Summer holiday turns treacherous in horror visual novel Mediterranea Inferno, out today
From the developer behind 2020's brilliant Milky Way Prince
Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now.
Mediterranea Inferno follows three childhood friends - Claudio, Andrea and Mida - who reconnect on a summer getaway in Italy after being isolated during the Covid pandemic. That sounds quite lovely, right? You can choose what the trio do with their vacation - beach layabouts, tourist sightseeing and boozy nights out are all on the table - but eventually, no matter what you decide, the same arcane force comes to make things weird. Strangers normally do that when you and friends want to be alone anyway, so I’m happy to finally get some cosmic visions out of it.
Those psychedelic images are lush and (based on the horror undertones) I’m guessing they were probably influenced by Italian giallo films. That’s no surprise since Santa Ragione is on publishing duties and they recently covered their own brilliant horror Saturnalia in a similarly striking pallette.
Back in 2020, Giada Zavarise wrote about the developer’s last game Milky Way Prince and thought it managed to “avoid conflating mental illness with cartoonish malice,” and presented “a nuanced, all too realistic portrait of a toxic relationship.” Mediterranea Inferno's store page includes a content warning that says there's "implied physical violence, psychological abuse, unwanted sexual touching, and limited gory imagery," as well as references to substance abuse, so hopefully it tackles tough topics as thoughtfully as its older sibling.
Mediterranea Inferno is out on Steam right now with a 10% discount slashing the price down to $13.50 for the next week.