who came here.
If all this sounds like a sensitive subject matter to make a game out of, youd be right.
Thankfully, however,The Town of Lights creators havent taken on the project lightly.
Eighteen plus, maybe twenty plus.
The amount of research that Dalco and his team have put into the game is certainly plain to see.
Its about her suffering […] Its about personal experiences and trauma.
The psychiatric hospital was created with the ideal of helping people, DiPiazza says.
This was the first idea behind the asylum back then.
Maybe you have seen the bathtubs on the tour?
Thats where they took a very hot bath or very cold bath.
It sounds like torture, but there was a medical reason why they did that.
Some of the things that happen to Renee, although tastefully handled, arent for the faint of heart.
The aim of the game is to tell the story of mental health in the 1940s, Dalco explains.
People dont want to talk about it.
The stigma comes from the past, and not talking about these things.
In the past, people often believed that the mentally ill were possessed by evil.
Into the 60s, everyone in Italy who displayed symptoms of mental disease lost every civil right.
It was considered shameful.
A later leg of the tour takes us to a graveyard further down the hill.
We were also surprised at how few graves there appeared to be in the place.
If there were thousands of people here, we asked, why is the cemetery so empty?
Because the bodies were often stacked on top of each other, we were told.
It was only towards the end of the asylums life that the rules began to change.
Built in Unity,The Town of Lightis a measured, ambient game in the mold ofGone Home.
We need to assess first, what is horror?
Horror is now generally perceived as zombies, monsters, Dalco says.
Today its different, clearly, Dalco concedes.
Things are much better.
But I think the stigma is still there; a sense of shame.
