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TLDR: A unique visual novel full of player choices. It succeeds in nearly all areas that a VN should except the most important one - a good story.


PROS:

✅Very stylish and artsy
✅Music

CONS:

➖Abstract
➖Narrative can be underwhelming

Content (Game world/Narrative/Length) –

Game World: Mediterranea Inferno (MI) is a visual novel that takes place in Italy. The game world mostly consists of you simply reading the dialog while the characters interact with the game world. Unfortunately (maybe), the game world is very hard to describe. This is an incredibly artsy title. As such the world itself often feels less like a world and more like a painting.
I will commend MI for its unique graphical style below, but I’ll say as far as a game world goes, MI fails to impress - it can oftentimes be challenging to understand what the world is supposed to be, especially during “Mirage” parts, which goes completely drug-induced bonkers.
Narrative: The narrative in MI is generally simple but the Mirage sequences can make it incredibly confusing. You don’t play as any character, as the player, you have a third person perspective while occasionally hearing the thoughts of the three main characters - Claudio, Mida, and Andrea. Each of the characters have their own demons below the surface they are dealing with, and the premise of the game is focused on how the COVID lockdowns have mentally impacted the Gen Z protagonists.
The story takes place in Italy as the three protagonists are somewhat famous. The lockdowns are lifted and for some reason, they haven’t spoken to each other in 2 years and want to do a weekend get-together. What follows, at the start, is a weekend full of queer debauchery. There are no explicit body parts shown, but the scenes and dialog can get quite perverse.
As the player, you choose who you want to give these Mirage items too (more in mechanics), what results is the Mirage seems to give the chosen character more confidence while the others become more mentally unstable.
Ending spoilers:

With my ending, Andrea turned into a crazed murderer, killing Claudio and Mida. I guess the lockdowns drove him a bit insane with the Mirage effect increasing his mental deterioration. After Andrea murders his two friends, the story ends with just text of him being arrested the next day.

Despite my ending, there seems to be many other options available if you choose different characters. Still, the narrative wasn’t good enough for me to want to play it again. While the general story was good enough to tolerate, the Mirage parts took whatever normalcy MI has and threw it off the rails. I would have rather enjoyed to have a deeper, more intriguing dialog without the need for drug-induced craziness.
Length: This is a short game, but you won’t see all of the content from a single playthrough as there is a good amount of choices for the player to make. One playthrough for me took me a little under 3 hours.

Gameplay (Controls/Mechanics/Difficulty) –

Controls: Being this is a visual novel, the controls are largely KBM and involve simple left clicking on options.
Mechanics: The main unique mechanic that MI has in the guise of player choice is the Mirage mechanic. How this functions is that some sort of queer deity comes to your characters and basically says that Mirage feels good and you need four of them to “Ascend to heaven.” The trick here is that a Mirage costs this random currency to obtain, so you have limited options to choose who gets a Mirage. Once a character chooses to have a Mirage, they enter some sort of acid trip that on some level explores how the character is feeling or what they are thinking. Furthermore, inside the Mirage, there are some different paths to take and more options to spend your valuable currency on. There is a type of card hidden in each Mirage that is used to purchase something if you collect 8 of them - implying that it may take more than a single, or even 2x, playthrough to accomplish this.
So overall, I’ll say that of the visual novels I’ve played, the Mirage mechanic seems like a unique spin on a normal VN play. The concept seems intriguing, but the execution leaves me wondering if there was a better way to implement this in perhaps a not so abstract way. All the Mirages I’ve watched felt somewhat confusing and nonsensical.
Difficulty: No difficulty involved, just choices. There doesn’t seem to be a way to fail.

Graphics (Quality/UI/Performance) –

Quality: MI is a very artsy game. The quality here is less of something I would call beautiful, and more like a unique abstract painting. Sometimes the artfulness of the design can get in the way of how things are supposed to look, making me feel confused to what even is happening, especially during Mirages. I don’t really like abstract art, but I feel that MI has done a great job in bringing a unique take to VNs.
UI: Simple and yet it seems to cover all of the bases of a good VN. I like how the log of previous dialogs is right there when you access the menu. I did find the save system confusing. There are auto saves, but when I attempted to save manually I had to reload from the auto save to get to where I was. Also, despite there being a manual save, it seems as though you cannot save in the middle of dialog, only a certain points, so once I saved in the middle of the scene, and when I reloaded I was brought back to the beginning of the scene.
Performance: No issues with performance, played on my desktop PC.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | installed on SSD

Audio (Sound Effects/Music) –

Sound Effects: The sound effects are done well. I noticed it being quite atmospheric. Things like rain, car doors, and background noises are done well. There is no voice acting.
Music: The music is pretty good and I’d say the best part of the Mirage experiences. When you enter Mirages, there are some absolute bangers that had me tapping and nodding my head to the beat. Well done.

Replay Factor (Longevity) –

MI has some good replay value. I read somewhere that when you finish a single storyline, you’ve seen about 60% of the content in the game. So I figure you’d have to replay it at least 2 more times - once for each character you didn’t choose, plus another time maybe for the max card trade in, which I’m not sure what that does.
All of this extends the 3 hour playthrough up to around ~9 hours, but I do anticipate some possible repetition, especially if you are unable to skip scenes. The game seems like it was meant for replaying because as soon as you finish, you are immediately thrust back into the first scene.

Final Verdict –

Mediterranea Inferno is difficult to recommend. Every unique thing it brings to the visual novel space (art style, Mirage) has clear disadvantages that make me dislike it. Furthermore, it can be difficult to recommend due to the overtly queer protagonists as you really need to take your audience into consideration and hope they have an open enough mind to look past things like 20-year old men having sex with each other.
Ultimately, I’m going to not recommend this because to me the core part of a visual novel is having a gripping enough story (duh, it's a book with visuals) to keep the player engaged, and I thought that the story of MI was weak enough to make me not care enough to play it a second playthrough. While the game definitely delivers on art style and music, it's almost like those areas had more effort into them instead of writing an engaging story.

Recommend?


No

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