There are many circles of hell. This is the brown one.

The formula that Dante’s Inferno follows to the letter is a variation on a formula that originally came from Japan. It’s essentially the over-the-top template of Devil May Cry made less technical and more epic. You play as a lone mighty warrior who is fooled into betraying those he cares about, and goes about trying to set right what he has done so wrong by tackling the divine powers that conspire against him head-on. On your way, you will hack a lot of things to pieces and collect their souls, which you can then use to make yourself even more powerful and better equipped to hack bigger, tougher things to pieces.

Some of these things are so huge and epic in their scale that simply hacking them to pieces isn’t quite enough. To defeat them you will occasionally need to resort to pressing a specified button in order to see the next section of a cut-scene, the like of which is commonly known these days as a Quick Time Event or QTE. We’re going to try not to mention this more than we need to but, as you may have noticed, it’s exactly like God Of War so far.

By the power of grayskull!

The main difference that sets Dante’s Inferno apart from God Of War is the aesthetics of its setting and, as luck would have it, that’s also the area in which Dante’s Inferno most excels. This game is truly and utterly disgusting, as well it should be.

See, the original Dante’s Inferno was a medieval poem inspired by the horror stories the Catholic church would tell folk about Hell to scare them into behaving the way the Catholic church wanted them to. The game is based loosely on the poem, with the name of the main character and the sequence through the nine circles of Hell being lifted directly from it. Now, it might be a literary classic, but some of the ideas expressed in Dante’s Inferno are among the most horrific anyone has ever managed to dream up, and Visceral Games has been single-minded in its intention to bring those ideas to life, in graphic detail. The result is disgusting, disturbing and, if you are of a suitably morbid disposition, thoroughly entertaining.

… continued