The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline ReviewPS5

The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline is a brief descent with gorgeous atmosphere and not much else holding it together

At this point, I have wandered through enough video game hells that the place barely scares me anymore. Necrophosis: Full Consciousness is the most recent offender, a strolling nightmare where the dread comes from looking around rather than surviving it. So when The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline arrived on PS5, I thought I knew what to expect. Another atmospheric corridor through the underworld with a few environmental puzzles bolted on.

That is basically what it is. The problem is that this one never finds a reason to exist beyond the scenery.

A ritual nobody asked for

The setup goes like this. You play Gabriele Alighieri, not a soldier and not a hero, just a man crushed by a legacy he never asked for. Every 33 years, the barrier between our reality and Hell fades. To protect your family and the world you know, you must perform The Ritual, returning to your ancestral Italian villa to accept a destiny you have spent your life running from.

That is the official synopsis, and it sounds far more exciting than anything the game actually delivers. I kept waiting for the villa, the family, the weight of that inherited burden to become something. Instead, you dive into Hell, come back, dive again, and repeat the trip about three or four times. In between, you solve a handful of fairly challenging puzzles. Thank god for walkthroughs, because some of them would have stumped me long enough that I would have quit otherwise.

And then it ends. In under two hours, with a walkthrough at my side, I finished the whole thing.

A circle, supposedly

I understand the title. The story is a circle, and circles never end, so whatever Gabriele accomplishes changes nothing in the end as the goal gets passed down to the next unlucky descendant. That reading works on paper. What it does not do is tell me why I should care. Maybe a deeper meaning flew right past me, but I really dislike it when games go all artsy-fartsy and never explain why you did what you did. The Divine Comedy gives Dante a clear moral purpose, nine circles, and a path back toward the light. This game borrows the iconography without any of that structure.

It reminded me of In Rays of the Light, another brief walking simulator where the puzzle logic does most of the heavy lifting while the narrative stays stubbornly quiet. The difference is that In Rays of the Light at least gave me a feeling of personal discovery. Here, I finished and mostly just wondered what the point had been.

Hell has one room

Now for the good news. Walking through this depiction of Hell is the best thing about the game, and honestly the only thing it consistently gets right. The iconography leans into grey rock formations that twist into something like dead trees, you know the forest from the poem, marble architecture, and pools of blood spreading across the floor. The imagery is unmistakably rooted in Dante's vision without turning into a theme park.

Some of the vistas are kinda stunning too. There is a run-down cathedral you pass through that would make a great poster. Charon appears at one point, and the way he is portrayed is visually intriguing in a way nothing else in the game matches. These moments prove the team can build atmosphere when it counts.

The problem is variety. For a game about descending through Hell, it keeps showing you the same one environment. The rocks, the marble, the blood, and then more of all three where only the color of the sky/fog changes. Two hours is short, but even that length exposes how little the world changes between the first dive and the last.

Italian names, wrong voices

Then there is the voice acting, which nearly ruined the atmosphere for me. This is an Italian development team, so my first question is simple: why not cast English-speaking Italians? That sweet accented English would fit the material tonally and give the whole thing a sense of place. Instead, the delivery lands serviceable at best, with one exception. The Ancestor guide has moments where his gravelly presence works, but even he stumbles from time to time.

The worst offender is the pronunciation of Gabriele. Every time a character says it, something sounds off in a way that left a bad taste. When your lead character's own name trips the cast up, immersion suffers.

The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline is a beautiful disappointment. Its atmosphere carries real craft, and the puzzles occasionally demand actual thought, which I appreciated more than I expected. But the story never justifies the journey, the environments repeat too quickly, and the performances undercut the mood they are meant to sell.

If you are hungry for another slow, eerie walk through the underworld and the asking price feels trivial, there are worse ways to spend two hours. Just go in knowing the visuals are doing almost all of the work. Thanks for reading!