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Saturnalia review: a truly unique, beautiful, and exquisite horror gameio Saturnalia!
io Saturnalia!
Saturnaliaisn’t a terribly long game, but it has spent much longer occupying my thoughts. Any time in the past couple of weeks that my friends and colleagues thought they were talking to me, they were in fact talking to an exquisite Italian neon-folkhorrorgame wearing my skin and looking out of the eye-holes in my skull. On at least one occasion I lay in bed at 3am, sweaty and frozen in half-asleep fear, because I thought I’d heard a strange rattling noise…
Saturnalia – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer [4K 60fps]Watch on YouTube
Saturnalia – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer [4K 60fps]
FW:fw:Fw: THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURSEDOnce open you MUST forward Saturnalia to 15 friends, because it is FREE on the Epic Game Store for its first week. If you don’t a SMALL and VERY SWEARY English girl will follow you around SHOVING YOU when you TRY TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH, shouting RANDOM NUMBERS whenever you’re counting, and repeatedly calling you an IDIOT for MISSING OUT ON THIS GAME.
Each, too, has their own personal goal that it would be nice to achieve before they leave. Anita is having an affair with a local, and would likehorrible revenge?to square that triangle. Paul was adopted out of town as a child and wants to find out about his birth parents. Ticking off the things on everyone’s to do list and escaping Gravoi could take you, ooh, maybe six hours, depending on your own tendency towards ratfuck cowardice, and you could elect to leave some things unresolved.
Every foray into Gravoi became an exercise in psyching myself up, and a weighing of cost vs. benefit. I do quite want to check the infirmary in the mine, but also I really do not want to go back into the mine. I became intensely paranoid, convinced that I should light as few little bonfires around town as possible in case the thing could see me better, and crept around in the darkness at a walking pace. The music and sound design is excellent, and every time I heard a door slam or something crackle in the undergrowthor a weird hum kicked in on the soundtrackI got a little more on edge. There are even ways, without spoiling anything, that the creature becomes somehow even more upsetting the longer you play. And the worst part is that sometimes you’re there, all keyed up adrenalinised, and the bastard won’t show up! The nerve!
The entrance to the mine (I didn’t get a good screen of the creature, because it moves quite fast and sometimes it crawls on all fours, which I found deeply upsetting, so I usually ran away with no regard for illustrating this review, sorry).
Quite often, because I would panic, I got backed into a dead end and was caught. When that happens you take control of one of the other characters, and have a chance to free your pal. But if all four of the team get got then, though you keep your progress with the story, the layout of Gravoi is shuffled. Saturnalia has a literal monster, but the metaphorical one is the town.
Left: a map on a street corner; Right: Gravoi’s extremely complex tissue oflies
There’s no menu or HUD map, so you have to use in-game map boards scattered through the town to find things. After a while you get to know where your cardinal locations are - the church, the bright blue lights of the pharmacy,the horrible altar, the yellow windows of the town hall. It is genuinely disorientating when the town changes, and you no longer have any sense of which is exactly the wrong way to run. And yet sometimes I contemplated deliberately sacrificing my remaining characters, because Anita had been taken and she had a map of the mines…
Gravoi is a small town, but complex. Some locations aren’t shown on the map boards, but are nevertheless important to remember, and are cleverly marked with, say, a specific bit of graffiti or recogniseable sound. You need to find tools to open up some areas, mini-puzzles in themselves. You can collect coins to use in vending machines, or you could throw them in a wishing well, or put your hand in the Mouth Of Truth carving you can find on a wall - a notably unsettling thing in a game full of unsettling things. For the brave, the extensive mine network running under the whole town can be used as a shortcut to a few different areas.It uses the mines tooI was not very brave.
Saturnalia though? That’s an experience you want to have. More and more I find myself skulking around the edges of the bell curve, looking for unusual things that provoke unusual feelings. Saturnalia is one. It’s a pulse-raising, shiver-making, dark little whisper; a beautiful game. Sometimes tiny things go a little wrong in Saturnalia - dialogue triggering at slightly the wrong moment - but you’ll hardly notice. It’s a rare game that unsettles you enough to stop playing, but attracts you enough that you turn it back on almost immediately. A rare game that’s so unapologetically specific, that doesn’t seem to have diluted any part of itself. Rarest of all is a game that’s truly unique, and makes you think “I haven’t played anything like this before.”
