We've got a pretty good line in interesting folk traditions here at RPS. I grew up in a county where staying up all night at the stone circle to welcome the Summer Solstice was an annual tradition (later augmented by a woman wearing antlers offering a selection of downers and hallucinogens), and as a child I had an unnecessary encounter with the Salisbury Hob-Nob. For the past few years Alice0 has gone to the Burryman's Parade, gracing us with pictures of that most wholesome gentleman. Rural traditions are fun if you're part of them, but to outsiders they can be unsettling at best.
This is relevant to my thinking about Saturnalia, an upcoming survival horror game by Italian studio Santa Ragione, where a small group of outsiders try to escape a village on the night of an ancient ritual. I've been playing a preview build of Saturnalia for the last week or so, and also got to talk about it with the studio director Pietro Righi Riva. "I usually tell people, 'Oh, you should make a game in like six months', and I have tried to do that in the past," he tells me. "This one just kind of got out of hand. I found an email yesterday, as I was looking for finishing the credits, about me discussing some story items in April 2017." And, while I am sure that most developers don't wish they'd been making a video game in the middle of the pandemic, I think the extra time may have allowed Santa Ragione to make something excellent.
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