Should you’re trying to carry a little bit of summer time solar into the lingering bleakness of a waning winter, then boy do I’ve a suggestion for you – assuming you are up for some pitch-black, emotionally pulversising horror. Mediterranea Inferno, final yr’s dazzling visible novel from The Milky Method Prince developer Lorenzo Redaelli, is out now on PlayStation, Xbox, and Swap.
Mediterranea Inferno follows a trio of lovely, trendy Milan membership children of their early 20s as they reunite, after two years aside as a consequence of lingering COVID restrictions, for a three-day trip within the blazing warmth of a southern Italian summer time. What follows is an artfully orchestrated descent into nightmare – a vicious, emotionally pummelling, and unabashedly queer story of friendship and post-COVID trauma the place gamers, in Redaelli’s personal phrases, can push “three bourgeois twinks…in the direction of essentially the most horrible and grotesque endings”.
It is an absolute sledgehammer of a sport – “a dense, provocative, playful, exasperating, horrifying, poetic, usually very humorous, and infrequently even profound rumination on the typically paralysing seek for a spot within the disenfranchising shadow of modern-day life”, as I wrote in my 5 star overview – and simply essentially the most relentlessly trendy sport of 2023.
That is significantly true of Mediterranea Inferno’s Fruit of Mirages sequences, during which every boy – as decided by the participant – takes an more and more hallucinatory journey into their deepest insecurities. From woozy, disco-hued dance flooring sequences to stark black and white flashbacks, the mix of Redaelli’s splendidly seductive rating, sparing soundscapes, and sometimes hypnotic visuals (drawing inspiration from the likes of trend images, traditional Italian cinema, and Catholic imagery) is so ferociously intense, the impact is all-consuming.
It is genuinely astonishing stuff – deftly juggling pitch-black humour with moments of painful, typically disturbing, emotional frankness – and a simple advocate from me now it is lastly made the soar from PC to Swap, PlayStation, and Xbox Sequence X/S. Meditteranea Inferno’s console variations value round £8, which is already a steal – but it surely’s additionally discounted by 66 % on Steam proper now, that means you’ll be able to decide it up for £4.41. Truthfully, simply purchase it.