The Notebook and the Glosses

In fourteenth century manuscripts the text sits in the middle and the commentary, in smaller letters, sits around it: here it is the same, and when you look at a thing the large line says what it is and the small one underneath, in italics, says what it means in the poem. A leopard that stays a spotted animal blocking your road is scenery, and this game is not set in the Inferno, it is a way of reading it. The gloss is one line and not a card, because anything that stops the game is read once and then skipped; places have their own, taken from the tightest volume holding the point you are looking at. It holds from the dark wood down.

The notebook is the other half, and it is not a panel but a book held in the hand, with three pages: the canto, the names, and the requests. The names sit in the middle because they are the currency, and you land on them turning either way. Objectives are steps and not directions: they say what is needed, never where, because where it is is exactly the game. The lamp moves towards the book to light it, so reading costs you distance.

The loose sheets are the only way the game tells you anything: no narrator and no cutscenes, and reading one burns oil, so understanding is a cost like the others. While you have a sheet in front of you, you do not walk and do not look around, but whatever is hunting you stops too, otherwise reading would cost life and the price of wanting to understand would be a tax instead of a choice. The souls’ requests sit on a page of their own and none is compulsory: kept apart from the steps of the canto, a request can never block the descent, and that is what makes it a choice.