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Saturnalia’s neon-folk survival horror will stick to you for a very long timeStudio director Pietro Righi Riva explains a little of how this unique horror game was made
Studio director Pietro Righi Riva explains a little of how this unique horror game was made
Saturnalia – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer [4K 60fps]Watch on YouTube
Saturnalia – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer [4K 60fps]
In Saturnalia you play as four different outsiders who are all in a small, fictional Sardinian village called Gravoi for different reasons, struggling with different problems. You start the game as Anita, for example, who was conducting geological research in the town’s mine, but also picked up an accidental pregnancy from a married man, while Paul was adopted and came to Gravoi to track down his birth parents. They all find themselves, unfortunately, still in Gravoi during a winter festival where people who don’t fit in are sacrificed. In response to this you are armed with a box of matches and the ability to run away through the maze-like streets.
“It has changed radically,” says Righi Riva, explaining how Saturnalia was, at first, a sort of first-person mobile game in a geometric maze, until they started reworking one thing after another. “It was a very intense process of rewriting the game. And every time just holding on to the things that we felt were the most special about it,” he explains. “It really evolved in a very experimental, iterative way, in a way that we hadn’t done before.” In Santa Ragione’s previous games, which had a much shorter development time, they came up with an idea and polished it and made it work. With Saturnalia it was, says Righi Riva, “more like letting the game stick to you and seeing what was best about it.”
It does stick, still. I like horror, but I’ve not been delving into horror games as much recently. Films and books run the gamut and back again of sub-genres at a dizzying pace, but the horror games I get emailed about, or find when I go looking, seem to broadly fit within three categories at the moment, these being: 1) things Protestants find most intense about Catholicism; 2) a matriarchal figure in this now-haunted house had a really bad time; and 3)this (very NSFW) Oglaf comic.
“They have this very unrealistic lighting that is super saturated and kind of, like, covers the natural colour of things. It brings us back to expressionism, really. German expressionist theatre and these giallo movies, they have in common building this theme that doesn’t look real at all and yet conveys so much emotion. We took that lesson to heart, so much so that in Saturnalia, the entire game is black and white,” he says. He explains that there is no colour in the textures, so all the colour - the otherwordly neon - is applied through lighting and post-processing. “All these different shades and different colours that exist on the characters and the buildings, they’re all added sort of artificially, and without taking into consideration the colour of the actual things that populate the scene.”
Righi Riva is quick to give credit to art director Marta Gabas here, who he says was “not interested as much in level design as she was in framing these situations that could happen - well, I guess it’s another way to call level design, really.” They wanted Gravoi to convey meaning first, rather than being designed for specific gameplay situations. And as well as drawing from different architectural styles and stage design (Righi Riva references Italian architect Carlo Scarpa and Swiss scenographer Adolphe Appia), Saturnalia takes a lot of inspiration from real life Sardinia.The Italian Videogame Projectput Santa Ragione in touch with the Sardinian Film Commission, who took them location scouting as if for a movie production. Gravoi isn’t a real place - both practically, because it needs to be a certain size, and out of respect, to not cast a real village as a horrifying place - but it’s based on the material collected on that trip.
It’s such a horrible gem of a game. For the preview I was playing it in stretches of half an hour at a time, because I got too freaked out. You could be trapped in Gravoi’s turning streets forever. It feels like, though it was made recently, Gravoi has always existed. Saturnalia doesn’t hold your hand, itbeckonsyou. Its long languid fingers reach out of the shadows, before pulling back just a little further as you approach. And oh! Oh! It’s dangerous! But you want to meet it!
“It’s funny,” says Righi Riva, “because even like opening that email, there are some some thoughts that are still there, since then, and it’s kind of like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t remember we thought about this so long ago.'”
