Dante's Inferno (video game)
Dante's Inferno is a 2010 action-adventure hack and slash video game developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PlayStation Portable in February 2010. The PlayStation Portable version was developed by Artificial Mind and Movement.
Dante's Inferno
- Jonathan Knight
- Stephen Barry
- Jonathan Knight
- Justin Lambros
- Stephen Desilets
- Michael Cheng
- Vincent Napoli
Brad McKee
Ash Huang
- Jonathan Knight
- Will Rokos
- Garry Schyman
- Paul Gorman
The game's story is loosely based on Inferno, the first canticle of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It follows Dante, imagined as a Templar knight from The Crusades, who, guided by the spirit of the poet Virgil, must fight through the nine Circles of Hell to rescue his wife Beatrice from the clutches of Lucifer himself. In the game, players control Dante from a third-person perspective. His primary weapon is a scythe that can be used in a series of combination attacks and finishing moves. Many attack combinations and abilities can be unlocked in exchange for souls, an in-game currency that is collected upon defeating enemies. Some downloadable contents were subsequently released, including Dark Forest, a prequel story, and Trials of St. Lucia, which features St. Lucia as a playable character.
Before the game's release, Dante's Inferno underwent a prominent, elaborate, and at times controversial marketing campaign led by the game's publisher Electronic Arts. This included the release of a fake religious game called Mass: We Pray, a motion controller-based game supposedly allowing players to engage in an interactive prayer and church sermon.
Dante's Inferno received generally positive reviews by critics, with praise for the story, art direction, voice acting, sound design and depiction of Hell, thought the gameplay received a mixed response due to repetitiveness in the latter half of the game and comparisons to the God of War series. It sold over one million copies worldwide and spawned a comic book miniseries and an animated movie, Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, which was released direct-to-DVD simultaneously with the game. A sequel based on Purgatorio and a mobile spin-off reportedly entered in development before being both canceled.
Plot[edit]
The story follows Dante (Graham McTavish),[5] a Templar knight from the Crusade who has committed numerous atrocities during the Third Crusade. Dante is entrusted to keep a group of prisoners safe so King Richard I could obtain a holy relic, the True Cross, from Saladin. But once he brutally slaughters them due to thinking they are heretics not worth keeping alive, Dante is ordered to take the holy relic. During the attack, Dante is stabbed in the back by an assassin, whereupon Death (Dee Bradley Baker) appears and condemns Dante for his sins, despite being promised by a bishop that his sins would be absolved. Dante refuses to accept his fate, vows to redeem himself, and defeats Death while taking his scythe. Dante leaves the Crusade, sewing a red holy cross-shaped tapestry into his torso, depicting every sin he has committed in the past. He returns to Florence, only to find his lover Beatrice Portinari (Vanessa Branch) and father Alighiero (JB Blanc) brutally murdered. Beatrice's soul appears before Dante, telling him that she knew he would come after her before a shadowy manifestation of Lucifer (John Vickery) drags her into darkness. After making it to a chapel, Dante blesses the holy cross that Beatrice gave him upon making their vows to be true to each other, to protect him against the evils that await. Upon doing so, a crack in the earth opens up, allowing Dante to descend to the Gates of Hell.
At the Gates, he encounters Virgil (Bart McCarthy), who knows of Dante's past sins, yet agrees to guide him through the Nine Circles of Hell in exchange for Beatrice praising him to God in Heaven. Dante begins his descent at the shores of the River Acheron where the newly damned souls board the great ferry of Charon (Bart McCarthy), a massive living ship. Charon denies Dante passage due to not being truly dead, while commenting that Beatrice made "a very foolish wager", but Dante sneaks aboard in order to sail across. After this, Dante tears Charon's head off using a beast-mount and throws it away, causing the boat to crash, though Charon's head survives due to being made eternal by divine power. After arriving at and travelling beyond Limbo, Dante confronts the serpentine Judge of the Damned, King Minos (Richard Moll). After Minos claims Dante is a sinner beyond salvation, Dante denies his verdict before fighting the Judge and killing him. Dante then enters the second circle, Lust, where he enters the Carnal Tower to find Beatrice, whose soul is slowly being corrupted into a succubus by Lucifer, who also reveals to her that Dante broke his vows to Beatrice, sleeping with a captive woman back in Acre, as the woman offered to have sex with him in exchange for the freedom of herself and her "brother". Reaching the top of the tower, Dante confronts and slays the gigantic Queen Cleopatra (Alison Lees-Taylor) and her lover Mark Antony (Lewis Macleod). Entering the third circle Gluttony, Dante slays its guardian the "Great Worm" Cerberus. It is here where Lucifer shows Dante how Beatrice and his father Alighiero met their demise, both being slain by the assassin from Acre, revealed to be the husband, not the brother as she claimed, of the captive Dante slept with.
