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Limbo is the first circle of hell, and also the first level of the game where we see the hero Dante defeating Death and jumping into hell after his love – Beatrice’s soul. Dante claims Death’s scythe and things start to get interesting as Dante starts his journey and battle against the legions of hell to rescue his love. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the first circle – Limbo.

Here reside the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, who, though not sinful, did not accept Christ. They are not punished in an active sense, but rather grieve only their separation from God, without hope of reconciliation. Limbo shares many characteristics with the Elysian Fields; thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in a deficient form of Heaven. Without baptism (“the portal of faith,” Canto IV.36) they lacked the hope for something greater than rational minds can conceive. Limbo includes green fields and a castle, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself, as well as the Islamic philosophers Averroes and Avicenna. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan and the philosophers Socrates and Aristotle as well as the Roman general and politician Julius Caesar. Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo (Canto IV). Dante implies that all virtuous pagans find themselves here, although he later encounters two in heaven and one (Cato of Utica) in Purgatory.

Beyond the first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles by wrapping his tail around himself a corresponding number of times. The lower circles are structured according to the classical (Aristotelian) conception of virtue and vice, so that they are grouped into the sins of incontinence, violence, and fraud (which for many commentators are represented by the leopard, lion, and she-wolf[5]). The sins of incontinence — weakness in controlling one’s desires and natural urges — are the mildest among them, and, correspondingly, appear first, while the sins of violence and fraud appear lower down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28Dante%29

Watch the developer’s diary to get a better picture of the first level of hell.

This upcoming game Visceral Games portrays the first part of the epic poem Dante’s Divine Comedy written in the early 14th century. It tells the journey of Dante through what is largely the medieval concept of Hell depicted as 9 Circles of suffering located within the earth to find his love, more information about the original text can be found on wikipedia.

From early screenshots and trailers the game looks dark and quite disturbing, kind of like God of War in hell. Gameplay looks interesting and similar to God of War, it is slated to be released in January 2010, so for now let us all patiently wait for Visceral Games to finish hell so we may visit it next year. The game appears to be multiplatform, and will be available for both the PS3 and XBox 360. Enjoy the trailer below for the time being. For those who are interested, you may read the whole original book of Dante’s Inferno online.