1. What was the original idea that made you want to create \*The Alighieri Circle\*?

The creative process was the exact opposite of what you might expect. For a long time, the studio had wanted to create a game inspired by the Divine Comedy, but we were missing the right angle.
The breakthrough came while re-reading the work in search of inspiration. Dante's Inferno is often treated as a precise geographical place, almost as if one were making a documentary. Reading between the lines, however, we realized that the work is actually an account of a transformative, deeply personal journey undertaken by an individual, and we asked ourselves: why not try to do something similar? Suddenly, Hell was no longer just a physical place to be mapped out. Hell is internal.
With a great deal of creative freedom at our disposal, we decided to explore an unconventional character. Projecting Hell directly into his mind allowed us to replace traditional flames and demons with paranoia and alienation, feelings that will stay with both him and the player throughout the entire experience.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

2. Gabriele isn't your typical horror protagonist. He's just a man dealing with his family's past. What can you tell us about him and what he's going through?

Gabriele is the product of a dysfunctional family, forced to pass a burden down from parent to child and chronically unable to communicate. He is a deeply insecure man who belittles himself and feels he is never good enough, because his entire family shares the same plight. Every Alighieri who has completed the ritual has ended up "broken" in some way, left to keep their suffering a secret.
He has always rejected this legacy, trying to distance himself as much as possible from his mother and grandfather to build a family of his own. Yet, despite his deep love for his wife and daughter, duty has haunted him his entire life: there is no escaping the ritual.
He is a protagonist the player will come to know throughout the journey, perhaps even coming to despise him just as much as he despises himself.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

3. I really like the idea of Hell being more of a reflection of someone's mind than just a physical place. How does that idea play into Gabriele's journey?

Hell in The Alighieri Circle forces you to look inside yourself. It’s like holding a magnifying glass over a person's deepest vulnerabilities and exposing it to the light for so long that it eventually burns. The Dive forces Gabriele to confront his sense of inadequacy, amplifying it  again and again and again, in a downward spiral that becomes heavier with every loop, just like a crushing panic attack. I think there is no need for a Hell to punish people when they are more than capable of hating themselves.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

4. The game doesn't have combat, which is pretty unusual for a horror game. What made you decide to focus completely on exploration, puzzles, and psychological tension instead?

Initially, we went down the route of the classic monster chasing you, but we soon realized that didn't serve the game's core vision. The fear we wanted to evoke isn't the fear of dying, but the fear of exploring yourself. So, we took that sharp spike of panic you get from a chase sequence and diffused it across the entire experience through sound design and environments, making every single step feel alienating in its own way. Throughout the whole journey, the player will have the constant sensation that 'something is off' around them, without ever being able to pinpoint exactly what.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

5. Can you talk a little about the Villa? What can players expect when they're exploring the family's old home?

Despite being the most tangible and grounded setting in the experience, the Villa still feels crystallized in a single, timeless moment. It serves as an intimate, direct link to the family's past. It is the part of the game where we are safe, where Gabriele can talk to his wife during breaks from the Dive. Players who explore its rooms with a keen eye will be able to piece together the history of Gabriele's lineage by finding the letters, uncover its true purpose, and grasp the terrible toll the Dive has taken on the Guardians who came before him.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

6. Then you have \*\*The Dive\*\*, which takes players into this much darker, distorted version of reality. How did you approach making that world feel different from the Villa?

The Dive stands in stark contrast to the villa in every single detail. It is within the Dive that Gabriele must face his trials, and this is where the game's core puzzles and challenges are concentrated. The visual style takes on abstract, dreamlike qualities, culminating in what we dubbed "shapeless chaos" during development.
The idea is to make the player feel as though they are traversing a shifting world shaped by the protagonist's mind; however, because his mind is chaotic and indecisive, the world itself seems unsure of what form to take.
Just like the villa, the Dive holds the memories of previous guardians who stepped through the portal. Yet, unlike the villa where we find letters, here we opted for purely visual storytelling to draw a sharp distinction between the two levels. Each environment has its own language, and the Dive does not communicate through rationality.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

7. The game is heavily inspired by Dante's \*Divine Comedy\*. How much of Dante's original work can players expect to see throughout the game, and where did you want to put your own spin on it?

Right from the start, we chose not to do a literal adaptation of every setting and character from the Divine Comedy, preferring instead to reinterpret the source material. Within the game's lore, the poem is not a map of an unchanging physical realm, but the chronicle of Dante Alighieri’s own personal ritual, shaped by his own worldview. However, I had to adapt that mechanism to a man in 1993: a vision no longer about judging society, but solely about himself. A Hell built on the feeling of not being enough to deserve to exist.

What does it mean for Gabriele to 'find himself within a dark wood, where the straight way was lost'?

Despite these differences, Dante’s journey laid down the foundational rules of this world: losing your way, reaching the gates of another plane of reality, and walking through Hell in solitude, accompanied only by a guide who knows more than they let on, while descending deeper and deeper into the human soul. The foundational themes, concepts, and even certain figures from the poem are all there in the game, just reframed through a new lens. Anyone familiar with Dante's poem will easily be able to connect the dots and see the common thread linking the original work to our vision.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

8. Players are collecting the missing pages of the Divine Comedy as they work toward completing the Ritual. How important are those pages to understanding what's really happening?

According to what the Alighieri family has been passing down for centuries, recovering the original pages of the Divine Comedy and putting them back in order is what renews the seal of Hell. Conceptually speaking, this is true, and the themes of repetition, ritualism, and initiation journeys are deeply rooted in the plot. That said, the pages as a physical object are our game's MacGuffin. Players will soon find out to what extent the reality of the Dive yields to the Guardian who walks through it, and what those pages actually stand for.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

9. There's a lot of mystery surrounding the Alighieri family and Gabriele's own memories. Are players going to have to piece together the story themselves through the diaries, collectibles, and things they discover?

In a sense, yes. We experience the game from Gabriele’s perspective. We are mere humans treading through a dimension created by something beyond our comprehension. If we stick strictly to the dialogue, we uncover the story of his ritual. However, to unearth the history of his family, the story of his soul, and to catch a glimpse of the history behind the Dive, we have to look around. We have to interpret; we have to read the subtext. This isn't a game where everything is simply handed to you. We wanted players to dig through memories via collectibles and letters, piece together the environmental storytelling, read between the lines, listen to what goes unsaid in conversations, and form their own understanding of the worldbuilding without being given any easy answers.

Emanuele Miccianza, Creative Director & Writer

10. Without giving anything away, what is one thing you really hope players experience or feel when they finally reach the end of \*The Alighieri Circle\*?

The Alighieri Circle is undoubtedly an unconventional work.

In the gaming world, it is standard practice to make players feel like heroes, handing them the power to change the world and shape their own destiny. But for Gabriele, that is not the case: he is a man forced to endure forces far greater than himself.

His terror stems from being at the mercy of fate, having no control over anything, and being unable to make choices about his own life.

We want the player to feel just like the protagonist. Trapped, suspended between dream and reality, experiencing firsthand what it means to be a piece in a much larger puzzle, whose true meaning remains beyond their grasp.

I don't expect players to reach the end of the game with a smile on their faces, reassured by having experienced something traditionally rewarding. I expect them to feel hollow as the credits roll, and to find it lingering in their minds for days to come..