Apple

It is the only thing in the game that gives life back, and it arrived together with the rule that made it necessary: life stopped returning on its own, and the player asked for something that restores one whole heart. It is picked up from the ground like everything else and eaten from the bag with the left button, the same way oil is poured into the lamp, and when it works the game prints nothing, because the heart filling up at the bottom of the screen already says so.

With every heart whole it is not eaten: the game says you keep it for later and the apple stays in the bag, because with life that no longer comes back an apple eaten by mistake is an apple thrown away. It gives back exactly one heart, as much as a heavy hit takes, so one apple undoes one mistake and no more.

The line it carries on the ground is Dante’s answer to Jacopo Rusticucci among the violent: he leaves the gall and goes for the sweet fruit promised him by his true guide. Twenty seven are laid across the six chapters, three in the wood, five in the Antinferno, one for each circle of the third chapter, six at Dis before everything that wounds, five along the embankments of Malebolge and three on the ice, and they do not come back. They sit at written points and not by the chapter’s dice, because one more call to the generator would reshuffle everything built after it; whoever has a save halfway through a chapter finds them from the next chapter on, since what lies on the ground is read back from the save.