Chapter 1 · The Dark WoodcrowdPlayable
The Lost
The souls who never found the way out of the wood, and now come after you.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vitami ritrovai per una selva oscura,ché la diritta via era smarrita
Revealswhat the crowd does when you reach the clearing of the gate.
The first adjective in the poem is that one: the straight way «era smarrita» (Inf. I 1-3). Dante gets through, but line twenty seven says that others tried before him and did not get out. The poem names them once and never looks at them again; the game turns round and looks, and they are the one thing in this chapter that the poem does not put on stage.
They do not want to stop you: they want to follow you, because you are the only one here who can get out. They are the only enemy in the game that wants nothing from you, which makes them the hardest to hate. What they cost is not your life: they ruin your hiding place, because a hollow trunk with three souls round it is no longer a hollow trunk; they cork the way, because seven bodies in a gap four metres wide are a wall; and they cannot be shaken off, because whoever pins one finds another.
They walk at half your pace and a third of your run, so they never catch anything that keeps moving: they are a thing that piles up when you stand still. At the threshold of Hell they stop on their own, because a soul that has not been judged does not go in: they stay at the edge of the clearing and watch, and that is where you understand what they had been asking you for.
The numbers
| What | How much | When |
|---|---|---|
| Walking pace | 1.55 m/s | half the player’s walk |
| They choose a direction every | 0.4 s | |
| How far ahead they feel | 1.1 m | so they do not walk into trunks |
| Reach of the nose | 20 m |
Links
- Found in
- The Dark Wood
- See also
- The Wanderer, The Scent, Nothing Dies
- Named by
- The Wanderer, The Dark Wood, The Step and the Breath