Saturnalia

My first hour in Gravoi was spent equal parts lost and genuinely unsettled, which turns out is exactly what Santa Ragione was going for. Saturnalia is a third-person survival horror game with rogue-lite bones, set in a fictional Sardinian mining village on the winter solstice of 1989. You control four characters, Anita, Sergio, Claudia and Paul, each carrying their own heavy personal story and a distinct gameplay ability. Anita always knows where she is on the map, which makes her feel like a lifeline the moment the town starts twisting. There is no combat. Your toolkit is matches to light the dark, a stamina bar for sprinting away from the Creature, and phone booths scattered through Gravoi that let you swap between characters across locations. Hiding in bins or cupboards is your only reliable safe option when the stalker closes in, and those hiding spots are sparse enough to keep tension permanently wound. The mechanic that really separates Saturnalia from the crowd is what happens on a full wipe. Lose all four characters and the village reshuffles entirely: streets reconnect differently, shortcuts vanish, alleyways that were dead ends become through-routes. Clues and key items carry over, but the spatial knowledge you built does not. That design choice is either the most brilliantly cruel thing in recent horror or an exercise in pure frustration, depending on your patience threshold. Most players who lean into it find the disorientation compounds the atmosphere in a way that scripted jump scares simply cannot. Players who just want to finish the story can toggle Adventure Mode, which locks the map layout and dials back the Creature's aggression, and there are additional difficulty presets covering everything in between. The Steam release also added a first-person mode, a hybrid first/third-person option, a photo mode, and a film noir black-and-white filter, making this version the most accommodating the game has ever been. The art direction is where Saturnalia really earns its reputation. Visuals borrow from stop-motion and rotoscoping techniques, with cross-hatched linework that makes the whole world feel like it is breathing on the page. The colour palette shifts from warm purples at night to sharp yellows from lit matches, and the contrast is genuinely striking rather than gimmicky. The soundtrack leans on ancient percussive sounds rebuilt with an electronic edge, drawing from 1970s Italian giallo cinema. The result is a sensory package that sticks around well after you close the game. Critics at Metacritic aggregate an 80, and user sentiment on Steam sits above 90 percent positive, so the appreciation is broad even if not unanimous. The legitimate criticisms are real and worth flagging. Navigation is genuinely hard, even by design, and the clue board that tracks your investigation threads can feel overwhelming when you are also managing four lives and a pursuing monster. Controls and camera angles have drawn complaints across multiple platforms, and some players find the character-rescue loop, where a caught character must be freed before they count as dead, more annoying than tense. The roughly ten-hour runtime flies when you have momentum and drags when you hit a progress wall. And some reviewers note that the four characters, despite their rich backstories involving some very heavy personal themes, can feel reduced to extended health bars rather than full narrative drivers during the chaos of play. Who is this for? Players who enjoy atmospheric, story-led horror in the vein of folk horror cinema, people who like the pressure of stealth without combat, and anyone curious about a genuinely distinctive art style that sits apart from every other game on the shelf. If you need clear waypoints and combat feedback to feel like you are playing a game, Saturnalia will fight you at every corner. But if you are willing to get lost on purpose, the village of Gravoi has a way of becoming one of those places you remember long after the credits roll.

Alex · Scout Team

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