“I really, really wanted to love it, and I almost do.”
Saturnalia is a survival horror video game. There, I said it. That’s my big controversial statement for this week. The review is done, you can go home now.
Not really, of course. Well, I’m not actually sure, anyway. As far as I know, the review isn’t actually over and you can’t leave here until our robot overlords say otherwise or your internet goes out, whichever comes first. But beyond that, I’m not really sure Saturnalia is a survival horror game, either. It is a fever dream. It is a visual narrative experience. It is a mystery-solving detective game. It is a corkboard with red strings and tacks tying hundreds of clues and leads together. It is a horror game with de-emphasized horror. It is a survival game with de-emphasized survival. It is Italian. Very, very Italian. It’s so Italian, it’s not even Italian anymore. It’s Sardinian. It is, from top to bottom, very, very interesting.
And for the second half of my four or so hours with the game, it is very, very frustrating.
The reasons for my frustration are numerous, but I’ll get back to that later. First, some context and the good (even great) things about this game. Saturnalia is a folk-horror survival exploration game with a focus on narrative, taking inspiration from Italian Giallo movies of the 70’s and 80’s (making it the second Giallo-inspired game I’ve played this year? Weird.). It follows around a group of three (four? more on that later) interconnected playable characters as they attempt to survive and escape a cursed town during the feast of Saturnalia and a pagan ritual that sees them up for sacrifice to some sort of malevolent entity.
That sure would sound like a lot of nonsense to the uninitiated, huh? And there’s a good reason for that; Saturnalia is the kind of game that would be largely impenetrable to someone without at least a passing knowledge of video games. Which is fine. A good thing, really. Because it allows for Saturnalia to explore gameplay territory often left untouched by games with a mass market appeal, and ends up becoming an experience that is immediately gripping and deeply interesting. The industry overall is way past the whole “is games art?” trite debate, so I won’t broach the subject more than to say “yeah, some of them, duh,” and I’d suggest that Saturnalia sprints and dives into the hiding space at the back of the “art games” crowd, if only for the fact that there is, really, nothing else like it.
Light spoilers for some aspects of the game from here on out!
I’m not the first to note this, of course. I’m echoing this review here, which is almost single-handedly the reason I picked up the game at all. See, Saturnalia is an Epic Games Store exclusive, a phrase which to me means “this game doesn’t actually come out for another year until it hits Steam.” I normally wouldn’t touch the Epic Games Store with a ten-foot pole. Not out of some sort of moral standing (I don’t like the Fortnite people much but they at least offer creators a better cut of the profits), or because the Epic Games Store is inherently and programmatically broken (it’s not), but because I want to have all my games in one place and if I can’t do that, I won’t bother. This stems mostly from my own OCD tendencies, but that’s a story for another day. And yet, I braved the Epic Games Store for Saturnalia. And because it was generously 100% off during its first weekend of sale. Convenient.
Am I satisfied with my (free) purchase? Yeah, I’d say so. Even if I’d paid full price for the game, its presentation is worth the price of entry alone. Do I think it lives up to the review that totally sold me on it? Eh… Kind of. It truly is the first game I’ve seen to combine an incredibly vivid atmosphere and realized space with an Outer Wilds-style detective clue-gathering mystery with cat-and-mouse horror escapades, and does it with likable characters and a setting not often visited in games. I don’t know if I would say that the stories as they play out separately are all that unique (it never felt like there was a plot point I couldn’t have guessed), or if the game mechanics on their own are all that novel (you collect resources, use some of them to distract the monster, run away if you can’t, explore and unlock houses with different items, something something amnesia silent hill resident evil, etc.), but it’s the way that everything is tied together that makes it uncommonly new. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the whole experience, and one that the game’s marketing heavily emphasizes, is that navigating the town and the times is a major gameplay activity, and the world randomizes itself if you lose all your characters.
See, though, the thing about that is that I never actually got to experience that randomization. I completed the game without losing all my characters (though only one was remaining) and finding most of the clues. But it was the intersection of all the different aspects of the gameplay (specifically the horror and resource-management stuff) that ended up producing the most frustration for me. I almost wonder if I would have enjoyed the game more if it didn’t have those horror elements (which is, of course, actually an option in the game), but at the same time, the thing would fall apart without it. Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.
I spent the first half of my time with the game (like I said, I beat it with an “E” rank and one survivor after about four hours) only playing two of the four (?) playable characters. I got caught a few times, but after a couple of trials and errors I managed to figure out how to avoid the creature pretty easily. Until, all of a sudden, I couldn’t. After unlocking the third character, I went around to unlock the fourth character, figured out her cool unique powers, and then promptly had her abducted by the creature. No problem, this has happened before. I’ll run over and save her from the altar. It isn’t difficult to avoid getting caught. Except once I got to the altar, the fucker popped out of nowhere with zero warning and ganked my ass, and I had to run down a bunch of side streets and regroup. See, for the rest of the game, the monster had announced its presence with tons of jingly bells like Santa Claus at a children’s party. The fact that I got no warning before being sidelined was unexpected, but nothing I couldn’t deal with.
Then a bunch of bells started going off wherever I went, and the monster suddenly wouldn’t leave my dude alone and two of my characters were now captured. Without warning or explanation. Hmm.
