The article is incredibly thorough about the entire script of the game's 11 levels: Level 1: Dream in Eden , Level 2: At the Shores of Purgatory , Level 3: Ante-Purgatory , Levels 4 and 5: Pride / Envy , Level 6: Wrath , Levels 7, 8, and 9: Sloth, Greed, and Gluttony , Level 10: Lust , Level 11: The Garden of Eden

– The entirety of Inferno 2’s campaign is set on Mount Purgatory. Described by Knight as the “inverse of Hell,” this mountain is divided into nine tiers – or terraces – themed after the Seven Deadly Sins of Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust, with a giant gate at its cliffside base and the Garden of Eden at its seemingly unreachable summit. Each terrace acts as a campaign stage, complete with its own challenges, puzzles, enemies, and Vision Cave (more on those later.)

– For the sequel, Dante would once again be outfitted with his cross, which can smite foes with blasts of Holy energy, and a scythe. While this scythe would have looked and felt distinct from the one used in the first game, the developers didn’t want them to be too different. “Dante’s Inferno players really liked the weapon,” a former Visceral employee explained, “which could expand and retract and swing around like Kratos’ blades of Chaos. We’d built a dedicated combat team that actually included people who worked on God of War, so we knew we shouldn’t try to completely reinvent the wheel.”

– Complimenting these weapons would be a suite of new spiritual abilities, which Dante acquires throughout the campaign. The first is Spirit Jump, a skill that allows him to leap across vast distances. Following that, he learns to take control of enemies (Possession), avoid certain attacks (Spirit Dodge), run at high speeds (Spirit Dash), and – during major boss fights – sprout angelic wings that allow him to fly. To use these and other powers, the player must fill up their “Faith Meter,” which allows them to enter “Spirit Mode,” a power-up that transforms Dante into an ethereal version of himself.

– Dante, too, must redeem himself if he wishes to reach Eden. To that end, each terrace sees Dante and Virgil search for a “Vision Cave”, where Dante relives an episode from his past in which he gave in to one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

– Scriptwriter Joshua Rubin says he envisioned these caves as “playable cutscenes” inspired by immersive theater productions like Sleep No More. “Dante – in Spirit Mode – moves through his memories like a ghost, reliving moments of sin that shaped his love story with Beatrice back in Florence,” he explains. At the end of these gameplay sequences, Dante fights “grotesque” personifications of his sins, literally defeating the demons inside him.

Upon exiting each Vision Cave, you would have received a power-up from Lucia, followed by an opportunity to make a gameplay choice that signifies Dante’s moral growth. On the Terrace of Envy, for example, you would have been able to risk your life to save an NPC, thus demonstrating compassion, envy’s opposite.

Traversal would have played a much bigger part in this game than it did in the original. According to one former Visceral employee, “Probably the most innovative and interesting thing we wanted to do with Purgatory, which is about ascending up to Heaven as opposed to descending down into Hell, was the climbing. Jonathan [Knight] told us: ‘I want this to be the best climbing game out there, better than Uncharted or Tomb Raider.’ Unlike those games, where pushing the stick glued you to a wall, we wanted to keep you on [your] toes and instill a real sense of vertigo.”

Climbing segments would have been akin to puzzles, with the player searching for graspable ledges, avoiding crumbling rocks and ranged enemy attacks, and helping companion characters ascend along with you. Midway through the campaign, Dante would have unlocked an ability that reveals previously unseen “Angelic Architecture,” structures normally visible only to angels and redeemed souls, opening up new routes through the environment.

Visceral planned for Dante’s Inferno 2 to include co-op and multiplayer modes. These were included out of necessity – as one former employee puts it, “This was a time when every game needed to have DLC and online play because companies were afraid of people selling their discs back to GameStop” – and partly out of a desire to build on the foundation of Trials of St. Lucia, a DLC pack for the first game which added battle arenas that could be played co-operatively with another player.

Although work on co-op and multiplayer had hardly gotten off the ground when EA pulled the plug, employees recall that the modes would have followed an angels-versus-demons format, with players being able to fight for either side. One employee had vague recollections of a map where players had to defend and board airships.