If you're looking to bring a bit of summer sun into the lingering bleakness of a waning winter, then boy do I have a recommendation for you - assuming you're up for some pitch-black, emotionally pulverising horror. Mediterranea Inferno, last year's dazzling visual novel from The Milky Way Prince creator Lorenzo Redaelli, is out now on PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.

Mediterranea Inferno follows a trio of beautiful, fashionable Milan club kids in their early 20s as they reunite, after two years apart due to lingering COVID restrictions, for a three-day vacation in the blazing heat of a southern Italian summer. What follows is an artfully orchestrated descent into nightmare - a vicious, emotionally pummelling, and unabashedly queer tale of friendship and post-COVID trauma where players, in Redaelli's own words, can push "three bourgeois twinks...towards the most horrible and gruesome endings".

It's an absolute sledgehammer of a game - "a dense, provocative, playful, exasperating, horrifying, poetic, often very funny, and occasionally even profound rumination on the sometimes paralysing search for a place in the disenfranchising shadow of modern-day life", as I wrote in my five star review - and easily the most relentlessly stylish game of 2023.

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