The recent E3 show gave us a chance to get a new peek at
Dante’s Inferno, which will be the first Xbox 360 release on Electronic Arts’ new Visceral Games label (the team’s first project, before the name change, was
Dead Space). As we’ve said before, the fact that we’ve seen lately is a fairly solid product, despite that the release date is still more than half a year away, is very encouraging that the final game should be stunning and ethereal. It’ll also be smoothly polished if Visceral manages to nail its target for nothing-below-60fps visuals throughout the game.
Indeed, this new hands-on trek showed us another portion of the title’s gameplay from the early sections before and after the boat that we wrote about
in our February first-look preview. The section is from the fifth circle, Anger, about halfway through the game, and our demo started with one of the “Punish/Absolve” moral decisions that will come up at various points in the gameplay. Much like the “Rescue/Harvest the Little Sisters” decisions in
BioShock, these have you getting to a named character from Dante’s epic poem and being given a choice. Punish uses your cross to gruesomely eliminate the character and “free” the person’s soul, which you absorb.
Interestingly, we were prohibited from using the Absolve option at this juncture—though it seems ironic that we faced some unknown punishment if we opted to go that route, while we were perfectly free to select Punish without sanction. It seems that there’s a reason we weren’t allowed to see the Absolve result, if it even “worked” in the early game build. Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer/creative director, told us that going with Absolve will have more of an effect on the game’s outcome, but only hinted that it “might help…or might not.” Gee, thanks for the tease, J.K., but I guess we can wait to see the dilemma that will be created for players from this binary crossroads.
From there, it was on to a crossing of the River Styx on a raft. The short journey had us crossing paths with a lot of flying creatures, who would frequently fire fireballs at Dante. Movement was limited on our raft, which was ringed with metal spikes, making dodging more of a challenge, especially when multiple shots were incoming, but Knight told us that, with the right timing, we could reflect the fireballs back at the birds, which was a much more effective and health-preserving way to traverse the river.
On the other side, though, we realized that the firebirds were tame compared with what came next. In fact, the biggest creature we’ve seen in this game, so far, was gradually revealed: The platform we were riding wasn’t actually a raft, but the top side of this creature’s crown, and reaching the shore enabled him to rise out of the water. Knight told us that this was Phlegyas, the river’s guardian, and he was many times bigger than Dante, once we got the protagonist down from the behemoth’s head.
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