The poet falls into Hell in Visceral Games' Dante's Inferno.
My Masterpieces of European Literature class in university was a favourite. It acted as an introduction to the works of several of humanity's most brilliant writers, including Aristophanes, Tolstoy, and Goethe. But of all the great scribes and works I studied in those two semesters, Dante Alighieri's epic poem The Divine Comedy, was the most memorable.
Of course, I never thought that any of the stories I read in that class would be made into interactive entertainment. However, now that Visceral Games' Dante's Inferno, which is based on Inferno (the first section of The Divine Comedy), is upon us, it's hard to believe that it took so long for it to happen.
Inferno contains some of the most horrifying depictions of Hell ever conceived, including souls that become part of perdition's very architecture, and sinners that are forever drowning, trapped in flaming mausoleums, and cooking in boiling blood. Perfect fodder for a developer of mature games. What's more, Dante's Hell is broken into nine circles, some with their own sub-rings, which can neatly be converted into game levels-which is essentially what Visceral has done.
Before moving on I want to be clear: I have no qualms with Inferno being adapted to interactive media. In fact, I was looking forward to seeing how it would be handled. How literal would the adaptation be? Would Visceral skip or emphasize the more disturbing parts of the poem? Would there be any sort of subtle commentary of this decidedly Christian perception of Hell?
Alas, it seems Visceral was much less interested in exploring the poem's meaning than in simply using Alighieri's desciptive text as a source from which to extract some truly terrible imagery.
Some credit is due. Dante's Inferno is a perfectly competent hack 'n' slash game in the mold of Sony's God of War series. It has solid and satisfying fighting controls and some very clever environmental puzzles. I didn't enjoy the clumsy platforming challenges in the second half of the game, but that's about my only real criticism of how it played.
My problem is with its disregard-and in some cases complete disrespect-of its source material. Visceral has inserted the occasional rousing quotation, the poet Virgil still gives us the low-down on the sins and sinners found in each circle of Hell, and the art design captures quite well the horrors that I had imagined while reading Inferno. But the soul and meaning of the poem is lost utterly.
It's an action game, so by choosing to play I have already agreed that I'm willing to see the poem's protagonist, Dante, as some sort of masterful, soul slaying warrior. It's a big liberty, but one necessary to the kind of tale Visceral has decided to tell. I'm cool with that.
Last year's excellent novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies , by Seth Grahame-Smith, did something vaguely similar by transforming most of Jane Austen's prim and proper characters into expert dispatchers of the undead. The book adds zombies, ninjas, and explicitly described scenes of violence to a story in which such things should be completely out of place, and somehow makes it work. However, Grahame-Smith never loses sight of who the characters are, what motivates them, or the story's primary themes.
Sadly, all of these things have been lost in Visceral Games translation of Inferno.
My memory of the poem's details has diminished over the 15 years since I read it, but Columbia University professor Teodolinda Barolini, a former president of the Dante Society of America who was interviewed in last week's Entertainment Weekly to get her thoughts on the game, summed up my feelings nicely when she said: "This is nothing like Dante. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm outraged, but as a person who has spent my life teaching and thinking about The Divine Comedy, I can't imagine somebody who loves this would pick the original up. They wouldn't understand a thing."
It's worth noting that she, too, was open to and intrigued by the possibility of a game based on Algheri's poem. However, she found the "sexualization and infantilization of Beatrice," a woman Dante knew in life who eventually takes him through the nine celestial spheres of heaven later in the poem, and the notion that Dante himself was a Holy Crusader, to be wholey at odds with what their characters represented in the poem.
Even the original elements of the game that I found to be most compelling-such as a provocative series of reward-based side objectives in which the player can either punish or save various sinners after hearing about their sins-just don't fit with the tale that Alighieri was trying to tell (I think he would cringe at the idea of his poem-self playing the role of God, punishing and absolving as he saw fit).
Had Visceral Games simply changed some names and plot points (and removed those ghastly and pointless sequences that generated controversy last year in which the player slaughters unbaptized babies-a blatant example of sensationalism designed to provoke anti-gaming activists and generate press coverage if ever there was one), then marketed their game as a work inspired by the imagery of Inferno, I'd likely have thought the game was simply an entertaining God of War knockoff and left it at that.
However, if you're going to invoke the name of a great writer and his most famous tale, you'd damned well better back it up with a bit of reverence for the material.
I love the notion of turning the written word into an interactive experience. I wrote a post about it last year. And I still think Dante's Inferno could have been not just an exciting and terrifying romp through Hell, but also provocative and-dare I say it-educational.
It's a shame that the developer decided simply to pilfer the poem's name and most horrific imagery and make up the rest.
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