I just finished Saturnalia! It was neat, and kinda ties into the earlier conversation about signposting in games too.
The basic idea is that you're playing a young woman on the last day she's staying in a town in Sardinia for work. She's worried that her boyfriend might not be excited that she's pregnant, because he's the local priest.
It's the day of the big festival, during which everyone is in church or at home. For a reason! Because there's a monster loose! You pretty quickly find out that oh no you and the few other folks still out and about are being hunted by... something. Something that comes out of the mysterious well above the mysterious mine every mysterious amount of time...
The game is mechanically a bit straightforward: you move characters from place to place in the town following a line of clues that are pretty much the A is locked so go to B where you find out the key is in C but you need to get to D first to unlock door E etc etc. But there are some interesting twists:
- You control four different characters, eventually. If at some point you get got by the monster, you can then use another character to rescue them from where they get taken which is neat
- The game is in a very striking and distinct visual style, with the default color scheme being "giallo" with deep purple and red hues lighting up the mist that suffuses the town
- Noise is represented by color growing more bold, which is cool
- The directional audio is really effective, in a way that I honestly don't see a lot in games even when it's supposed to be used as a monster-tell.
- The characters all have some special ability that's simple but helpful. One can use a camera to flash the monster and scare it away for a bit, for example.
- You get clue board! That's fun. It's a little bit poorly laid out because they include like, every item of relevance which makes it a bit overcrowded. But it's a cool way to lay out a lot of the threads in the game
- You get a rating at the end! I got an S, I just thought that was neat. I assume this is a Resident Evil nod?
- It's relatively short and sweet. Really I figure I could probably have managed it in like 5 hours if I had been really motoring instead of walking a lot of places out of fear that the monster would hear.
- Oh I forgot this one: certain places have phones, and your unused characters will gather in them. Then, you can move around town and use a phone to either ask people to come to you or swap characters to one of the people on the other end of the phone. It's a fun sort of fast travel! That's one of the things I was thinking about regarding fast travel and such. You can also have one of the other characters guide you to a location and just follow behind them which is another neat method of making the multiple protagonists give you ways to navigate more effectively.
It's very much of a specific place and time and I appreciated that. Like there's a reference in it to a person who's an Accabadora, which is apparently a Sardinian folklore thing about women who'd perform euthanasia on the terminally ill. I'd never heard of that before, and neither has Wikipedia. Though Italian Wikipedia has a page on a movie with that title. Anyway, I appreciate how much it's a story about somewhere distinct. It's all pretty sketchy and focused on the central story elements but it still feels like more of a real location than I'm used to seeing in games.
The one thing I super didn't like is unfortunately kind of a central mechanic? A bit, but not really. Basically every time all 4 characters get got by some method the town will reset and reshuffle into a new arrangement. But not that new. The important locations are generally scattered around the outside in the same order so it's more that instead of going left/left/right to get somewhere you go right/left/right to get there on the new map. Thankfully on the default difficulty you don't need to totally reset your progress, all the little shortcuts and clues and such you've gathered remain. But also... this happened to me like 4 hours in. And the shuffle barely moved stuff, so it felt kind of unnecessary. By the end I was just sorta rushing things and reshuffling any time someone was killed without really considering it an actual impediment.
It feels like this was something they thought would be a central sorta roguelike-ish element of the game but it just does not contribute enough to be worthwhile.
But yeah, an interesting story told in an idiosyncratic way that's not too rough to finish in a few evenings. I'd recommend giving this a shot if you're into mild spookiness and history mysteries.
Edit: Oh also there's barely any walkthrough stuff online (except the awful "walkthrough coming soon! This is... a game!" pages that litter the internet) so if you want to consult one these are what I found:
- A full playthrough:
- The full clue board with labels about where to find the stuff on it: https://hato1.github.io/Saturnalia-guidebook/clues.html
