The Drop

It is not a rule about realism, and its own file says so. It is born in the third canto, the first place in the game built in terraces: without a price on falling a funnel is not a funnel, you climb over the edge of every terrace and reach the bottom in ten seconds, skipping the one lock the circle has, and a puzzle you can walk around is not a puzzle. Under five metres nothing happens; above that it costs a heart, and another every four metres and two; over fourteen it stops being a choice and becomes a cliff, and a cliff that does not kill stops being looked at.

It is a price and not a prohibition, and the whole difference is there: throwing yourself off a terrace to save a circuit can be done, and sometimes it pays, because you arrive alive and in a bad way. It is the same trade this game always offers, spending now what you will want later. It holds from the third canto down, but in the eighth circle it was switched on late, once players noticed that the flanks of the bridges let you drop into the ditch and skip half the route. The shortcut stayed possible and took its price, and the bridges keep their missing parapets, which is deliberate.

The mechanism can tell a fall from a removal, because down here you are moved in ways that are not falls: the pit of Minos shifts you sixty metres in one frame, a beast that carries you goes down the wall for twelve seconds with somebody else’s hands on the reins, and a mistake counted there cost a heart nobody had spent. Only a continuous descent, under gravity, on your own feet, is measured. And where falling is the mechanism rather than the accident, and already carries a price of its own, the fall stops counting for a moment, because the same mistake is not paid for twice.