In the fourth circle; Greed, Dante encounters the greatly deformed soul of his father Alighiero. After overcoming the puzzles of the fallen God of Wealth Plutus, Dante defeats Alighiero and uses Beatrice's now-enchanted cross to absolve him. In the fifth circle, Anger, Dante begins to float across the vile River Styx on what appears to be a floating platform. Upon reaching the other side, however, the platform is in fact the top of the head of the gigantic fiery demon Phlegyas who attacks Dante. Overcoming this, Lucifer appears before Dante with Beatrice, revealing that she is damned because she made a bet with him that Dante would be faithful to her, and Dante's infidelity damned her soul to Lucifer. Beatrice, now broken-hearted by Dante's betrayals, willingly gives herself to Lucifer by eating three seeds of a pomegranate. Dante rides atop Phlegyas who he controls to smash down the walls of the City of Dis and into the sixth circle, Heresy. Beyond lies the seventh circle, Violence, including Phlegethon and the Wood of Suicides. Within the woods Dante encounters his mother Bella. He becomes deeply saddened and enraged, having been told as a child that she died of an illness but in fact hanged herself because of his father's cruelty. Absolving her of her sin, he continues beyond the woods to the Abominable Sands for those violent against God, where Dante also encounters his former comrade Crusader and future brother-in-law Francesco, who is now a horribly disfigured version of his former self and desires revenge against Dante for his state of being. Upon defeating Francesco, Dante absolves him and descends into the eighth circle, Fraud.
Before Dante can reach Lucifer, Beatrice puts him through the challenges of ten stages of the Malebolge, each depicting the fraudsters throughout history from simple thieves to the false popes. At the entrance of the ninth and last circle, Treachery, Dante insists to Beatrice that he has faced all of his sins. Beatrice reminds him that he slaughtered the Saracen prisoners out of anger and that Francesco died taking the blame for it. Realizing that he has sinned beyond redemption, Dante admits that his place is in Hell and asks Beatrice to forgive him. This act of supreme sacrifice undoes Beatrice's transformation and restores her to her former self. As Dante watches, the Archangel Gabriel carries Beatrice's soul away, promising Dante that he will see Beatrice again and that his redemption is close at hand.
Journeying through the icy realm of Treachery and fighting his way to Lake Cocytus, Dante finally confronts Lucifer himself, an enormous demon with three faces, chained within the frozen lake. After defeating the giant demon, Lucifer reveals that several enormous chains Dante had destroyed to proceed were the Chains of Judecca, which kept him imprisoned in Lake Cocytus and inside the body of the giant demon. Lucifer reveals that he merely used Beatrice as bait to get Dante to break the chains and free him. Lucifer emerges from the giant monster in his true form, a horned, satyr-like monster, and battles Dante. Through great struggle, Dante is able to defeat Lucifer and impales him on the grim reaper's Scythe. Before Dante can attack again, Lucifer summons the vision of the assassin stabbing Dante in Acre; which shows him collapsing to the ground. Dante is horrified to realize that he was actually killed and thus cannot be free. Lucifer gleefully reveals that, now free, he will rise, overthrow God and eliminating all that is good from the universe forever. But Dante, with the aid of the souls he gained through his trials, absolves himself and re-imprisons Lucifer again by binding his hands in the ice lake.
Dante then sees himself naked in a bland void with his tapestry burnt black, where Beatrice's soul arrives from above and takes his hand and carries him up. He is taken to Purgatory, where he emerges from a cave near Mount Purgatory, where, after stated he did not die and did not live, he removes the tapestry from his chest. As the removed tapestry floats down to the ground, it transforms into a snake and slithers away while Lucifer's haunting laugh echoes for the final time before the screen reads "To be continued...".
Canceled sequel[edit]
Since the game ends in a cliffhanger with Dante reaching Mount Purgatory, it was widely speculated that a sequel, based on the second poem in The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, would enter production. Despite this, it was initially announced that Visceral had no plans for a sequel.[75] Zach Mumbach of the studio stated: "I'm sure that if enough people are like, 'I got 60 dollars for Purgatory or Paradiso,' then we would make that game. But I don't know. I don't get to make those decisions".[75] In November 2011, Joshua Rubin announced that he had been hired as a writer for a video game sequel that was heavily hinted to be a sequel to Dante's Inferno.[76] However, no further information regarding a sequel has been forthcoming, and though not officially confirmed, some gaming websites reported that the game had been canceled.[77][78] In 2018, Alex Riviello of Polygon, through interviews with people involved in the canceled game The Ripper also by Visceral Games, stated that the sequel titled Purgatorio had a finished script and playable chapter, and that it would feature a climbing mechanic in order to reach the top of the Mount Purgatory, but it was canceled without being publicly revealed after the disappointing sales of the first game.[78]
A 2D sidescroller mobile game based on Dante's Inferno was also in development by IronMonkey Studios, but was cancelled by EA after six months of work as the studio shifted its priorities to the emerging free-to-play mobile game market.[79]