Despite how common mental health problems can be, understanding them, or even just discussing them without prejudice, is something of a modern invention. Unsurprisingly then, as a relatively young medium, video games haven’t had the best track record when it comes to dealing with such complex issues. Games like Far Cry 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (to name but a few) have used insanity as a cheap tool and catch-all synonym to explain away the actions of a homicidal villain, which does a great injustice to those suffering from real, treatable conditions.

That’s not to say some games haven’t tried, though. 2013’s Depression Quest successfully achieved empathy through perspective, while Square Enix’s Life Is Strange treated its delicate mental health subject matter with the utmost of care. (To say more would be to enter spoiler territory.) UK studio Ninja Theory, makers of DMC: Devil May Cry and Enslaved, is even trying to tackle mental health in the action genre with the upcoming swordplay epic Hellblade. Few games, however, have dared to take the horror genre—the worst offender of all when it comes to the cheapening of mental health issues—into such brave new territory.

Screenwriter Luca Dalcò hopes to change that. His new game The Town of Light, due out on Steam in February, is undeniably a horror experience, and one that at first glance appears to walk the same clichéd path as others in the genre. It’s set in an abandoned mental asylum, players take on the role of a former patient, and—thanks to said patient’s psychological problems—lots of scary stuff happens.