I recently finished up Dante’s Inferno, Visceral Games newest IP. The game loosely follows the adventures of Dante Alighieri’s journey through the seven levels of Hell as he looks to free the soul of his wife, Beatrice (pretty sure that didn’t happen in the book). Being a somewhat copy of God of War, I was expecting there to be some type of gruesome nature to the game. However, I was surprised to find that the shock value of the game’s images harmed the quality of the game rather than developed the visual representation of Hell.
The last Visceral game that I played was Dead Space, which was my favorite game of 2008. The brutality of that game worked well, yet Dante’s Inferno enemies was pushed a little too far. At one point, there are demon babes that come out of a large demon woman’s breasts. Just typing that description made me sick. Not to mention that the image of the gluttons have been permanently burned into my retinas. There oily moobs haunt me in my sleep.
Gruesome games have never been a problem for me. Blood and gore works well in the context of the game. Visceral did a good job of developing the environment of Hell; however, the inhabitants pull focus away from the environment and re-focused me on why the hell (no pun intended) there are demon Baraka babies in Hell.
