The tragic protagonists of indie developer AstralShift's games all have ribbons in their hair. Pink, red, seafoam blue, these ribbons cut paths through haunted mansions and forests as AstralShift's horror RPG girls battle demons (inner or outer).
"In our creative minds, beauty and horror have always gone together – there is no horror without beauty," AstralShift co-founder Patricia Silva tells me.
This characteristic blend of rosebud and occult femininity is what makes the horde survival RPG adaptation of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's late medieval Divine Comedy – yes, you're reading that right – Hell Maiden my most anticipated upcoming game (though it won't be an outright horror game, despite its source material). In AstralShift's previous two titles, 2016's Pocket Mirror and its 2023 prequel Little Goody Two Shoes, I found the kind of soft glam horror I'm always looking for.
"Horror isn't simply about the shock value," Silva says, affirming my instincts. "It needs context to work, otherwise there will be nothing for it to stand out against or threaten to destroy, corrode and haunt. This notion isn't only very present in our games, but in all of the horror media that we enjoy and take inspiration from."
Little Goody Two Shoes' visual drama – its silvery woods, every one of its saucer-eyed girls – comes from '90s shoujo anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena and Madoka Magica, Silva says. But what Silva describes as the game's "balance between the beautiful and the horrific" originates in the annals of horror film history. "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Suspiria were huge," Silva says, "but we were also very influenced by modern works like Hereditary, The Witch and Midsommar."
"In this sense, much of the game's base concept is very faithful to its original inspirations because it essentially is a fairy tale," Silva says. "The same applies now to Hell Maiden and Dante's Divine Comedy."
Alighieri's historic poem about navigating the increasingly treacherous rings of Hell, then Purgatory, until Roman poet Virgil and the lovely virgin Beatrice finally lead him to Paradise, has functioned for decades as a metaphor for unburdening the heavy soul, finding God. Hell Maiden honors this meditative lesson with explosions.
"It's been very fun to learn about the original poem and adapt, reimagine and extrapolate from it as much as possible to fit the molds of a horde survival RPG," Silva says. "Almost everything in Hell Maiden is directly related, in one way or another, to both the work of Dante and all the Greek and Roman poets featured in it."
This wouldn't be possible without help from the ancient Poets of Limbo, anointed great thinkers like Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Homer – Dante's literary guides reimagined as pretty anime angels. Silva tells me the Blessings with which they bestow combat abilities to build your deck, like a dash that leaves sparkly trails of lightning, or a poem that manifests as a physical pool of damage, were motivated by Hades' Boons.
"Deathsmiles' soundtrack was also a direct inspiration" for Hell Maiden, Silva says about the 2007, gothic bullet hell game by Japanese developer Cave. "We wanted each Circle of Hell to have its own quirky and memorable musical identity which Deathsmiles achieves in a very nonchalant manner."
Less nonchalant: "Day was departing, and the embrowned air / Released the animals that are on earth / From their fatigues; and I the only one / Made myself ready to sustain the war," Dante Alighieri writes in the Divine Comedy, as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1867. Looking death in the face, making inventive video games on an indie budget – what's the difference?
"The gaming industry is overwhelmingly competitive right now and standing out is proving to be more and more difficult as time goes on," Silva says. "We decided to go solo for Hell Maiden for the sake of independence and autonomy, but also for financial reasons. However, this means we have to do all the weight lifting ourselves."
I – a woman who finds comfort in movie theater scream queens, Laurie Strode and Laura Palmer, girls who share my clinical tendency toward anxiety, delusion, and lip balm – am grateful for it.
As Silva notes, AstralShift's games "wouldn't be the same without their female leads and their particular life experiences, which we believe perfectly encapsulates the need to center women in horror." There's a level of everyday horror you grow accustomed to as a girl, since so many of us are taught from childhood that we should be afraid of the world; there's a bad man around any corner. By necessity, we've learned to find charm in it. Enchanted mirrors, like in Pocket Mirror, cursed high heels, like in Little Goody Two Shoes, true love in the afterlife, such as in Hell Maiden.
"There is much more to be explored, still," Silva adds. But, at least, "now, more than ever, we have the perfect subject matter to achieve this balance between beauty and horror – Hell!"
