Saturnalia: a great team returns with a thrilling, frightening prospect

With sparks rising and muttered incantations, Santa Ragione returns at last. This Italian micro-studio has taken us out into a perfect little galaxy in a ship we didn't know how to fly, set us breezing down 1970s highways and navigated clear-edged quantum tunnels. Now it's Sardinia, sometime in the early 1990s, and horrors are afoot in a small town. Find your matches. Call for your friends. Step into the expectant dark.

Saturnalia is a survival horror adventure and I've just played the time-limited ten-minute demo. Who knows, I may play it again when my wife comes back from work and the house is not so quiet. This is almost a roguelike, but Santa Ragione is so good at side-stepping traditions I don't really want to call it that. You play as a group of friends in town on a very bad night, trying to make your way through the murk and mists and survive in amidst threatening rituals. You play as this group one at a time. They're your lives, I guess. And they can die.

Things randomise each time, I gather, but the mood remains the same. This is lovely stuff to look at, dark streets a little too narrow, buildings a little too prison-like, all delivered with hectic ever-shifting pencil shading as if the night is being hatched into being around you. I started in a church. It was almost too dark to see anything so I lit one of a handful of matches I'd been given, the gloom giving out in a sort of sulfurous yellow cloud that flickered as I walked. Doors were locked. A staircase beckoned. I fumbled around, opened a door to the outside, picked up a key that might come in handy later and then stepped outside and was immediately killed by a shadow that had been stalking me.

Read more