Malebolge
Dante’s Inferno
First person horror · Windows and Linux · Out 30 October 2026
The complete descent through Dante’s Inferno, from the dark wood to the frozen lake at the bottom. Every place in it is a place in the poem, and nothing has been invented to join them up.
disse a’ compagni: «Siete voi accortiche quel di retro move ciò ch’el tocca?Così non soglion far li piè d’i morti».
You are Dante, alive in the body, carrying an oil lamp, because you have mortal eyes and the dead have no use for light. Oil runs out. Nothing down here waits for you to be ready.
And nothing down here knows where you are. What hunts you follows the trace a living body leaves: weight, breath, warmth, moved air. Stand still in the wrong place and it finds you anyway. Move well and it loses you.
Six chapters, nine circles. The poem’s Hell is a funnel, and the deeper you go the heavier the sin.
Move over a chapter to see it. On a phone, tap it.
1
Three beasts, three thefts: the bow is what you build from what you take off them.
The wood at night, and a lit hill you are not allowed to reach. The she wolf drives you back down, and the only road out of the wood runs underneath. You carry a lamp because you have mortal eyes: the dead have no use for light.
Cantos I-IIRead in the wiki
2
A crowd that will not part for a living body.
Behind the gate, the ones who lived «sanza infamia e sanza lodo» (Inf. III 36), chasing a banner that nobody carries. They do not part for you because they do not care about you. Of the crossing itself the poem says nothing: Dante faints on one bank and wakes on the other. The game shows it, and says so.
Cantos IIIRead in the wiki
3
Five circles, and every key is in the wrong one.
Limbo first, which is nobody’s punishment and everybody’s waiting room, and then the four circles where the sin is appetite: the storm of the lustful, the mud and Cerberus, the rolling weights of the misers, the Styx. They are one scene because you climb back up through them on foot, and what opens a lock down here is always in a circle you thought you had finished with.
Cantos IV-VIIICircle I, II, III, IV, VRead in the wiki
4
A city that will not open, and a wood that bleeds.
The iron walls, the Furies on the tower, and the name they call down. Past them the burning tombs of the heretics, the river of blood, the wood of the suicides, the burning sand. Here the lower Hell begins, and so does what the poem calls malice.
Cantos IX-XVIICircle VI, VIIRead in the wiki
5
Ten ditches, one map, the biggest place in the game.
Ten concentric ditches crossed by bridges like the spokes of a wheel, each with its own fraud and its own punishment. Not ten levels: ten districts of a single place you learn to move through. The game takes its name from here, and it is the biggest map it has.
Cantos XVIII-XXXCircle VIIIRead in the wiki
6
The bottom is not fire. It is a frozen lake.
The giants set you down and there is no way back up. Four belts of ice, traitors held in it up to the face, and at the centre the thing whose wings make the wind that freezes the lake. And out of there you come «a riveder le stelle» (Inf. XXXIV 139).
Cantos XXXI-XXXIVCircle IXRead in the wiki