The Three Hearts

Hits are counted from the dark wood to the bottom. In the first canto a beast’s paw costs a heart and drives you back down, and so does the blind man in the pass when he gets hold of you; from the gate on the wanderers clutch, the wasps sting and the fire takes its share, because a danger that costs nothing stops being a danger. You are the only thing down here that can fall, which is the same reason the damned have no bar to empty.

Three hearts, decided by the player, and a hit comes in two weights. A light one takes half a heart: what is small and many only scratches, the wasps, the serpents, the slap of the wanderers, the harpies, the wrathful, the nails of the Furies, the arrows from the bank, the foul air, the shoves. A heavy one takes a whole heart: the beasts, Cerberus, the Minotaur, the black bitches, Lucifer, the bite of the falsifiers, the devils, the weights, the leaden cloaks, the fire, the pitch, the sword, the storm, and every grip you fail to break. A hit takes what it says, more than a heart if it has to, and wounds that keep going, boiling blood, the ice, the rain of fire, are counted in hearts per second.

Life no longer comes back on its own: it used to return one hit every ten seconds of peace, and a danger you can wait out costs time and nothing else. What is lost comes back only by eating an apple from the bag, one heart each. When a single heart is left the heartbeat starts, exactly one heavy hit from the ground and not a threshold picked by eye, so the sound says the same thing as the half empty heart on screen. At zero the screen goes out for two and two tenths of a second and you return to the last step you closed: it is not a death, it is falling and getting up where the way was marked. Medusa’s gaze is the one thing that does not count hearts, because it is not a blow: it is the only thing in the poem that can be neither parried nor taken.

The hearts are drawn and not typed, seventeen pixels a side and scaled by a whole number, with the narrow point and wide lobes of fourteenth century miniatures, the century of Dante and of the heart he watches being eaten in the Vita nuova («vide cor tuum», Vita nuova III). Each empties from the bottom like a jar, so half a heart reads without counting, and the one just lost swells for three tenths of a second. They sit at thirty per cent opacity while they are all whole and never vanish, because with three hearts that do not come back an indicator that disappears is one you consult too late.