[Review] The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline – A visually-striking Hellscape with devilishly elegant puzzles

Earlier this year, I got hands-on with the PC demo for The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline, an unnerving first-person supernatural mystery meets psychological thriller from Italian studio ONE O ONE GAMES (the makers of The Suicide of Rachel Foster) and indie publisher Entalto Publishing. Well, today the full game is out, and I can finally comment on whether the title delivers on its early tease of tantalising puzzles against a surreal and moody backdrop.

The answer is a resounding “yes,” with a caveat, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

As a little narrative context for The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline, the game proposes that Dante’s The Divine Comedy is more than a literary classic. It masks a truth about Hell, and one Italian family, Dante’s descendants, has been tasked with using the poem’s magically-imbued pages to perform a ritual every 33 years, in order to re-seal the door between our reality and the plane of torment. You play as the latest in this line, Gabriele Alighieri, a decidedly unheroic man who has been dreading the inherited task all his life.

Through his ancestral home, Gabriele descends into an infernal realm known as The Dive, and there he learns that Hell isn’t a place of fire, brimstone and devils. Rather, it’s a highly personal creation – a surreal reflection of a person’s greatest fears, worst memories and darkest thoughts. Hell is of your own traumatic making, basically.

Rather unsurprisingly, then, The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is a quiet, melancholic and highly cerebral game without combat or mad-dash survival horror pursuits. Gameplay is of the Walking Sim tradition (that’s okay, I love the genre!) where you navigate environments, piece together your family’s tragic story through collectibles, and complete puzzles that serve as the backbone of Gabriele’s three requisite Trials to get the job done.

The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline looks great, and the game’s warped, desaturated depictions of Hell really set it apart from other titles that have taken its characters to the same location. That said, the biggest selling point here is the puzzles. There are no hints, no hand-holding in any way, and yet the challenges are never opaque. While the third Trial is a lesson in trial and error, which can, admittedly, be frustrating, elsewhere the puzzles are supremely elegant in their cross-reference design, and mentally satisfying as a result.

The only downside is that there are so few of them. The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline can be completed in just five hours. That makes it a perfect one-to-two-session game for a soggy weekend indoors – reminding us a lot of The Last Case of John Morley in that regard. It also has a degree of replayability due to the emotional hook of the Alighieri family’s sacrifices, which every Ritual demands. That said, there’s a sense that the game could have been bigger, as many questions go unanswered, and well, there are nine Circles to Dante’s Inferno. Three Trials centred on three pages seems a little lacking by comparison.

A sequel would definitely be welcome, and while the scale of Dante’s Bloodline matches Gabriele’s personal narrative journey, the door feels open to more explorations set within this distinct interpretation of Hell.

As it stands right now, though, The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline delivers some of the best environmental puzzles of the year. Anyone who loves that style of gameplay should give it a go.

The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is out today, 10 September, for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.