Dante's Inferno (video game)
A Templar knight descends through Hell to save his beloved.
Dante's Inferno is a 2010 action-adventure game developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts. Loosely based on the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, it reimagines the poet as a Templar knight who must fight through the nine Circles of Hell to rescue his wife Beatrice from Lucifer. The game is notable for its elaborate and controversial marketing campaign, which included a fake religious game called Mass: We Pray, and for being intended as the first part of a trilogy that was later cancelled.
Quick Facts
- Title
- Dante's Inferno
- Publisher
- Electronic Arts
- Director
- Jonathan Knight · Stephen Barry
- Producer
- Jonathan Knight · Justin Lambros
- Designer
- Stephen Desilets · Michael Cheng · Vincent Napoli
- Programmer
- Brad McKee
- Artist
- Ash Huang
- Writer
- Jonathan Knight · Will Rokos
- Composer
- Garry Schyman · Paul Gorman
- Genre
- Action-adventure, hack and slash
- Modes
- Single-player, multiplayer
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3 · Xbox 360 · PlayStation Portable
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Dante's Inferno is set in 1191, following the Siege of Acre. The protagonist, Dante, is reimagined as a Knight Templar who survives an assassination attempt and a confrontation with Death itself, learning he is condemned to Hell. He returns to Florence to find his beloved Beatrice murdered and her soul taken by Lucifer, forcing him to pursue her through the nine Circles of Hell. Guided by the spirit of the poet Virgil, Dante confronts historic figures such as Queen Cleopatra, Mark Antony, and King Minos, while memories of his past sins—including an abusive childhood, his mother's suicide, and a massacre of prisoners during the Crusades—are revealed.
Reader's Guide
The game received generally positive reviews, with praise for its story, art direction, voice acting, sound design, and depiction of Hell, though gameplay drew mixed responses due to repetitiveness in the latter half and comparisons to the God of War series. It sold over one million copies worldwide and spawned a comic book miniseries and an animated movie, Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, released direct-to-DVD simultaneously with the game. Two sequels based on Purgatorio and Paradiso, as well as a mobile spin-off, were planned but all cancelled. A playable demo was released for PlayStation 3 on December 10, 2009, and for Xbox 360 on December 24, 2009. In September 2026, a developer using XenonRecomp created a native PC port allowing play without emulation. A limited 'Death Edition' was also released.
Did You Know?
- The game's marketing included a fake religious game called Mass: We Pray, a motion controller-based game supposedly allowing interactive prayer and church sermons.
- Downloadable content includes Dark Forest, a prequel story, and Trials of St. Lucia, which features St. Lucia as a playable character.
- The game's story reveals that Dante was actually killed by the Saracen Assassin back in Acre and thus cannot leave Hell.
- A native PC port was made in September 2026 using XenonRecomp, a tool that recompiles PowerPC code to C++.
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