Talking about Saturnalia is hard. Every time the town reshuffles itself I think of another way I should begin.
Saturnalia is the latest game from the Italian micro-studio Santa Ragione, the people behind some of the most vibrant and fascinating and engrossing games I have ever played. These people make games that create obsessions in their players, and, actually, now I mention it, you can see that a little as the town reshuffles. Saturnalia is a game about exploring a small Sardinian town after dark, hurriedly pursuing your own tangle of agendas while being stalked by something awful and unstoppable and single-minded. You play one member of your gang after another, and when they’re all captured by the stalker, the town, well, reshuffles.
This reshuffling is brilliant to watch. And again it makes me think: honestly, how I begin when I’m telling someone about this game? Sometimes the houses and streets move around as if they’re brass fixtures set into grooves. It’s a puzzle box, an orrery. I want to talk about how the game has been made with help from a physical board game company, and how the shuffling makes you see some of that physicality, the way that it’s all legit, no cheating, the way that it’s a , and the way that this allows the player to understand that the pieces of the town haven’t been added to or subtracted from – they’re just in different places.
SaturnaliaDeveloper: Santa RagionePublisher: The Quantum Astrophysicists GuildPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Headed to PC in 2021, other platforms TBA
Sometimes the houses and streets move back and forth, almost mirroring each other, like those fancy dances characters are always doing in Jane Austen novels. I want to talk about how different this feeling is from MirrorMoon EP, another beloved Santa Ragione joint, and how each of this outfit’s games are a bit like that other deeply Italian source of restless experimentation, the novels of Italo Calvino. Each Calvino novel its own world with its own rules, its own modes of being. Very Santa Ragione, that – even though, when I mention this in my developer interview, I am sternly told it’s an “absolutely disproportionate” compliment.
Saturnalia – Story Trailer Watch on YouTube
Then there’s that interview. The transcription AI service I use to write up my interview with Pietro Righi Riva, the studio director at Santa Ragione and a crucial force behind Saturnalia, has a very specific problem. A problematic problem. It can identify every word used except the word ‘saturnalia’. Time and again, the word comes up in conversation and the AI takes the wildest of guesses. After a while I start keeping a list of these paracuses, each one, somehow, an ice floe unto itself, distinct and bright. Each one a piece of natural poetry.
Southern Nigeria. Sacred knowledge. Salted Melia. Such another.
Such another! It’s almost too neat. And the walls move again.
So let’s start in the town, its narrow paths converging, confounding, the locations of its scattered landmarks hard to fix in the mind even when they aren’t moving around. This Sardinian mining town is the star of Saturnalia, and what a star. Both maze and prison courtyard, its ageless grey walls smooth one second and fidgety with crosshatching the next, its limited viewpoints disappearing into darkness or clouds of disco fog. Bonfire sparks fill the air and sizzle over the soundtrack, mixing with cultist’s dull chanting. This town is a thing of graphite and matchsticks. When it gets dark, you have to light matchsticks to see by, in fact, each one a risk because your stock of matchsticks is limited and precious, and because maybe the light, like any noise you might make, will bring the thing that stalks you closer to your position.