Charon, Minos and the City of Dis in Dante's Inferno the Videogame

            In 2010, Visceral Games released Dante’s Inferno the videogame. Contradictory to Dante Alighieri’s proper history, the setting of the video game takes place in the year 1191, in the midst of the Third Crusade shortly after European knights captured the city of Arce. In the videogame adaptation of the the Inferno, Dante is no poet; he is a crusader fighting for King Richard against Saladin, the Kurdish protector of the Holy Land, in an attempt to be redeemed.

Throughout the course of the video game we come to learn how excessively Dante sinned during his mortal life. His soul is found guilty of all nine sins, and therefore it is only fitting that each level of the game corresponds to one of the nine circles of hell; and Dante must make his way through each of these circles as he does in the Inferno. The purpose of this entry is not to examine the game play or to analyze the storyline in depth. The purpose of this entry is to examine several of the videogame’s depictions of the guardians of the circles and a few aspects of the environment.

In the Inferno, Charon is depicted as the ferryman of the river Acheron. It is important to note that Charon is his own entity in the poem and is not necessarily tied to his boat. In the videogame adaptation of Inferno, Charon is portrayed as an anthropomorphic ship with a giant hull for a body; he is both the ferryman and the actual vessel by which the souls traverse the Acheron. If you fast forward to 12:15 in the following link, you can see this representation of Charon for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zQMJB8PSJM. It is also interesting to note the appearance of the souls boarding Charon. They are all black, bland, and miserable and fail to have any sort of distinguishable traits that would make them unique from one another. They are lack any individual identity which complements the motif of confusion and misunderstanding that we discussed in class.

The videogame’s representation of King Minos is quite interesting. Unlike the poem, in which King Minos listens to the soul as it confesses its sins and then passes judgment, the menacing and enormous King Minos of the videogame forcibly grabs the soul he wishes to judge, brings it to just in front of his nose and smells the souls. Then he goes on to pass judgment. I thought that the idea of Minos being able to smell the soul’s sins was quite creative. The scene with Minos is located at approximately 20:45 in the above link.

The visual representation of the gates to the City of Dis and the city itself are incredible. The sheer magnitude of the environment is more than enough to impress, it is enormous. In some instances, some of the structures surrounding the city are fortified with souls damned to these circles. You are able to see this representation of the gates and the City of Dis in the above link, first at time 50:00 and then again at time 52:20.