In the 2008 sci-fi horror game, Dead Space, blue collar engineer Isaac Clarke is guided through an abandoned space ship by the voice of his girlfriend, Nicole. But as circumstances grow more dire aboard doomed mining vessel Ishimura, and further quasi-demonic alien atrocities are uncovered by the player, one question emerges: how could anyone survive this? What Isaac discovers and the possibility of Nicole being alive grow more dissonant until the titular Chapter 12, where the truth is uncovered.
Throughout the game, Isaac has been manipulated by Marker 3A—a man-made replica of an alien artifact. Nicole actually committed suicide shortly after the Necromorph outbreak, and Isaac witnessed it at the end of a video log seen at the start of the game. Manipulated by grief, psychosis, and electromagnetic frequencies generated by the Marker, Isaac has further enabled the Necromorph outbreak and must reckon with their actions through two follow-ups as his mind slips further into insanity.
Eagle-eyed players, though, could follow earlier breadcrumbs left by the first letter of each of the game’s in-game chapters. They spell out, “NICOLE IS DEAD.”
Though Visceral’s 2010 follow-up, the little-praised action-platformer Dante’s Inferno, does not feature such a deliberate trick with its chapter names, it does offer players a similar metatextual thrill through its save system. If a player makes use of each save slot, they can document Dante’s descent into sin. Then, when a late-game series of trials eats up most of those slots, they’re forced to save over the previous rings of the Inferno. They are invited to “erase” sins Dante is complicit in, but are not able to strike out his most grievous wrongdoing: violence.
Dante is a Crusader lost in a forest of sin. He’s called into action by Lucifer, who snatches away the spirit of his beloved Beatrice and drags her to the cold bowels of Hell. She’s to be the Devil’s new bride. Enraged, Dante follows the demon down into his domain and proceeds to do battle with its denizens. With damned pagan poet Virgil as his guide, the warrior must shoulder the weight of all human sin if he hopes to liberate his beloved from Lucifer’s icy grasp.
In Visceral’s take on the first act of The Divine Comedy—an interpretation versus outright adaptation—players use mechanics liberally drawn from other action-platformers of the day to descend into Hell. The combat most resembles Sony Santa Monica’s God of War series, the third of which was released a little over a month after Dante’s Inferno on March 16, 2010. These similarities include a bladed whip-like weapon, practically identical platforming mechanics, and QTE prompts that flash as big, bright button prompts above enemy heads. Critical consensus of the time doomed the game’s reputation as a “God of War clone,” for lack of a better term. With Sony’s series hitting the PS3 for the first time just under a month later, PlayStation players simply played that, while Inferno floundered among the 360’s core demographics of first-person shooter and sports game fans.
This is why reductive takes on mechanical similarities between titles (“it’s just X with Y in it”) can be a poisonous line of thought when left unchecked. It’s “X is the new Y” by any other name, and can ultimately spell disaster for works of art that hold merit in the zeitgeist. Novelty does not define excellence. If one is going to interrogate Dante’s Inferno for its similarities to God of War, then they must, too, take Dead Space to task for all of the notes cribbed from Resident Evil 4. But to do that, one would overlook the liberal similarities between Dead Space 2 and Capcom’s direction for the Resident Evilremakes. Ultimately, art is both recursive and discursive by its very nature—that goes forwards and backwards in the pantheon. To overlook certain examples of it that are drawn from others is to dull one’s own sense of expressive curiosity.
But I digress. Where Dante’s Inferno differentiates most from God of War is in its “Holy” and “Unholy” upgrade system. As players progress, they are given the chance to absolve or damn certain damned souls in the underworld. These include such contentious figures as Pontius Pilate, Electra, and Nimrod. In addition to the player’s moment to moment choices in combat, these decisions contribute to two different meters, which correspond to the two upgrade trees. For my most recent playthrough, I absolved every soul and sunk the majority of my upgrade points into “Holy” damage, which made it feel like a significantly different game than I remember playing at launch.
Holy attacks in Dante’s Inferno take the form of a long-range projectile with crowd control capacity. Dante thrusts his crucifix, and from it fires three white-hot crosses that tear demons to shreds. Each upgrade brings stronger and faster crosses, alongside a parallel set of other Holy skills to upgrade. My favorite among these is Sacred Judgment, which is among the most useful abilities in the game overall. Dante unleashes a surge of divine energy that stuns and pulls in crowds of enemies. It’s an early skill, but one that only grows more useful as the game piles enemies on the player.
