Saturnalia review: a truly unique, beautiful, and exquisite horror game

1 year 6 months ago

Saturnalia isn'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-folk horror game 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...

In fact it was not stillness, but the panic-sprint into darkness that became my main and oft-unsuccessful tactic whenever I heard the creature of Gravoi. Gravoi itself is a small but inconveniently maze-like fictional Sardinian town, host to a yearly folk festival that, every so often, involves the unwary being carried off and killed by a... something. Unfortunately, four very unwary outsiders - rendered outsiders for a variety of reasons, whether they're locals or not - find themselves having to survive the night of this festival, armed with things like matches, firecrackers and a polaroid camera.

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Author
Alice Bell