Filippo Argenti

In the eighth canto a man full of mud rises out of the marsh, asks Dante who he is, and then puts both hands on the boat to pull him in; in the game he is the one thing in the chapter that comes after you knowing you are there. Everywhere else souls suffer their own punishment and you are somebody passing through: here one of them has something against you.

He was added because a verb was missing. In a hundred minutes of play the only thing that could hurt you was the warden of the third circle, and players had said it in a line, that it was all puzzles. Under the mud there is nothing to see but the wake and he moves slower than you do; when he surfaces he shouts, and that shout is the only warning you get; then he charges, and the charge is not outrun, it is dodged.

Hitting him does not win: it makes him let go, and nothing more, because nothing dies down here. What takes him out of the way is the canto itself and not you, and the game only puts in your hands the means to let it happen. Even the cry he sends up is a point in the world, his and not yours: the others go for him, and if you are between them when they arrive that is your problem. What the game says when you look at him: a muddy thing that rises and asks who you are, the only soul in the whole poem with a grudge against a passer by rather than against its own punishment, and the others, who are that punishment, know it.