SANTA RAGIONE

An Italian studio's quest to insert unusual stories in unexpected places

- ALEX CHATZIIOANNOU

An endless runner that upends the genre's fundamental interaction. An open-world adventure that lets you roam ruins strewn throughout an entire galaxy. An isometric racer spliced with the kind of branching narrative you'd expect in a visual novel. A nightmarish tour of a procedurally generated Sardinian village. Take any quartet of successive releases from a single studio and you'd be pressed to find a more disparate collection. It's as if Santa Ragione is starting from scratch with every project. Is there a method to this madness, a common thread linking Wheels Of Aurelia's pastel-hued road trip to Saturnalia’s bleak island festival?

When asked about it, studio director and co-founder Pietro Righi Riva offers something of a mission statement: Santa Ragione’s aim is to explore what “we can do in terms of game design to allow games to talk about more diverse stories; anything we feel like we don’t have the interactive language to express”. The emphasis on design is important. This is not just about more inclusive casts or overlooked themes, but about tinkering with the medium’s basic tools to come up with alternative modes of storytelling. From this angle, Santa Ragione’s genre hopping can be seen as an ongoing effort to insert unusual narratives in unexpected places. And, in the context of a studio founded 15 years ago by two students with no coding abilities, this effort involves acquiring the skills to take on increasingly ambitious projects that tell increasingly complex stories. In fact, it is due to these limitations that the first thing they ever released was of a more analogue nature.

In their late teens, Righi Riva and co-founder Nicolò Tedeschi knew each other from Italian videogame forums, and bonded during in-person meetings organised by these online communities.