- Spoiler: show
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03/01 - The Last Campfire
05/01 - Splatoon 3
17/01 - Wolfenstein (2009)
22/01 - Fragments of Euclid
02/02 - Postmouse
08/02 - Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (Kung Lao)
26/02 - F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch
06/03 - Omensight: The Definitive Edition
09/03 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine
21/03 - Forza Horizon 2 (first finale)
25/03 - Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom
31/03 - Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (World Tour)
01/04 - The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog
16/04 - Knights Contract
20/04 - Strider (2014)
12/05 - The Sword of Etheria
22/05 - Lost Planet 3
26/05 - Disco Elysium
12/06 - Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition
14/06 - [PROTOTYPE]
18/06 - Zeno Clash II
29/06 - The Wonderful One: After School Hero
07/07 -
Dante's Inferno
I was toying with the idea of going through this one again lately. I remember liking it, but it had been a pretty long time since I last played, so my memories aren’t the clearest. I feel like my opinion of the game did decline slightly over the years, and I wasn’t sure how well it would stand up these days. But I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s actually still a good, fun experience. It may not be an especially original game, and there’s a few rough edges here and there, but generally it does what it tries well.
Combat mechanics are pretty solid, although obviously very derivative of God of War. Attacks are all stylishly animated, have a real meaty feedback to them, and flow together really well too. It does take a while for them to properly flesh out over the course of the game though, in a way that makes the game feel a bit basic until you get quite a long ways in. Your bread and butter attacks don’t really have much to them. A single light attack string, and a single heavy attack string. You can mix things up a little by starting with the former and ending with the latter, but it’s not like you have a variety of stuff that has meaningfully different behaviour. You also get some special moves that you pull off by hitting a face button while holding block, just like GoW. But once you upgrade these moves is when you actually start to uncover something that gives you some meaningful choices. They each have an extended version, but what the game doesn’t tell you is that you can start with one of these moves, and finish with the extension of another, which can give you some level of choice over what you do with combos. So it is a fun system on balance, but it’s far from the best. I’ve definitely played a lot of worse action games, some that I’m even generally positive on, but there’s a lot of room where it could be better as well. I think God of War still has it beat, but this is still one of the better examples of games that try to emulate this combat style.
Enemy design is a bit mediocre however. There isn’t a huge variety, and there are some notable bad elements. A lot of the smaller foes don’t stand out visually very well, as they’re often dull coloured or simply too small on screen. Attacks are often way too quick to realistically be able to react to. But there is a class of larger demon enemy that is fun to fight. They’re big enough to see well, and their attacks are properly telegraphed. They’re tough, but can be juggled if you play well. So they feel like a fair and rewarding challenge. One enemy type that I used to really dislike, and that was putting me off replaying this initially, are the succubi. They have the ability to just dodge out of your attacks and leap at you instantly. They also have several moves that stun you. They can be very annoying. But this time I found a pretty decent way to deal with them, so they ended up being much less of a pain than I was expecting. But despite some good points, the problems that do exist make me feel like whenever I died it wasn’t really my fault. Instead it was just because the AI decided it wasn’t going to let me play and there was nothing I could’ve done about it. It’s not so bad of a problem that it drags down the overall experience, but it’s enough to make the occasional encounter a sore spot.
There’s also quite a lot of platforming, which isn’t brilliant. It comes in two forms. One being the kind of cinematic platforming like you would see in GoW, where you’re grappling on to walls and shimmying along ropes. It’s fine, but very simple. The other type is more traditional manual jumping from platform to platform. Dante actually feels pretty good in the air, a rarity in this genre. It has a nice sense of momentum, and you have a lot of control over your direction. But it’s massively let down by poor camera placement that makes depth perception really difficult. So many falls happened just because I couldn’t tell where I was in 3D space. It also likes to hide hazards from you at times, like not showing where you’re supposed to be jumping to, or having platforms drop away from under you with no warning. It’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it did make for a significant number of moments where I got stuck for a while on something that really shouldn’t have been a problem.
It’s quite impressive on an aesthetic level. Clearly another aspect that is cribbed from God of War though, as a big flashy spectacle inspired by religious mythology. This vision of Hell is a really cool one though. It’s really creative and has a lot of fantastic and imposing visual design. At times it does really feel like a Hieronymus Bosch painting that you can explore. Dark caverns of twisted architecture, filled with the countless tortured souls suffering their ironic punishment for whatever sin they have been damned for. Cities of fire, rivers of blood, gnashing teeth, and demonic visages. Each circle is very distinct and there’s some really good imagination on display. It’s easily one of the main draws to the game. Not everywhere looks great though. There are quite a few areas that are little more than boxy rooms with drab, muddy textures. It does frequently impress, but the quality doesn’t stay consistently that high for the whole experience. But even so, I have to give the game a bit of slack, being a multiplatform 7th gen release that was targeting 60fps with these big cinematic vistas. That’s a pretty tall order that very few developers even attempted. It runs smooth as silk on XB1, and I don’t recall any major dips on the original hardware. Audio design also deserves a nod. It manages to feel extremely loud in a way that really sells the scale of these locations and the power of attacks, yet it’s still pretty clear to parse and well balanced.
As an aside, this game also got me thinking about “edgy” games again, with that being on my mind since Prototype. I said I liked this kind of thing in my completion post for that game, but I think that might have given off the wrong message. I mean, not that I expect anyone is paying that much attention, but still it had me musing on this whole thing. A lot of the time these days when something gets called “edgy” it comes with a lot of negative connotations. That it contains some kind of bigoted or toxic themes that it tries to glamourise for the audience. And that’s definitely a thing, but it’s not something that I vibe with or want to make excuses for. But I think there is a distinction to be made here. Media that is “edgy” in that way often comes across as very gross, in a misanthropic and nihilistic way. It feels cruel and mean-spirited. When there’s stuff I like that could be called “edgy”, they are things that I think have some level of earnestness and purpose to them. They are dark and brooding, sometimes grotesque, but have a heart and believe in some kind of good, or have a tongue in their cheek. Maybe that disqualifies them from having the moniker, or perhaps they fall under an older meaning of the word, and it has since lost some innocence thanks to the context of the surrounding culture that has emerged over time.
If you look at something like The Darkness, although some of the dialogue hasn’t aged well, it still comes across as something that has some level of empathy. Some other examples like Darksiders and Doom have an inherent silliness to them that stops them from coming across as too cynical. Prototype on the other hand doesn’t have any charm to it, nor does it have any kind of purpose to its edginess. I don’t think I’d go so far to call it outright misanthropic, but it definitely doesn’t care about anything. Dante’s Inferno is somewhat similar, but is elevated a bit by its aesthetic ambitions. It’s kind of gross, and has a fairly adolescent tone. But at the same time, it is somewhat compelling as a vision of divine punishment and the kind of morality system that would imagine such a thing. It is often cruel, but it makes a point to condemn Dante for the things he’s done as an invading Crusader. This isn’t a story about how society is corrupt and the only thing that can save it is for the protagonist to kill everyone they personally don’t like. Yet at the same time it seems to want to have it both ways, as it revels in brutal violence and occasional nudity/sexual suggestiveness that has a pretty skeevy tone. And then it gives this character the power to cast judgment on the various historical figures you find populating Hell. It is rather tasteless, but I can’t say it’s without substance. So I’m not entirely sure if it counts as the current definition of “edgy”, although I wouldn’t exactly want to defend this game from anyone finding it off-putting. If anyone else has been keeping up with Jacob Geller’s recent podcast, I think both this game and Prototype fall in to the category of “rotten” games which that show is about. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if it covers this particular game at some point down the line.