Well, that’s fine, whatever. I’ll get my second character and reclaim my other two friends from the thing’s clutches. Except when I got back there, my third guy had now turned into another monster (thankfully locked up) and my fourth character, the one I had been able to explore with for all of about five minutes, was suddenly dead. Wait, what? The game didn’t tell me characters could die. I never had the expectation that one of my characters might be lost for good. What the hell was going on? Couple that with the fact that the environmental clues seemed to point to the fact that one character was supposed to die in order for you to progress, and further couple that with the fact that I felt like half the time I was caught was because of the janky character movements and I was suddenly at a loss. Fucking hell.
This is where the game started going downhill for me. I had now lost two of the most useful characters, one with twice the stamina and one who can pass through metal bars, seemingly forever. If I lost my other two characters, would the town reset and I’d get all four of them alive? Would only one of them come back? Was I doomed to lose now? I couldn’t tell. I was so bamboozled that I had to take a break from the game and step back and come back to it another day.
But I didn’t, because I hate myself.
See, I want you to take this whole review with a healthy dose of salt because, for the second half of the game, I forced myself to play it. I felt like I was “so close” to the end the entire time that I told myself I had to see it through today and that I couldn’t stop now. And that kind of ruined my mood on the game. I should have taken a step back. I should have put it down and come back later. But if I did that, I also didn’t think I’d pick it back up again. So I was at an impasse, and I forced myself to play. Because, again, I hate fun and self care.
This, of course, highlighted a handful of gameplay aspects I found especially frustrating that I might have been willing to overlook otherwise. So, your main source of light are matches. you can get books of matches scattered around the game world, but they’re a finite resource. You can pay for more with coins, another finite resource. If you’re in the mines and you run out of light, you physically cannot go into the mines. The game will not let you. Do you see where this is going? After exploring the mines for, like, almost an hour, I ran out of matches and suddenly found myself stranded in the middle of a dark series of tunnels and the game kept resetting my progress when I took the wrong path. And I had no way of getting more matches because I had already searched pretty much everywhere else. This would be the equivalent of running out of bullets in a shooting game. I was, quite decidedly, fucked. And so the mines were off-limits from then forward.
There’s a chance that I might have gotten more matches if all my characters had been lost and the town had reshuffled. But I wasn’t taking any risks on that front. What if only half of my characters came back anyway, and there were no new matches, and I suddenly had to relearn the entire village and mines again to find my way around? Fuck that. There’s no way that was happening. IN reality, I should have just taken the L, reshuffled the village, and played on the game’s terms. But I didn’t. I couldn’t do it. And I stank up the rest of the game with my rage.
Near the end of the game, there are a handful of items that you need in order to progress. This sees you, for example, going to the castle to find the secret room, going to the town hall to get a map of the castle, going to the school to see the map on a slide projector, only to go back to the castle and realize you had the key to the door there anyway but the game wouldn’t let you progress until it decided it wanted you to progress. I ran into this same kind of arbitrary gatekeeping a handful of times throughout the game, where I felt like I had solved a puzzle already but the game told me I hadn’t actually solved it yet until I got some sort of arbitrary other item. Sure, this was necessary for pacing and making sure I didn’t uncover some things too early, but it felt… frustrating. There’s that word again. So many things about this game, especially, especially the survival horror stuff, frustrated me. And yet I kept playing.
I could list other gripes. I already mentioned janky character movements, but the fact that you can’t see more than, say, ten feet in front of you at any give time, even in open areas, is frustrating. I’m sure it’s a determined choice to keep the player in the dark, but it meant I have no idea what the fuck the castle looks like. Or the dam. Or the church. Or half the damn town. And I’m sure there’s other things I could add to that list. But I’m done now. I’m about griped out. Because, at the end of my time with the game, I had to lean back and tell myself “you fucked this up for yourself.” And I decided I’d come back to it in, like, a year, when it releases on Steam, and try it again.
It takes a lot of balance and tightrope walking for a survival horror game to build tension, especially around resource management, without actually letting the player run out of resources. Finding that level of “just enough” to make you feel weak and ill-prepared without actually lacking the tools for the job. To give the player the sense that, at any moment, you could run out of stuff. You could run out of bullets, or you could run out of green herbs and scrap metal. I usually avoid survival horror games for this exact reason; I hate that very specific form of anxiety. But in all the games I’ve played, I’ve never actually found myself so completely without the resources I needed. Except for in this one. And you know what? I don’t think it’s the game’s fault.
Despite what may be missteps in game design or could very well be my own shortcomings, Saturnalia is strangely beautiful, with an engaging story that’s as twisty and turny as the town itself, and a color palette and sense of style that’s unlike anything else in the gaming world today. It’s got itself wedged into my subconscious, and I do truly recommend the game, despite my issues with it. It isn’t particularly scary, or even difficult, but it managed to stump me, and although I’ve bounced off of it for now I know I’ll be coming back later. There are things I haven’t finished, questions that are still unanswered, places I haven’t fully explored yet, things I need to see through. I feel very much like the characters in the game, in that regard; they’re all drawn to this place to settle unfinished business. In an ironic way, Saturnalia is now my own unfinished business. Someday, I will be back.
And when I am, I really, really hope to give it an honest second chance. Because there really is something worth loving here. I just think I’m not ready to love it yet.
