With Visceral's intriguing yet uncompromisingly brutal adventure take on Dante Alighieri's Inferno chapter of the Divine Comedy on the horizon, we caught up with Justin Lambrose, Senior Producer on to talk about the game.

We administered hot pokers, 5000 lashes and other horrific tortures to get insight on the game's disturbing imagery and art design, as well as some information on how the franchise could expand into other media with the upcoming and comic book series.

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How did the idea come about to adapt the Divine Comedy? It's not an obvious choice of source material for something that would necessarily translate well to a game.

The amusing thing is really the idea. The thing most famous about the poem is that it literally mapped out how he made a real place - it's very real geography, descriptive characters, punishments and demons and all this sort of stuff. That was really the inspiration, to take this very detailed, imaginative world and place the game in there. The narrative doesn't fit very well for a game that's pretty straightforward, walking through on the way to meet Beatrice, describing everything as it goes. We kept that in there but we put another layer of narrative on top of that so we added more antagonists (such as) Lucifer and the love story between Dante and Beatrice to give you a reason to fight through the nine circles of hell.

Through Dante's original story you have a level structure mapped out for you already. Was that part of the reason you thought perhaps this will be a good idea?

Absolutely. I think that's one of the strengths of the game, these nine very distinct, very different circles. We did different art direction, different creatures, different combat and story elements. So, yeah I think that was probably the biggest motivator.

You've got everything that Dante's original literature had in the one game, if there was to be a sequel what would happen there? Do you have any ideas?

There are three chapters in the Divine Comedy, we've done the first chapter and even then we couldn't fit in everything that he wrote about and we kept all the main characters that we could. Some of the things were represented in sculpture and other ways, we've taken the way some of the sinners were tortured and created characters based on those. So there is much more than we could probably fit into a game that we are going through. We had to see the animated feature and the comic series, so yeah there is definitely a lot of content to mine throughout the Divine Comedy.

So there's a projected trilogy then?

We were so focused on making Dante's Inferno an amazing experience from beginning to end, you'll see hints and those that have read the entire poem might see something, but right now we are hoping it's a big success and we are able to do that.

You've got the animated movie as well. Is this the first step to expanding the franchise to other media, books and things like that?

Yeah. We have actually taken a pretty big step forward into different media. We've got a comic book series coming out - I'm very excited about that. The animated feature we've done, action figures as well. One of the things is that it is such an immense piece of work that translates well into all these things, so it's a big epic franchise not only in games, but transfers over to many different things. We wanted to create a very character driven story that would allow it to be used and become a comic book story, show more about the needs of the character and things like that.

What were the biggest challenges in adapting such a piece of revered literature for a game?

Part of it is being true to it. Making sure that those people who revere the original work that we are playing off of, that they understand that, but it's also putting our own spin on it. Artists throughout the ages have always been inspired by this work whether it be painting or sculpture or music, so we wanted to do something unique. We didn't want to take this already edgy book and turn this into a world.

So we enlisted Wayne Barlowe, a visionary film concept artist, who spent a lot of time studying hell. And in his early work, he used variations of all these crazy creations and we picked them up and very literally put them in the game and used them for inspiration. They really showed us how far we could push the envelope and that was the big challenge to see how far we could push it so it still fits and has a gameplay sense and goes back to the original poem content. It was a lot of fun, but a challenge and there is so much to it as well, so there was that balance of gameplay and poem content, really pushing forward something unique and offering a new spin on it.