Which brings me to the other mechanical differentiation between Inferno and War. Of the two, Visceral’s is the harder game, often to a frustrating fault. Players are pelted with foes at inopportune times, and on first playthrough, the checkpointing can make this feel especially unfair in certain monster closets. Swinging on Dante’s scythe to scale lava-slicked walls, too, is often a punishing experience that can only really be figured out by trial and error. As if a tacit admission of this, repeated deaths on lower difficulties lead to the gradual restoration of the player’s health bar. Tackling the game on harder difficulty levels is recommended for those familiar with the various ways the game is designed to screw them over, of which there are many. That said, the inclusion of New Game+ makes for excellent practice.
These elements drew me to Dante’s Inferno over so many other of its contemporaries in 2010. Even with its triple-A budget, the game is not afraid to rough up the player and even outright mislead them into death. On top of that, there is always more than one way through a conflict. A careful balance of Holy and Unholy attacks is what it takes to survive Hell, which itself is fascinating from a metatextual standpoint. Regardless of one’s intent, sometimes the only way to do battle with the unholy is to best them with their own tools. In union with the beastly difficulty, this is an effective polemic about the ways righteousness is wielded in evil ways.
Consider this passage from the 2002 Jean-Yves Leloup book, The Book of Mary Magdalene, in which the French theologian interrogates the final passages of the titular gnostic gospel:
The future belongs to the pure and gentle, not to the rigid purists of all our fundamentalism. If the latter have the purity of angels, they also have the pride of demons, like all grand and petty inquisitors who shed blood in the name of purity, religious faith, traditional values, or race. The greatest crimes against humanity are always committed in the name of goodness and the need to preserve integrity and purity. (Leloup 78)
This quote is applicable to Dead Space as much as it is Dante’s, which plays in similar territory with the doomed Ishimura. An audio log found at the outset of the Dead Space chapter Search and Destroy reveals that the mining operation was, in fact, illegal the entire time. The whole enterprise was a liability from the beginning, sold to the crew under false pretenses—a crew who was then left to fend for themselves as a far-future religious crusade clashed with researchers who only knew what they had uncovered when it was too late. The zealotry of the Unitologists was the root of the craft’s undoing.
Dante’s Inferno offers Christian players a similarly frightening and effective late-game message—that killing in the name of God is not inherently just. It rightly frames Crusades as a frightening atrocity led by a corrupt Church, justified by a selective interpretation of the Bible. Dante, as a character, is forced to watch his comrades in Christ suffer for their sins of bloodlust, avarice, and sexual violence. Then, he watches as a dark, ambiguous ‘other’ seduces and corrupts his Aryan bride. It is the inverse of evils done by him and his men, “avenged sevenfold.”
If one prescribes to the notion of biblical Hell, then these choices are not blasphemous ones. Instead, it argues that simply identifying something as “Christian” does not necessarily make it so. Dante’s Inferno frames Hell as a more karmic concept than most may conceptualize it. Writers Jonathan Knight and Will Rokos dwell on the causality, perpetuity, and possible salvation from Hell. Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian lore, like a light, is projected through a lens of samsara.
The six realms of rebirth are a schema in which beings are reborn according to the kind of life they lived. The realms are depicted in the Wheel of Life (bhavachakra), a vivid representation of samsara—the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. […] Karma plays a role in determining where we are born and reborn, which keeps happening until we reach nirvana and escape the cycle. Until then, we are stuck in the six realms.
Using karma as a framework through which to interrogate Dante’s Inferno is fruitful. Damned souls, both the wayward ones Dante encounters and personal foes like Alighiero, are caught in a perpetual cage of their own making. While this is also consistent with The Divine Comedy’s conception of sin and damnation, it is also very post-Christian in its representation of retributive justice. It’s less punishment being meted out, more a cage of the sinner’s own making. This is also reflected in Ash Huang’s vivid, depraved art direction, which renders each sin in wet, bloody, bloated detail—ideals made into prisons of the flesh.
This common ground with Buddhism is an inevitability. It is an example of the spiritual kinship with zen found when pushing some of Christianity’s tenets to their logical extent and tracing their root origins. Early Christianity had many teachings that could now be identified as Buddhist in nature. Gnostic gospels such as the Books of Thomas and Mary taught that heaven and earth were one and the same; they honed in on teachings of the Messiah that espoused letting go of earthly attachment, and meditating on one’s inner self versus following organized churches.
