Shades of Dante

Academic response to the 2010 release of Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno, an action-packed reboot of the Trecento poem, in which a hypermasculinized crusader with anger management issues and a really big scythe plumbs the depths of Hell in pursuit of his true love, was as chilly as the frozen banks of Lake Cocytus. ¹ Several critics lamented that the narrative liberties taken by the design team would inevitably disappoint first-time readers of the poema sacro who came to Dante by way of the game. As it happens, Visceral anticipated accusations that its adaptation would “desecrate the original poem.” In a developer’s diary video entitled “Heresy,” gameplay engineer Tom Wilson explains that they took their source material very seriously “without being literal and bound by the exact text because, come on, that would suck as a game.” ² Visceral consequently recast the poem’s timid and philosophical pilgrim-protagonist as a warrior whose moral failings while in the Holy Land have devastating ramifications upon his return to Florence. Finding Dante’s beloved Beatrice slain and her soul in the clutches of Lucifer, players guide the now brutish Dante through Hell where he must face his mortal imperfections in monstrous embodied forms.