The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline Preview

The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is a horror walking simulator, based on The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, a classic and incredibly influential piece of Italian literature. Dante’s Bloodline puts you in control of Gabriele Alighieri, a descendant of the author. It’s his bloodline’s fate to perform “The Dive”, a descent into Hell itself, to reseal the gates.

This demo is pretty short, and there isn’t a great amount going on. It starts at the Alighieri family manor, and as Gabriele, you need to open the portal to Hell, take The Dive, and spend a small amount of time exploring. There is voice acting here, and it’s decent, but not mind-blowing. Despite this, though, I don’t love the writing; there are a lot of weird tonal inconsistencies. Gabriele occasionally makes quips or some strange lines that just don’t make the most sense. For example, immediately after entering Hell, he hears a voice, and then talks about hearing voices, which feels strange, considering he’s just taken a dive into the literal underworld. There’s also a lot of talking, and it’s difficult to be really pulled into the atmosphere with the constant dialogue.

I’m really invested in what the core of this story seems to be leading to. Hell in Dante’s Bloodline (and I assume The Divine Comedy) is a deeply personalised experience. It’s setting up for an exploration of Gabriele’s own past and personal demons. While we get no deep exploration of this idea within the demo, it feels like this is one of the core themes that the game is going to explore.

Gameplay itself, though, is incredibly sparse. Due to this game’s nature as a walking simulator, there’s typically not much here, but especially so in this case. I needed to find a key for a locked door, and then three statues that were easily located around the manor. Beyond that, it’s simply a walk from point to point. The full game should have a focus on puzzles too, but the demo didn’t really showcase anything on that front.

I’m impressed artistically too, despite some gripes. There’s a strong atmosphere here, the sound design is great, especially in the manor, and the visuals are pretty good for the most part, but I did see a lot of strange visual artifacting, primarily around the edges of objects. The depiction of Hell is interesting. It’s pretty, and while clearly unpleasant, it’s not the typical fire and brimstone design. While I expect that to change as you delve further, I have faith in the visual department to remain engaging.

As a whole, The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is interesting, but there’s definitely some work to be done. There’s great potential in the visuals and artistic department, and the storytelling could potentially land really well, but there are some unfortunate issues in the writing department.