Santa Ragione is a 3-person Milanese studio that has published 4 award-winning experimental video games and a board game. In 2020 the studio published games by emerging Italian authors: the first was Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star, semi-autobiographical visual novel.
Today Santa Ragione is concentrated in the development of Saturnalia, horror video game set in Sardinia, supported by Sardinia Film Commission, and Pietro Righi Riva, creative director and co-founder, told us that “the project stems from the desire to use the horror genre to tell stories that make us reflect, in our case on the present and the past of our country. Saturnalia takes place at the end of the 80s in Sardinia because it’s the perfect place for a horror “.
These are the years in which an entire generation sees itself again, between contemporaneity and technology not yet so intrusive as to ruin the tension with the constant ringing of smartphones. And then there is the Sardinian hinterland, “a remote scenario, little known to the general public, full of history and folklore, perfect for unpublished and disturbing stories based on ancient rituals and legends – Righi Riva told us again – The idea the basis of the game is the exploration of a labyrinthine space infested with a malignant presenceAlthough it is a classic theme, it has allowed us to reinvent the concept of threat. If failure in other horror games means replaying a game sequence, in Saturnalia one is punished only by the loss of spatial reference points “.
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In the game the village transforms and reconfigures every time all the protagonists are captured, forcing the player to learn and discover new roads and ways, stairways and passages that connect the different environments in which the story unfolds.
In the title of Santa Ragione, Sardinia is a collage full of visual suggestions, as Righi Riva explained to us: “The village of Gravoi, where the action takes place, it is a fictitious place, but built through a collage of views, places, buildings and even archaeological sites of the Sardinian hinterland. We tell strong stories and in the game we introduce a folklore of invention that is the basis of horror, we preferred not to associate the story with a specific place, also to avoid misappropriating the rituals and masks of a millenary tradition, which have their own role and meaning that outsiders are not given to interpret “.
The environment, from real to virtual
In the village where the game takes place, a mining complex appears which is a fusion of the spaces of the Iglesias mining museum and Porto Flavia, a medieval castle reminiscent of Bosa and a nuragic site similar to that of Santa Cristina. All the interiors and furnishing elements, such as the biographies of the characters, are reconstructed taking inspiration from the historical fabric of the island. As well as the struggles for the rights of miners, at the center of one of the subplots, which link the protagonists to the events.
Saturnalia has an artistic direction that, as in all works of Santa Ragione, transcends the videogame: “From the very first moments of conceptualizing the project we collaborated with Marta Gabas, our art director, chosen for her extraordinary theatrical scenography works. We started from various points of reference, such as the Italian yellow by Bava, Argento, Avati, with the intention of creating a coherent space that was realistic, but in some way wrong, disproportionate, crooked, uncomfortable, claustrophobic, which would allow the creation of memorable glimpses in which unspeakable facts take place “.
The basic idea pays homage to expressionism, in cinema and theater, where the sets are co-protagonists, as is the village of Gravoi: “Gabas has taken care not only of the shape and structure of the spaces, but also of all the elements that populate them, going to recover for each one photographic material from the archive or taken from our location scouting in Sardinia “.
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From the call for Creative Europe to the money of Epic Games
Santa Ragione’s work won the competition from Europa Creativa, then the studio opened a collaboration with the Sardegna Film Commission. And thank goodness, because in Italy recovering the funds to develop a certain type of video game is complicated, as confirmed by Righi Riva: “There is no repeatable model, it depends very much on the project and on the market conditions, which are constantly changing. Regarding Saturnalia, the concept was born precisely in the context of the 2017 Creative Europe call. Although we already knew we wanted to produce a labyrinthine horror set in Sardinia, in which the light of matches plays an important role, it is during the drafting of documentation for the call that many characterizing elements have taken shape “.
After Creative Europe, also Lorenzo Silva di Horrible Guild, board game development and production house Milanese, he joined the project as a co-producer, helping to finance the development and contributing with important design elements. Subsequently, thanks to the coordination of Andrea Dresseno of Ivipro, a project that brings together videogame producers and entities of the Italian territory, the Santa Ragione family came into contact with the Sardegna Film Commission, which coordinates and sponsors the scouting on the island, which is the moment in which the studio collects all the video, audio and photographic materials underlying the settings of the title, in addition to the interviews that make up the background for the historical and cultural elements.
Finally the project was signed for a distribution in collaboration with Epic Games, which made it possible to finance its completion.
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