The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline, review: a journey into the Abyss that ends too soon

We've seen quite a few walking simulators, enough to understand that the problem is never how little you do, but how much weight what remains carries. When combat, progression, and much of the interaction disappear, everything falls on the shoulders of the story, the environments, and how the game manages to make us want to keep exploring. The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline starts from a favorable position: the surname in its title alone evokes a specific imagery and immediately sparks a certain curiosity.

ONE-O-ONE Games takes the Divine Comedy and tries to tell us that what Dante wrote wasn't exactly Hell, but rather how the poet rationalized what he had seen. The Abyss truly exists, the Alighieri family guards its secret, and every thirty-three years a descendant must return to the family villa to complete a ritual necessary to keep the passage closed. In 1993, it's Gabriele's turn; he has long known the weight of his surname and hopes to find a different solution than those faced by his ancestors.

We really liked the initial idea. Not because simply putting Dante in a video game makes it interesting, far from it, but because the title at least tries not to reconstruct the usual tour of the circles of Hell. The problem is that, after completing it in about three hours, exploring almost everything and reading most of the documents, we found ourselves with a production that seems to be preparing for something bigger the whole time. And just when we finally expect it to start doing so, the credits roll.

A Family, Thirty-Three Years, and a Debt to Pay

Gabriele (the protagonist) knows that the ritual exists and that his family has been repeating it for generations, but he doesn't know the true nature of the Abyss nor the identity of the figure who accompanies him when he begins the descent. The guide, with a rather obvious reference, takes on the role that Virgil had for Dante. Only here, it's an ancestor who has already faced the same journey.

The choice works especially well when the documents show how each generation tried to live differently with the same curse. One of the most interesting episodes concerns the past of this figure and their attempt to escape the rules of the ritual to avoid losing their loved one. In a few lines, the game brings out a conflict that, paradoxically, ends up being more defined than Gabriele's own.

The protagonist remains a functional alter ego. We follow the story through his eyes and see him in the sequences dedicated to his life with Delilah, but we never truly felt like we knew him. The relationship with his wife is the human part that best sustains the story: the phone calls between the two and the cutscenes, created with an illustrated style almost like a fresco, manage to give credibility to the couple.

And that's precisely why the ending leaves a strange aftertaste. For much of the adventure, The Alighieri Circle reminds us that the ritual will require a sacrifice and builds the idea that Gabriele must make a choice. When that moment arrives, however, the script has already decided everything. We didn't need three endings or a moral wheel, but if the story spends hours making us feel the weight of a decision, it would have been at least pleasant to truly experience it. Even the Well of Creation, indicated as a place linked to the origin of the curse, remains more of a promise than a true destination.

The Abyss is not Dante's Inferno. But then what is it?

Expecting to find Minos, Cerberus, Paolo, and Francesca around every corner would probably be the worst way to judge ONE-O-ONE Games' work. The game openly tells us that the Inferno of the Comedy is Dante's interpretation and that the Abyss can take different forms depending on who crosses it. We like the idea because it allows the developers to move away from the most overused iconography of the Florentine master's book, trying to invent something new.

Visually, they succeed. The Abyss primarily uses white, black, and gray, with red used for blood and for certain elements that need to stand out strongly from the rest of the scenery. There are expanses, water, and structures that seem to belong to different eras. Charon even appears in a form distant from classical imagery. But the more we venture into the abyss, the more the problem becomes evident. The Abyss has few presences, very few truly significant encounters, and almost no situations capable of leaving a mark beyond the scenic visual composition that makes up its structure. We weren't asking for a parade of characters from the Comedy, but if this place is supposed to reflect Gabriele's fears and memories, it's natural to wonder why it has so little to say about him.

Is Gabriele deliberately so internally impoverished as to generate an equally barren Abyss, or are the scenarios simply lacking enough content? The game doesn't provide enough elements to turn the first hypothesis into a convincing interpretation, and so the second quickly takes over.

Even on the horror front, there's little to save. During our playthrough, we found practically nothing that produced fear and very little that could be described as unsettling. It's not a matter of jumpscares: the Abyss never seems to truly react to our presence or make us question what we're observing. It's beautiful to look at, sometimes disorienting, but rarely unsettling. For a place built on the fears of those who cross it, it's a missed opportunity that's hard to ignore.

The Villa Hides Many Secrets But In The End...

Between one descent and the next, we return to the family villa. The spaces are contained: a main floor consisting of a few rooms and a basement level where the warehouse and the passage to the Abyss are located. At first, the small size doesn't bother the eye, if only because one expects to see something beyond a few shelves and two dusty display cases.

However, the villa continues to suggest secrets without actually possessing enough of them. The diaries are probably the most interesting part of the exploration, as they tell the stories of some of the Alighieri who faced the ritual before us and add Gabriele's memories. But reading those pages, we repeatedly wondered why we weren't seeing those stories: transforming at least some of them into memories or short sequences would have given much more weight to the family's past.

In the end, the villa primarily becomes a service space. You return, you look for the new document, you solve what's needed to proceed, and you descend again. After the first chapter, the structure becomes easy to predict, and despite the short duration, the pace becomes surprisingly slow.

The puzzles also follow this line. Those who played the demo already know the one with the three beasts, simple and direct. The subsequent ones sometimes require understanding where information has been distributed or connecting two elements present in the room, but they almost never force us to truly think. Difficulty alone wouldn't even be the point: an elementary puzzle can work if it tells something about the place or the character. Here, many passages seem to exist because something needs to be done between cutscenes.

Right at the end of this journey, there was one thing that at least made us smile. Faced with a kind of labyrinth made of doors, we retrieved paper and pen to mark our path (something for '90s gamers, when photographing the screen with a phone wasn't an option). It didn't suddenly become Myst, but for a few minutes, we had the feeling of participating in the solution. Too bad it happens when we're already close to the conclusion.

Beautiful to See, But the Frame Remains the Best Part of the Painting

The technical aspect gave us the fewest problems. We played on PC with a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and an ultrawide monitor, finding a stable experience, without significant bugs or noticeable performance drops. The gameplay correctly utilizes the panoramic format, while the illustrated cutscenes maintain a narrower aspect ratio and are shown with black bars on the sides.

Unreal Engine 5 does its job, and in some glimpses, it does it very well. Materials and lighting create a credible villa and an Abyss capable of building interesting images. The illustrated sequences dedicated to Gabriele and Delilah are perhaps the element we appreciated most artistically.

The limit is what happens within these spaces. After three hours, we more easily remember the bichromy of the Abyss than a scene that occurred within it, and that says a lot. The sound compartment also remains correct without becoming distinctive. In the build we tried, we used the English voices, which were convincing and suitable for the characters, while music and ambient sounds do their duty without building the tension that could have greatly helped the experience. The Steam page now also indicates full Italian audio, an aspect that will need to be verified in the public version.

Three hours are not short by definition. Here they become so because everything seems to demand more time: Gabriele would need more characterization, the villa real secrets, the Abyss encounters that truly belong to it, and the ending enough space to make what it has prepared feel impactful.

The Alighieri Circle: Dante's Bloodline remains a curious and in some respects fascinating project. But when we finished the ritual, we didn't feel like we had reached the end of a journey, but rather the point where that journey could finally begin to say something more.