Dante’s Inferno (game): Limbo
The first Circle of Hell is of course Limbo - while it is not the first level of the game (the game actually starts in the “human world”, at the “surface”, before Dante breaks open the Rodin-styled Gates of Hell and throws himself down into the Inferno below).
The introduction to Limbo is glorious, as it is Dante falling down into a gigantic void of darkness, as other people around him also fall while screaming - only he lands perfectly though, protected by the magic around him and his own life. The other souls crash around him, some on fire due to how long and fast they fall. But here is the fascinating concept: they fall. You don’t arrive gracefully in Hell, you arrive just like Lucifer himself arrived, falling down from Heaven, crashing onto Hell itself. All throughout Limbo (at least the higher part of it) you see various giant faces carved into the walls, literaly vomitting the damned souls out of their open mouth - not just a play on how the damned souls are literaly “vomitted” out of the world, rejected by the universe itself, but also a clever twist on how in traditional medieval depictions the Gate of Hell is represented by the mouth of a dragon/monster/the maw of Leviathan itself. (Again, I can’t give enough credit to Wayne Barlowe for all he invented and created - the bonus videos for the game do say that Barlowe had an entire sketchbook on which the game visuals were designed, a sketchbook called “Barlow’s Inferno”).
Speaking of the damned souls - the game designers kept the idea that the damned regain a second body in the afterlife, though a lesser one than the body people have on Earth. In this case, they made sure the damned all looked completely stripped of their identity. All the damned have a colorless, hairless, naked body, all of the same size and condition - if it wasn’t for their gender or voice, they would all look like each other. In fact, the damned souls are so much stripped of their individual identities that they are literaly becoming the building blocks of Hell. It is something the design team highlighted in the bonus content - the walls you can climb on are actually made of cages stacked onto each other, all filled to the brim with damned souls, crushed into a surface you can climb. This is the metaphor “Hell is made of people’s souls” or “Hell is made of the souls’ torment” made LITERAL as Hell is built with and on the damned souls themselves, their torment is being literaly turned into a living brick.
The other idea brought forward by the developers is that “the sins twist the people into monsters”. It is something we will see regularly throughout this version of Hell, but already I can point out here that one of the various “ennemies” of this circle are the Tormented Shades, also know as the Hell Minions - unlike the other damned souls, who just wail and weep and stay huddled and hidden in their little corners, they actually serve the forces of Hell, and become more grotesque, corpse-like, hunched figures fighting Dante. Alongside these damned souls that decide to serve Hell, there are also demons - pure demons, as in inhuman beings, that Dante has to fight. The demons here are based on your “stereotypical” of demons, as they are towering, horned humanoids all in black with massive goat-like feet and clawed hands. The final type of ennemies Dante has to fight are unique to the Limbo level and... they are one of the most notorious parts of the game. They are... the Unbaptized Babies. They are not in Alighieri’s original poem, BUT one of the reasons Limbo existed for a time in the teachings of the Church, and appeared into Christian belief, was to solve the tricky problem of the “unbaptized babies” - these babies that died before they could be baptized and thus, according to Christian teachings, could not actually reach Heaven, despite them being “innocent” and not having had a chance at life. The Christian teaching claimed that for them, Limbo awaited, a unique realm that is neither Heaven nor Hell, a neutral in-between. It was one of the two Limbos of Christian belief, the Limbo of Infants - the other, the one Dante was ACTUALLY referring to in his poem, was the Limbo of the Patriarch, supposed to be the dwelling place of the righteous souls before the arrival of Christ. But the developers of the game played very morbidly on the ambiguity of these two Limbos, by mixing them into the first Circle of Hell, and thus making “real” the most extreme and fanatic teachings that claim all unbaptized babies go to Hell. And in this case, the souls of the unbaptized babies become grotesque, demonic beings Dante has to fight throughout his exploration of Limbo...
Limbo is mostly made of two distinctive parts, sharing an eternal “stormy night” ambiance. The first one is the “arrival” part, where all the damned sinners are vomited into Hell, and then have to gather by the side of the foggy Acheron river, to cross into Hell on Charon’s boat. Charon is in fact the first boss of the Limbo level, and he got a massive upgrade. His boat is not just a little boat you see in so may paintings - it is an ENORMOUS, MASSIVE, cruise-sized ship, fit to host the enormous amount of damned souls that flow into Hell. And Charon isn’t a separate entity - he IS the ship, a giant head at the end of the massive ship, reciting forever the same lines engraved on the gates of Hell in the original poem, the “Abandon all hope” poem.
The second section of Limbo is the “Citadel”, loosely inspired by the fortress in which the virtuous pagans dwell in the original poem. This Citadel is a grim and huge fortress in the middle of the stormy night, where the Unbaptized Babies appear out of burning chimneys. And at the end of the Citadel... you find the final, “true” boss and master of this realm. Minos, the King and Judge. As with a lot of other characters in this game, Minos is here a genius disturbing reinterpretation of the character from the poem - Barlowe as you will see did a great job for all of the game bosses. Here, Minos is still a serpentine giant - though he now has two, tentacle-like tails instead of legs. The theme of “the sinners become literaly part of Hell” is also at work strongly for Minos, as his skin is the same color as the rock of the citadel, and his high crown (fused in his head/made of his skull and flesh) is actually imitating the architecture of his very judgement room. But the real twist is that this version of Minos is completely blind. Eyeless - or rather with his eyes covered by a thick layer of flesh - in a grotesque parody of the blindfolded Lady Justice, Minos actually SMELLS the sins of the damned. By sniffng them he can identify the crimes they commited in life and the types of vices that sent them to Hell, and this is how he decides where each soul has to go.
