If you’re looking to bring a bit of summer sun into the lingering bleakness of a waning winter, then boy do I have a recommendation for you – assuming you’re up for some pitch-black, emotionally pulverising horror. Mediterranea Inferno, last year’s dazzling visual novel from The Milky Way Prince creator Lorenzo Redaelli, is out now on PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.
Mediterranea Inferno follows a trio of beautiful, fashionable Milan club kids in their early 20s as they reunite, after two years apart due to lingering COVID restrictions, for a three-day vacation in the blazing heat of a southern Italian summer. What follows is an artfully orchestrated descent into nightmare – a vicious, emotionally pummelling, and unabashedly queer tale of friendship and post-COVID trauma where players, in Redaelli’s own words, can push “three bourgeois twinks…towards the most horrible and gruesome endings”.
It’s an absolute sledgehammer of a game – “a dense, provocative, playful, exasperating, horrifying, poetic, often very funny, and occasionally even profound rumination on the sometimes paralysing search for a place in the disenfranchising shadow of modern-day life”, as I wrote in my five star review – and easily the most relentlessly stylish game of 2023.
That’s particularly true of Mediterranea Inferno’s Fruit of Mirages sequences, in which each boy – as determined by the player – takes an increasingly hallucinatory trip into their deepest insecurities. From woozy, disco-hued dance floor sequences to stark black and white flashbacks, the combination of Redaelli’s wonderfully seductive score, sparing soundscapes, and often hypnotic visuals (drawing inspiration from the likes of fashion photography, classic Italian cinema, and Catholic imagery) is so ferociously intense, the effect is all-consuming.
It’s genuinely astonishing stuff – deftly juggling pitch-black humour with moments of painful, sometimes disturbing, emotional frankness – and an easy recommend from me now it’s finally made the jump from PC to Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox Series X/S. Mediterranea Inferno’s console versions cost around £8, which is already a steal – but it’s also discounted by 66 percent on Steam right now, meaning you can pick it up for a mere £4.41. Honestly, just buy it.