If you're looking to bring some summer sunshine to the lingering bleakness of a waning winter, then I have a recommendation for you, assuming you're up for some pitch-black, emotionally pulverizing horror. Mediterranea Inferno, last year's dazzling visual novel from The Milky Way Prince creator Lorenzo Redaelli, is now available for PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.
Mediterranea Inferno follows a trio of beautiful, stylish Milan club girls in their early 20s who reunite, after two years apart due to persistent COVID restrictions, for a three-day vacation in the scorching heat of a summer in the south of Italy. What follows is a cleverly orchestrated descent into a nightmare: a cruel, emotionally devastating and unabashedly strange story about friendship and post-COVID trauma where the players, in Redaelli's own words, get to push “three bourgeois youngsters… towards the most horrible and frightening”. finals”.
It is an absolute game: “a dense, provocative, playful, infuriating, terrifying, poetic, often very funny and sometimes even profound reflection on the sometimes paralyzing search for a place in the private shadow of modern life” . as I wrote in my five-star review, and easily the most relentlessly stylish game of 2023.
Mediterranea Inferno – Console Launch Trailer and AccoladesThis is particularly true in Mediterranea Inferno's Fruit of Mirages sequences, in which each child, as determined by the player, goes on an increasingly hallucinatory journey into their deepest insecurities. From woozy, disco-toned dancefloor sequences to black-and-white flashbacks, the mix of Redaelli's music wonderfully seductive sheet musicspare soundscapes and often hypnotic visuals (drawing inspiration from fashion photography, classic Italian cinema and Catholic imagery) are so fiercely intense that the effect is all-consuming.
It's truly amazing stuff, juggling dark humor with moments of painful, sometimes disturbing emotional candor, and an easy recommendation from me now that it's finally made the jump from PC to Switch. games stationand Xbox Series X/S. The console versions of Mediterranea Inferno cost around £8, which is already a bargain, but it's also with a 66 percent discount on Steam right now, meaning you can pick it up for just £4.41. Honestly, buy it.