Most relevant to Dante’s Inferno is, naturally, the nature of sin. Here’s what the Book of Mary has to say on the matter,
The Teacher answered, “There is no sin. It is you who make sin exist when you act according to the habits of your corrupted nature; this is where sin lies. This is why the Good has come into your midst. It acts together with the elements of your nature so as to reunite it with its roots […] This is why you become sick, and why you die: it is the result of your actions; what you do takes you further away. […] (Mary 7:14—7:27; Leloup translation)
Juxtapose this with both the plot and the moment-to-moment character actions of Inferno. In each circle, players are confronted with “corrupted” figures in places “where [their] sin lies.” Dante acts as the “Good [that] has come into [their] midst,” absolving their worldly sins and granting them freedom in divinity. Even if players choose to damn every soul along the way, Dante must eventually absolve his mother’s suicide and thus act as that “Good” in Bella’s “midst.”
This leads the damned protagonist down the path of recognizing his own sins—the bloodshed of the Crusades, the opportunistic infidelity, the inability to deal with his father before he attempted to assault Beatrice. Only through confessing to his own misdeeds is Dante able to ultimately save Beatrice’s soul, thereby thwarting Lucifer’s wager that he would be able to craft a warrior in his own unholy image. (Another Dead Space parallel, if one considers the hallucination of Nicole a trapped spirit of a sort.)
Dante’s righteousness becomes his greatest asset, as it grants him divine protection from the Devil’s wickedness and ultimately allows him to emerge victorious from Hell. In front of him lies Purgatorio, which was to be the setting of the game’s ultimately cancelled sequel.
(A likely factor? The game’s costly marketing budget, which involved a memorable Super Bowl spot and a $200k viral campaign. This itself was an attempted course correct from earlier attempts at marketing the title, which relied on puerile antics leftover from the bygone ‘booth babe’ era.)
As a standalone work, Dante’s Inferno sits alongside El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron and the first Bayonetta as some of the only great Christian religious art in videogames. By using Alighieri as a jumping-off point, the Visceral team utilized tried-and-true mechanics to litigate the nature of Western faith. It is a searing indictment of faith in divine providence being used to justify bloodshed and colonization. Further, it doesn’t shy away from the scarier, uglier parts of belief, using extreme violence to get its point across. Dante’s Inferno is effectively an interactive ‘hell house,’ albeit devoid of the implicitly right-wing politics often found in those.
Of course, “Christian religious art” has long been synonymous with drek, and for good reason—plenty of faith-based grifters are eager to shovel shit into the mouths of American evangelical consumers if it means a quick buck. For every Mary Magdalene, The Last Temptation of Christ, or Cabrini, there’s a sin bin’s worth of God’s Not Dead and Left Behind to wade through. For most, I see why it’s not worth the trouble. Lower examples can radicalize people towards divisive—even hateful—political ideologies that are implicitly against Christ’s teachings.
And yet on the same dime, religion can motivate artistic titans to move mountains. This is why I continue to seek out art motivated by faith that has universal merit and application beyond proselytizing. It’s that idealistic part of me that was moved by The Prince of Egypt and Jesus Christ Superstar as a child. I believe these stories and their teachers have merit. From Michaelango to Marvin Gaye, Gordon Gano to Lady Gaga, the story of Christ and its surrounding ephemera can be wielded to drive new light into the encroaching rot of greed, bigotry, and manifest destiny that has poisoned our culture. Yes—even poison of its own making. Before it can do that, however, we must reckon with the weight of our own sins. With how the “word of God” has been wielded by opportunistic charlatans to sew division and pave over history. That may be harder to contend with than a boss rush or quick-time event.
But the heavenbound Visceral Games offered a way forward through videogames in 2010: interactive penitence. A virtual admission of wrongdoing, especially wrongdoing in the name of the Lord. Because sin is not something that the Devil created, nor something that God conjured to punish us. Sin is a creation of man, and only by man can it be undone. By the logic of Dante’s Inferno, this means we do not wait for a second coming. We do not beg for forgiveness, nor pray for salvation. Instead, we grapple with sin itself—crucifixes clutched tight. We stare at the naked injustices wrought by our beliefs, and by our beliefs, we make those wrongs right. Only when we can do this in true empathy, in pure humility, might we be truly saved from the weight of our collective sin against ourselves, our children, and our mother.
“Those who have ears, let them hear.”
Madeline Blondeau is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She’s written for Paste, Anime New Network, Anime Feminist, Anime Herald, and Coming Soon. Her writing has appeared in A Handheld History, Lock-On, and Sakura Serenade. You can support her work and read further writing on media and culture at http://madshaus.neocities.org/.
