Dante's Inferno is a 2010
action-adventure game developed by
Visceral Games and published by
Electronic Arts. The game was released for
PlayStation 3,
Xbox 360, and
PlayStation Portable in February 2010. The PlayStation Portable version was developed by
Artificial Mind and Movement.
The game's story is loosely based on
Inferno, the first canticle of
Dante Alighieri's
Divine Comedy. It follows Dante, imagined as a
Templar knight from
The Crusades, who, guided by the spirit of the poet
Virgil, must fight through the nine Circles of Hell to rescue Beatrice from the clutches of
Lucifer himself. In the game, players control Dante from a
third-person perspective. His primary weapon is a
scythe that can be used in a series of combination attacks and finishing moves. Many attack combinations and abilities can be unlocked in exchange for souls, an in-game currency that is collected upon defeating enemies.
Before the game's release,
Dante's Inferno underwent a prominent, elaborate, and at times controversial marketing campaign led by the game's publisher Electronic Arts. This included the release of a fake religious game called
Mass: We Pray, a motion controller-based game supposedly allowing players to engage in an interactive prayer and church sermon.
The game received generally positive reviews by critics, with praise for the gameplay, art direction, voice acting, story, sound design, and depiction of Hell. It also sold over 2 million copies worldwide across all platforms.
[1][2] The game spawned a
comic book series and an animated movie,
Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, which was released direct-to-DVD simultaneously with it.