Purgatory

I don’t tend to have many unpopular opinions or hot takes, both because I’m generally a pretty easygoing let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom sort of person, and also because let’s be real, “unpopular opinions” and “hot takes” are usually just conventional wisdom being dressed up, unconvincingly, in the trappings of reaction, and who has time for that? But with that said, here’s one that might actually qualify: the best book of the Divine Comedy is Purgatorio. I probably don’t need to convince you that Paradiso’s slow victory lap through the heavens is pretty draggy (though I remember the climax actually being pretty good), but I think most people prefer the Inferno to its sequel: it’s the first bit, so it’s got all the opening-gun energy of setting the stage, meeting with Virgil, and kicking things into motion, plus the parade of grotesques meeting punishments equally grotesque as Dante descends circle by circle boast memorable stories and great visuals to go along with them.

Purgatorio has the classic second-act problem, the plot just being a journey from point A to point B, while the theologically-suspect setting (purgatory was never an actual place in Catholic doctrine, to my knowledge) is drab by contrast, its inhabitants mostly just regular people who did some good, some bad in their lives, and who are now embarked on a gradual course of penitence. But, hear me out! When you think about, don’t those depraved gargoyles in the Inferno sort of bleed into monotony after a while, and doesn’t the constant Guelph vs. Ghibelline score-settling get old after a while? And beyond that, there’s no drama, we know these people are terrible and have made bad choices; learning their stories doesn’t provide any lesson or illumination, just the presumed catharsis of finding out that bad things are happening to them after death even if they eluded punishment in life. Those souls making their slow pilgrimage around and around the mount of purgatory, though? Those are, to repeat myself, people, people with high aspirations, giant blind spots, moments of triumph and terrible mistakes, and they abide in hope that their sins may nonetheless be forgiven. And there’s nothing more relatable, and nothing has higher stakes, than that.

This self-indulgent intro is here to provide context for my perhaps-also-a-hot-take critique of Purgatory the game, which is that it doesn’t have enough purgatory-the-concept in it. Not that there’s anything overtly supernatural here – the game starts out as a workplace horror-story, as your unreasonable boss triggers a wave of indignities to be visited upon you, until you finally snap. The default-Twine presentation is livened up by the occasional special effect – the text pointing out that there’s a flickering fluorescent light likewise flashes in and out of visibility – but I found the dreary black background and dark-blue links were a good fit for the story’s oppressive vibe.

Similarly, I did note the occasional typo, but the prose effectively conveys the increasingly-disordered cognition of a person coming apart at the seams without getting too florid:

You can’t take this anymore. You gently remove the TV from its stand (but not before turning it off). While weirdly hugging it on the balcony, you can hear the seagulls and the laughs of the pub patrons downstairs. You release it from the railing.

Everything is heightened, your reactions seeming disproportionate to the stimuli you encounter; the protagonist is clearly nursing deep physical and mental wounds, which make them too sensitive, too vicious in their responses. As the story moves further and further from that initial office setting – and then returns to it, under different circumstances – the player’s given fractured glimpses at what might be at the root of all this, but it’s glimpses, plural: not everything added up for me, nor I think was it meant to, the game more focused on portraying the disintegration of the self than providing a clinical, causal story. Time starts to loop, facts contradict themselves and reveal themselves as contingent, bodies start showing up.

Your choices also start to matter more. At first, these all seem to lead to the same place, with perhaps a bit of slightly-different suffering along the way depending on your decisions, and often at climactic moments, you’ll see a grayed-out choice that the protagonist perhaps can recognize, but by no means has the capability to act on. But as the game progresses it becomes clear that there are several quite distinct branches to the story, and some consequential decision-points that eventually move you to the endgame.

It’s to the game’s credit that I have an intuitive sense of how that process works, but the precise mechanics remain sufficiently obfuscated; the process of working through a crisis of this magnitude shouldn’t be linear one. And for those understandably put off by the bleakness of the game’s opening, it’s probably worth stating that the game does end in a more hopeful place. But here’s where that initial critique comes in: it’s hard to ignore the religious overtones of a story that starts with the protagonist lost in deprivation and sin, and ends with them seeking someone named Mary and hoping for a measure of redemption, but Purgatory remains vague on what the process of contrition looks like.

I don’t mean I was disappointed not to find doctrinaire Christianity, of course, but I felt like the game provided an inadequate explanation for what finally allows the protagonist to start to change. A few choices do indicate that they’re building their willpower and mental fortitude, and there’s a key choice to pray that, when it becomes available, seems to signal a new openness to grace. But it was hard for me to detect any differences in what the protagonist was doing or how they were thinking about things that would have made these shifts feel more plausible or psychologically grounded. Which is just another way of saying that the protagonist – much less all the other characters in the game, who are much more thinly drawn – comes off as a plot contrivance rather than a human being, heir to all the flaws and potential of our kind. And without that element, Purgatory (and the Purgatorio) would be drab indeed.