The videogames, Anna and The Land of Pain, take us through the mountains, guided by the dark colours and mysterious atmospheres of the trails. The products outline a horror mountain itinerary that unfolds across the regions of Val d’Aosta and the Veneto, with subtexts created, respectively, by popular tradition and personal dreamscapes.
Print itineraryThe Dreampainters’ title, Anna, is set in an abandoned sawmill that can be found in Val d’Ayas, one of the sunniest valleys in Val d’Aosta. The game’s setting, the hamlet of Pilaz, stands outside the small village of Périasc on the SR45 in the Champoluc direction. We head out on a sunny day, into the valley encircled by the tall peaks of the Monte Rosa mountains, the Alpine range on the Swiss border in the distance which includes the Roccia Nera. We walk along the Evançon river through knee-length grass, watching it flow between pine trees and ancient houses in the walser style: made of larch wood and slate. The detailed rendering (thanks to the team’s photographic reporting and surveys) makes the setting extremely vivid. The little sawmill is the only location for the game. The narrative background is created by voices recounting ancient tales from local folklore and crime events: this all provides depth to the setting and adds something extra to the experience.
Surrounded by the silent presence of the local fauna, with visits from ibex and wolves, we head towards the crumbling building, the location for the puzzle, as a man searching for Anna, a name that has floated up from his memory through the intricate labyrinth of his amnesia. This opens the path to an enigmatic and uneasy reconstruction that develops mostly inside the workshop and the ground beneath it. This search is configured as a reconstruction of both individual and collective memory, given the presence of disturbing legends from the surrounding valley area.
Our horror itinerary moves East, to the Altopiano of Asiago, near the municipality of Enego, where it is possible to admire the best landscape features in the area (known as the “Italian Finland” for its 200km of ski pistes): the Brenta Valley, Monte Grappa and the majestic Dolomites. Alessandro Guzzo’s videogame, The Land of Pain, is set in the woody areas of the Altopiano, an intimate and biographical experience that unfolds in the writer’s childhood places. In the green areas of the high plain, where it is easy to meet piebald cows grazing freely in the pastures, we find gentle trails that head into these woods, picnic benches and huts for lunchtime refuelling with the local Asiago cheese. In the foothills of the Belluno Dolomites, which rise close by, we head through the thickets of fir, beech and long-branched mountain pines, to cross the abundant ferns, juniper bushes and, if lucky, stumble across the beautiful edelweiss flower.
In the game, an idyllic and familiar setting becomes a disturbing scenario after a sudden and mysterious event. We are guided inside a crumbling old house, after walking through the forest for two hours. It is the end of the summer and the trees glare threateningly at us from above while we explore the barely visible trails. Here too, thanks to Guzzo’s photos and surveys, detailed rendering catapults us through the shrubs of these isolated mountain hamlets lost in the mountains: time appears to stop, we lose every reference point. Innocuous, apparently picturesque, elements like the old washing houses, stone walls and steps, suddenly appear as representatives of something disturbing that could return from the past to persecute us in the present, in an evocation of a Lovecraft-like atmosphere.
Will we find an escape route? Is there a way out of the disturbing abandoned mountain huts of Northern Italy?
