Demos are back, baby. It feels like over the past couple of years, getting hands on with titles pre-release has really gained in importance for bringing players on board, and hyped for upcoming games – especially indies, and especially if it’s a genre they don’t normally dabble in.

Which brings us to the February 2026 edition of Steam Next Fest, a celebration of upcoming games, which kicks off next week, on 23 February. One of the future releases you’ll find in the Next Fest catalogue is The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline, a first-person psychological thriller, with a dash of horror and a dollop of mystery.

The makers of The Alighieri Circle, Italian developer ONE O ONE GAMES (who previously released The Suicide of Rachel Foster) and Spanish publisher Entalto Publishing, have made their PC demo available as of today, 19 February, in the lead-up to Next Fest.

In this dark and moody walking simulator – there’s no combat, only exploration, puzzle solving and hidden collectibles – you assume the role of Gabriele Alighieri, an ordinary man, husband and father, whose family are bound to a centuries-old supernatural rite. Because it turns out Dante’s The Divine Comedy isn’t just a piece of literature. It reflects a disturbing truth: every 33 years the barrier between our reality and Hell weakens.

From each generation, an Alighieri must enter a surreal other dimension, called The Dive, through the portal hidden in the bowels of the family’s ancestral home. Once in The Dive, they are tasked with sealing off Hell once more by gathering and reuniting the lost, magical pages of the Divine Comedy.

The Inferno of The Alighieri Circle isn’t full of fire and brimstone, though, and its demons aren’t the conventional horned kind. Gabriele’s journey is a harrowing psychological one that forces him to confront his deepest fears and trauma. Falter, or become distracted, and his soul will be consumed by the darkness lurking in the realm.

Whether The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline will be the nine circles of puzzle hell or heaven, well, the demo doesn’t really convey. At around 45 minutes long, it offers a tiny taste of the game’s brainteaser component but a big serving of its aesthetic and core narrative mystery.

I do wish the demo had included one brain-straining challenge – there’s a tantalising chess board puzzle just sitting inert in the one room – but it does make clear the two unnerving worlds (one sumptuous but eerie; one stark and nightmarish) that you’ll be exploring. It also dips its toes in the tragic history of the Alighieri family, many of whom never recovered from the painful introspection and sacrifice forced on them by the Ritual.

Coming across as both cerebral and visually dazzling – much like that other dark indie delight The Forgotten City – The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is already ticking a lot of boxes when it comes to artful entertainment for adult players, with a lot of bonus historical flavour.

The game releases in 2026 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S|X.