MALEBOLGE

doubles it. Stone stops it.Speak, and Dante speaks. With a microphone, if you want one, your voice becomes his, in the wordless throat of the damned, and it is breath like any other: the beasts smell it. Some places are crossed in total silence.Ration the light. Oil lets you see while it burns and gets you found while you carry it. Run dry and you are blind, but odourless. Nothing dies. The damned are already dead. Every weapon has one verb: the arrow pins, the Miserere scatters. What you buy is a few seconds of clear road, never an end.Carry the names out. Every soul that stops you wants its name carried back among the living. Promise it, tear it out by force or get it by lying: each weighs differently in the book, and a heavy book smells of the way out.Three hearts. From the gate down, a light blow costs half a heart, a heavy one a whole heart; lose them all and you fall back to the last step you closed. They never come back on their own: the few apples down here give one back.Read it like a manuscript. Look at anything and the game tells you what it is and what it means in the poem. No narrator, no cutscenes: reading a loose sheet burns oil.Voices without words. The damned speak with a synthesized throat: syllables that say nothing, with the pitch, tremor and breath of a person.Rendered at low resolution, with vertices that snap, 15-bit colour and dithering, like a console game from the late nineties. The opening verses scroll over Gustave Doré’s 1861 engravings.Italian, English, German, Spanish and French. Dante’s verses stay in the original Italian in all of them, the way he wrote them; outside Italian they can also be read in Longfellow’s English.