#420: dante’s inferno (the game)
(christian) god of war
dante’s inferno (2010, PS3/360, visceral games): it feels appropriate that review #420 (excluding the WW2 and post-apocalypse series) would land on a game as proudly insipid as dante’s inferno, the other title from dead space devs visceral games. a thoughtful, meaningful adaptation of the divine comedy, dante alighieri’s classic examination of the afterlife and its inhabitants, this ain’t; instead, we get a god of war clone with a paper-thin story that seems to be largely an excuse to model naked breasts.
as penny arcade’s tycho once put it, this game is operating on pretty shaky theological ground. okay, yes, the basic premise remains the same: dante, going through a bad time in his life, is guided by the shade of the roman poet virgil, travels through the nine circles of hell, each with their own themes and motifs. along the way, he’ll meet various famous names among the damned, sent to hell for one reason or another (some of whom by today’s moral standards will inevitably be seen as having gotten a raw deal.) but that’s kind of where the similarities end.
in the poem, dante is little more than a tourist, a sort of self-insert of the author, who was dealing with the pain and frustration of being literally exiled from his hometown of florence, italy over politics; dante in the game, meanwhile is something of a villain in his backstory, a bloodthirsty monster of a crusader who surpasses his abusive father in cruelty, both on the battlefield and off.
there’s also the way the game treats beatrice, my goodness. in the inferno part of the poem, beatrice is mentioned but not seen, having sent virgil to guide dante through hell. in the game, she’s reduced, instead, to a damsel in distress, who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for dante’s fidelity, not knowing that dante was unfaithful to her in the middle east, and the entire plot of the game involves dante journeying deep into hell to save her from satan himself. she spends nearly the entirety of her screentime in varying states of undress, often being entirely nude, especially as satan’s corruption begins to work on her.
aside all this character assassination is a generally straightforward depiction of hell, complete with elements from greek myth; there are nine circles, each with their own themes (though some are fairly indistinguishable from each other.) greed is a vast factory full of molten gold; lust is festooned with phallic and yonic imagery, dominated by a giant topless cleopatra whose nipples are mouths. fraud, the 8th circle, is a dark, unpleasant realm of about 10 small arenas serving as minigames. and as you might expect, the 9th circle is a frozen nightmare of treacherous pathways and the home of satan himself.
but rather than being a melancholic exploration of the suffering that awaits the hellbound, dante’s inferno is much more in line tonally with doom. the game opens with dante slaughtering muslim fighters left and right in the holy land, before being stabbed in the back. death comes to claim him, but dante kicks his ass and takes his scythe, a ridiculous-looking thing built out of bones with an extendable handle. returning to italy, he sews a red cross to his chest (!) before arriving home to find his father and beatrice dead; he takes beatrice to a nearby chapel, which soon opens up to reveal a pathway down to the gates of hell. there he will kick all kinds of ass as he fights his way down to the bottom.
you get two weapons; the scythe will be your bread and butter, capable of increasingly devastating combos and special moves as you fill out the related skill tree, which requires souls that you get from killing enemies and destroying certain fountains that contain them. the other weapon is a cross, formerly belonging to beatrice; using it shoots out cruciform beams of light that can be spammed in a combo, as well as special moves of its own such as holding down the button for a bigger, but short-range, blast, all of which are unlocked in the skill tree. and for those moments when you need that extra oomph, there’s the redemption bar, a sort of super mode activated by holding L1 and R1 that allows you to move faster and do more damage, and is filled up by killing enemies.
you also get various forms of magic, accessible by holding L1 and one of the face buttons. the first one you get sends you charging across the screen in a blaze of light and leaving a trail of exploding ice crystals; it’s great for knocking down enemies. you also get a shield that damages anything it touches, a castlevania-style flying cross, among others. these spells are unlocked and improved via both skill trees, which one they’re in depending on where they fit thematically (for example, the flying cross belonged to dante’s abusive father, so onto the hell tree it goes.)
along the way you’ll also pick up relics that confer various benefits; most of these can be leveled up by wearing them while you kill enemies, and while you start off with a mere two slots for relics, you can unlock two more via the skill trees.
the skill trees work like this: each has their own gauge, that you must fill up by condemning or absolving the denizens of hell. most enemies can be grabbed by your scythe, after which you can choose their fate, which must be fulfilled via a QTE. the game is full of QTEs, actually, which is par for the course for this era of video games, and visceral especially. sometimes you’ll come across someone famous (by 13th/14th-century standards) suffering in hell for their misdeeds, and you’re given the same choice. punishing them is automatic; absolving them, however, launches a minigame of sorts where sins (depicted here as sickly little orange blobs, somewhat resembling the explosive weak points of dead space’s necromorphs) slowly gravitate towards the center of beatrice’s cross, and you must hit the face buttons in time. whether you absolve or punish, you’ll receive experience points for either path; as you level up a tree, more options become available to you to unlock. it’s a neat twist on the usual skill tree concept, though it’s probably best to work on filling out both trees as best you can.
this being hell, there’s no shortage of monsters to slay, though most of them fall into a few distinct categories. aside from the very common rotting corpses who besiege you, you’ll often run into larger, obsidian-skinned demons with increasingly bigger weapons and armor; early on they serve as minibosses of sorts, while later they become standard fodder as dispatching them grows easier with your increasing power. the game is a little sparing with the enemy variety, only occasionally throwing the more difficult enemies at you, even after they’re formally introduced (most circles feature at least one new enemy type who appear primarily in that circle before popping up sporadically thereafter.)
the game’s difficulty is frustrating. i admit that part of it is on me, when it comes to third person combat i’m much more in favor of the likes of dark souls than devil may cry; fast-paced action and heavy reliance on combos isn’t terribly to my taste. but i struggled on normal difficulty in this game to the point that about a third of the way through i lowered the difficulty to easy, and that posed a problem of its own. the difference between easy and normal is stark; where normal is often unfair at times, where even a small enemy can hit you with a combo-ruining knockback, easy is almost insultingly trivial, and you tear through enemies at a pace that it’s trivial to kill enemies you intended to grab instead, as well as making it difficult to build higher combo numbers since they have all the constitution of tissue paper.
in spite of competent gameplay and overall presentation, dante’s inferno is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the dumbest games i’ve ever played. the game’s depiction of hell is edgy for edgy’s sake; as with most iterations of doom save perhaps doom 64, i find it hard to take this kind of depiction seriously. it’s telling that doom 2016 all but gave up on a serious depiction of anything, and acknowledged the absurdity of its premise, unlike the original games or especially doom 3; dante’s inferno, meanwhile, is nakedly earnest, and if i’m being honest, that’s not a point in its favor.
dante’s inferno was supposed to get a sequel, and indeed ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. due to visceral’s 2017 closure by EA, that’s never going to happen. it’s probably for the best that it never materialized; i don’t know how you can transfer the overall tone of this game to something about purgatory or heaven. dante’s inferno is a violent, silly game that bears little resemblance to its source material except in the most superficial way. if dante alighieri were to be shown this game he would be vaporized immediately.
