Dante’s Inferno was written by Gerard Bernor and featured in the January 1980 issue of Softside magazine.
The plot of Dante’s Inferno involves you trekking through Hell in search of the contract for your soul and then escaping with it. There is no parser for Dante’s Inferno. It recognizes the keys: B, F, U, D, L, R which represent backwards, fowards, up, down, left and right. This confused me at first because it led me to believe (there have been similar mechanics in past games) that the directional movement was based on the way in which you’re facing. I soon discovered however that was not the case and that the keys equate to normal compass movement on a map. So B is south, F is north, L is west and R is east. So Dante’s Inferno is basically one gigantic maze game. The up and down directions add a wrinkle to the maze.
The location descriptions in Dante’s Inferno are well written and help to create a particular gloomy atmosphere. I am not sure I would go so far as to say that it promotes any kind of anxiety because this is still just a “maze game”. I was able to find the records room in which my contract was kept and then quickly made my way out.
It took me roughly 70 minutes to complete the game and much of that was due to the effort of creating a map for the game. You would be very hard pressed to beat the game if you do not map out Hell.
An interesting and unique offering with not a lot of replay value once you recover your contract.