Dante’s Inferno — This Game Is Hell (Obvious Pun)
Dante’s Inferno … hooo boy.
Ever since I saw the first trailer for the game, it was clear to me that it was a God of War clone that took some serious artistic liberties with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. However, I did not know then what I know now, that Visceral Games was one hundred percent set on giving gamers an image of what hell really must be like. Half of this hellish experience is delivered through the absolutely grotesque imagery that keeps you playing out of sheer morbid curiosity, and the other half is delivered through the tedium that you will find in the game’s poorly designed gameplay system. Some people argue that this is purposeful, because Visceral Games wanted you to really experience “Gaming Hell” but I say those people are stupid. As it stands now, we have a game that not only seriously earns its M rating but also could have been quite the accomplishment if it weren’t for its glaring flaws and repetitive nature.
Our protagonist Dante isn’t the poet he was in real life. Instead, he is a crusader who, like our old Spartan friend Kratos, killed one too many people in his lifetime and now has to pay for it. Fortunately, Lucifer has a boner for Dante’s love Beatrice, and so he whisks her away to hell, and taunts Dante into giving chase. Armed with an extendo scythe made out of bone, Dante decides to descend into the very belly of the beast on a quest to reclaim his beloved and make you vomit in the process.
This game ties the ESRB M rating to a chair, cuts off pieces of its flesh, and shits in the bloody crater. That may sound disgusting to you, and if it does you are so totally not prepared for Dante’s Inferno. Disemboweled babies with knives for arms are just the shallow end of this putrid puss pool of vomit inducing imagery. Every woman in the game has her breasts out, even the lust demons with mutilated demonic genitalia. Demons and corpses have their skin flayed off, their organs showing, and are generally hard to look at for any prolonged period of time. Blood, vomit, and feces are in full supply and are sometimes used for enemy attacks. Body parts are stitched together in horrid ways and even the bodies of the sinners you choose to save rather than damn range from sad and pitiful to downright disgusting.
… and that’s just the half of it! Everything about this game is just … wrong … in all the right ways … but still wrong! From Lucifer’s constant groping of Beatrice, to Dante’s flayed open chest, to the brilliantly animated cut scenes which show the carnage Dante has wrought in his life in gory detail alongside all the women he has fucked, this game is meant to shock you, which works both for and against it. Although the game is chock full of grotesque imagery, it doesn’t really do anything with it, other than make you vomit. There is no real coherent story or plot to Dante’s Inferno, and those looking for deeper meaning to the whole shebang will be left out in the cold. The action moves you forward without too many story related reasons other than the “OMGZ GET BEATRICE BACK” overarching plot hook. The game barely has anything to do with the actual Divine Comedy and has lost all literary merit that its inspiration had. At the very least, one could say that the levels and demons therein are based off of the levels of hell in The Divine Comedy, but in all honesty, they are more of a mish mash of the seven deadly sins rather than the layers of torture that Dante originally wrote about.
Still, the game does what it sets out to do, revolt you. This actually wouldn’t have been that bad, all things considered. It’s actually a good thing that someone is pushing the boundaries of our video game ratings system, and more games like Dante’s Inferno means we will likely get more, otherwise questionable, import games that are truly works of art, but feature some serious adult content. Unfortunately, Dante’s Inferno doesn’t back up its boundary pushing tendencies with a good game, making it a very bad poster boy for games with adult content indeed. If an angry parent came to me and said that Dante’s Inferno is nothing more than an attempt to sell violence and sex in a video game, I would sadly have to agree.
Oh Dante’s Inferno had some great gameplay ideas but that’s all. You can customize Dante in several different ways, progressing him through tech trees, equipping him with relics, and choosing to save or damn lost souls in order to become more holy or unholy. Unfortunately, your load out doesn’t save when you die, so if you pick up a new trick at the beginning of a level, you will have to re-equip it over, and over, and over again until you get past your current segment. Let’s get this straight developers, going into a menu over, and over, and over again simply isn’t fun.
That’s just the start of all of Dante’s problems. Dante controls decently enough and the fighting is actually pretty tight, but there is just so goddamn much of it. You know how in God of War you will beat the crap out of a load of enemies, and then progress forward a bit, do a puzzle, and fight some more enemies? Well Dante’s Inferno mashes all this stuff into one. Wave after wave of enemies will spawn from the ground and try to kill you, even if you are in the middle of a puzzle and trying to concentrate. Deaths feel unfairly cheap, and many of the enemies in the game have one hit kill moves that can blindside you if you aren’t paying attention. The game also has plenty of instant death traps and pits that feel unavoidable, or at least harder to avoid than they should be. Boss encounters are filled with sloppy quick time events that are poorly represented on the screen, which once again kill you if you fail. In short, you will die, a lot, a whoooooole lot, and remember, every time you die you have to redo your skill advancement and recollect any items you may have gotten before you bit the bucket. Frustrating.
Aside from all that, there just seems to be so many useless time wasters in this game. There are mini games you have to play to “capture the sins” of people you want to absolve of their unholy debts. You have to mash buttons to open chests and doors. You even have to go through a mandatory challenge mode toward the end of the game. The whole game feels as if it is mostly filler, and it is not a good feeling.
There is so much of this game that could have been good, and that is the most frustrating thing of all. The soundtrack is great. The voice acting is actually spot on. The graphics, although grotesque, are crisp and clear. Heck, the basic action system even has well thought out RPG elements and this all sounds great on paper! However, Dante’s Inferno never takes the third step to tie this all together in one presentable package. Instead of truly innovative action based gameplay packed inside a story that is meant to disgust your very soul, we get repetitive battles, faulty quick time events, and demon tits. That’s great, if you are in to that sort of thing, but it’s totally balls for anyone else. Dante’s Inferno is quite simply hell, both literally and figuratively. At 10-12 hours, I’d say rent it and binge play it if you are really that interested. You simply aren’t going to get any more respect for having a copy of Dante’s Inferno on your shelf. It’s like the video game version of Antichrist, without Willem DaFoe.
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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