In 2010, Visceral Games and Electronic Arts unleashed Dante’s Inferno, an action-adventure game that was their answer to God of War. The story was very loosely inspired by Dante Alighieri’s classic text, The Divine Comedy, as Dante sought to retrieve the soul of his wife, Beatrice, from Hell while facing Lucifer and the forces of evil. Now, 15 years after the game’s release, new details have emerged about the canceled sequel, Dante’s Inferno 2: Purgatorio.
IGN has an extensive report about Purgatorio, which includes a comprehensive breakdown of the story. The follow-up was envisioned as the inverse of the first game, as Dante was meant to scale Mount Purgatory to reunite with Beatrice and reach the Garden of Eden on top. However, each layer of the mountain represented one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and Dante had to both purge himself of those sins and defeat the embodiment of each one.
Dante also would have found himself in the middle of a war between Heaven and Hell, which he inadvertently set off by allowing Lucifer to escape Hell and invade Purgatory. St. Lucia–Dante’s guardian angel from the first game’s DLC–and the poet Virgil would have returned to guide Dante on his journey. To reach his goal, Dante would have to defeat some lethal archangels who considered him to be their enemy.
Along the way, Dante would have reunited and reconciled with Beatrice and banished her evil side from her. Or at least that’s what he thought he did. In the game’s closing moments, Dante and Beatrice made it all the way to Heaven, just for the former to discover that Lucifer had tricked him again. Through Beatrice, Lucifer murders Dante and casts him all the way back down to Hell. The only hope that ending offered is the spirit of St. Lucia, who assures Dante that even his death was part of God’s plan.
The proposed third game, Dante’s Inferno 3: Paradiso, would have brought the war between Heaven and Hell to Earth and introduced Dante and Beatrice’s daughter, who would be among the mortal warriors who fight alongside angels to reclaim Heaven from Lucifer and save Beatrice. God’s plan would have been revealed as a plot to tear down the unforgiving ritual of sending souls to Heaven or Hell and replace it with something more compassionate.
Unfortunately, these ideas will likely never see the light of day as a game. But it’s an intriguing look at what could have been.