The Stages

Six chapters, and the number was not chosen: it is decided by where you walk back, because two places you can walk to and fro between have to sit in one scene, so in one save, so in one chapter. The poem’s twelve places fit inside six, and the third is large because from Cerberus you climb two floors back up to Limbo. A canto is opened by finishing it, by crossing the threshold, and the locks live in the preferences and not in the save, because deleting a game to start again must not shut what has already been seen.

Whoever picks a canto from the menu has not played the ones before it, so he begins with the kit: the minimum needed to go on, that is, what the previous chapter leaves in your hands, not the whole haul. The dark wood is the only one without any, because you begin in the dark and the lamp is on the ground two steps away. From the third down you begin with lamp, strung bow, six arrows, the Miserere, the beads and three flasks of oil; and the three flasks are not generosity, because the third chapter ends by lighting two fires at the top of a tower and each fire costs one, while the third is for a lamp that lasts seven minutes out of a hundred of chapter.

A stage is more than a bookmark moved: it declares the step, what you have on you and what has already happened in the world, because whoever comes in halfway without the facts finds the shortcuts shut and the circles out of reach. A stage’s gear replaces the chapter kit instead of adding to it: at the third step of Incontinence you have the lamp and nothing else, because the weapons are still at the bottom of the lake and you arrive there unconscious. It is the rule that lets the game be crossed in pieces, and it covers all six chapters; the sixth has no stages at all, though, because its scene is still an empty line.