Edoardo Vitali, an Italian game designer, spent a year in Nova Scotia in the 2010s. Inspired by what he saw, Vitali is developing an atmospheric mystery video game called Benton Cove, set in a fictional town within the Annapolis Valley.
Having lived in Dartmouth, Vitali had the chance to experience much of the province’s finest sights, including the valley, becoming a source of inspiration for his artistic endeavours. This isn’t his first stab at capturing Nova Scotia’s unique setting, either.
In 2023, he released The Cooking Class through his studio Another Dev Company, a horror video game where the player would attempt to escape a Dartmouth home by picking up VHS tapes scattered around. Nods to Nova Scotia were strewn across the setting, but Benton Cove seeks to do more than just reference its location. It’s story-driven, semi-open world, and from screenshots and videos of the development so far, incredibly Nova Scotian.
“Why the Annapolis Valley? I once travelled there,” says Vitali in an interview with The Coast. “Everything looks perfect in the daytime, but at night, there’s sometimes a darker atmosphere in small towns.”
The town has all of the fixtures of a small Nova Scotian town: 19th-century architecture repurposed for modern living, a small fishing village with a lighthouse, and characters native to the setting. There are connections to Acadian history. Signs pointing towards Digby, Wolfville, and other nearby real-world locations. Benton Cove is equipped with a cafe, a library, a police station, a town hall, a small movie theatre, and a radio station, creating a wholly accurate depiction of a small Nova Scotian town.
A fan of the works of American author William Faulkner, Vitali considered the setting appropriate for his own mystery: a small-town struggle between family dynasties.
“Everything has a meaning in this town,” says Vitali. “Every character will have a backstory.”
In fact, much of the game’s lore is already publicly available. Vitali crafted a website, akin to a 1990s-era HTML 3.2 design, filled with the town’s history, culture, and events, much like any town website you may click on today. While Vitali was keen not to speak too candidly about the website’s function within the game itself, he did hint towards its helpfulness.
Development
The dedication Vitali has shown to Benton Cove is palpable through its thoughtful world design and lore, but more than that, through the rigorous process he’s undergone just to make a working build of the game.
“I started to develop this game one year ago. Then, the project broke. I tried to start the project one day, and it didn’t go,” he says. “One year of work. Everything was destroyed.”
Vitali took a few months off from development to gather himself after losing so much hard work, a predicament that would permanently halt development for many indie developers. For Vitali, however, it was an opportunity to refine his ideas and revitalize his concepts into a second draft.
“I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do it better,” he says. “It took me three months, because I already had the blueprint in mind. If we take everything into account, it’s been one year and three months (of dev time).”
Since starting, Vitali says he’s working more than eight hours a day on designing the game by himself, which he is no stranger to. Vitali got his start in game design after discovering RPG Maker, a basic game design program that allows people without much experience in the field to make simple pixel-graphic games, similar to the Super Nintendo titles some of us grew up with.
After crafting a game based in his Italian hometown, including his friend group as characters and asking local businesses to contribute funds for their inclusion. After this experience, he decided he would learn how to use Unity, a 3D video game engine much more complex than RPG Maker, but still rather user-friendly.
“I’m going to do this. I’m going to do it my way. The right way,” he says about his time getting into game development. “I don’t care if it’s the right way or the wrong way, but it is my way, at least.
“I started for fun, and it slowly became a full-time job, with breakdowns, crunch time, and everything else a solo developer goes through,” he says with a laugh.
Inspirations
Much of his recent work is inspired by indie horror games like Mothered and those developed by Chilla’s Art. He also cites works such as Fears to Fathom and the popular Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises.
When asked why he would focus his recent games on Nova Scotia, Vitali answered with one word: “authenticity.”
“I’ve been to America many times, and it’s not the same,” he says. “I am a small-town boy myself, and authenticity is what we have. I don’t live in Florence, I don’t live in Rome, we don’t have colosseums, but if you come here, you’ll feel at home. We are not the postcard Italians. We’re the real Italians.
“I thought the vibes meshed, in a way. Like, this is Canada. This is pure Canada. Welcoming people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful cliffs. That stayed with me.”
One of Vitali’s hopes for the game is to have local Nova Scotian artists contribute their work to be showcased in the game: paintings in galleries, albums in the record store, and so on. Anyone interested can contact Vitali through his business email.
