Religion in video games

The best critique of organised religion in games, to my mind, comes in Final Fantasy X (which I controversially maintain is one of the best in the series) where the religious establishment maintains its social control and the status quo through the process of sacrificing a summoner to the destructive entity known as Sin, who simply absorbs her power and starts the cycle anew, the fear generated in each cycle ensuring the people are loyal to the church. Yet this is still only an allegory. After all the youthful, brash world of videogames doesn’t often concern itself directly with the stuffy traditionalism of religion (games like GTA and Manhunt the medium has enough enemies already), but this month the situation changes considerably with the release of no less than 3 A-list titles which set themselves within specifically Christian apocrypha. They are Bayonetta, Darksiders (both out now) and Dante’s Inferno (released start of Feb), and you might also add to this list Assassins Creed II, which debunks Catholicism through its central antagonist, who works his way up to become pope solely to gain access to the secrets of the Vatican before claiming the Bible to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Judging from the subversive approach these releases take, it seems there’s going to be a few more spaces reserved for game designers in the fiery furnace. But that’s all good, because after all only the cool people go to hell.

One of the coolest people in the brimstone would undoubtedly be Bayonetta, the eponymous heroine of one of the most gloriously inventive and devilishly fun games released in a long time, and an early contender for game of the year. This sassy vixen, clad in a slinky black cat suit (which disappears each time she powers up a combo) and designer glasses, simply oozes sex appeal. Dispatching her angelic antagonists in a hail of bullets (from guns mounted on her stilettos in a nod to Planet Terror) or a series of electrifyingly fast, flowing combos, Bayonetta punctuates each movement of her lithe body with an erotic wiggle, and sometimes straddles her prey to dish out a literal spanking. In short Bayonetta is the most gloriously sleazy game I’ve ever seen, taking the crudest elements of the medium and elevating them to glorious new depths in cut scenes that quite simply leave you in stitches. Platinum Games seem to have perfectly fused the spirit of 1970s American exploitation flicks with a kooky Japanese hentai anime sensibility and, thanks to the involvement of Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, presented it all with a breezy confidence and some of the most high octane gameplay so far seen this generation of consoles.

The pitch: In a weirdly distorted vision of our world, Bayonetta is the last witch surviving the persecution of the witch hunts, who is now employed as a kind of angel hunter for Rodin, the shady underworld arms dealer and bartender at The Gates of Hell (spot the fine arts reference). As a witch Bayonetta is able to move between the real world and Purgatorio, where the citizens of heaven (Paradiso) and hell (Inferno) are able to roam, and attempt to influence the human realm (incidentally these terms are all derived from Dante’s The Divine Comedy). Looking to test her abilities, Bayonetta tracks the sale of a precious artefact to the European city of Vigrid, the former base of the now vanished Lumen Sages and Umbra Witches, but finds herself embroiled in an angelic plot to bring back the Creator as well as dealing with unlocking the traumatic memories of her past.


Anyone who has seen the masterful anime Neon Genesis Evangelion will be in familiar territory with regards to the picture this game paints. In Neon Genesis young children had to pilot huge mechs in defence of humanity against the angels, in a weirdly inverted interpretation of the book of Revelation. These ‘angels’ were depicted as vast semi-organic alien ships, constructed in a variety of bizarre shapes and created from a mysterious compound. The devastation they wrought on Neo Tokyo was as shocking as the gruesome end they often came to, violently torn apart by the Evangelion mechs (traumatising their young pilots). Likewise in Bayonetta, despite possessing names like ‘grace’ and ‘harmony’, the angels are ferocious killing machines split into groups according to the mythical hierarchy of the angelic choir. The most memorable of these are colossal, their scale lending the game much of its epic grandeur. For instance one angel, Fortitude, is depicted as a vast upside-down cherubic head grafted disturbingly onto a rotund torso and topped by two huge serpents. They are quite simply some of the most impressive and terrifyingly original character designs ever seen in any art form, demonstrating both the imaginative powers of the medium and its ability to subvert cultural elements in fascinating new ways.

Far less original, but no less sensitive, is Darksiders’ depiction of demons and angels, casting the denezins of hell as clichéd ogres and the armies of heaven as winged marines, who descend to Earth to play out their long awaited final battle. Meanwhile you play as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, alone and disgraced after you realise the seven seals binding the ancient treaty between heaven and hell haven’t in fact been broken and it is, rather, your very presence that has precipitated Armageddon. The game sees you stalking the destroyed cities of man attempting to redeem yourself by ending the conflict that you have inadvertently started.

Whilst both Bayonetta and Darksiders project the story of biblical apocalypse onto our world, the forth coming Dante’s Inferno depicts a more personal odyssey. One man’s journey through the nine circles of hell in search of his murdered wife Beatrice, Dante’s Inferno promises to act as a diabolic counterpart to Bayonetta’s astounding depiction of the angelic hordes, by offering its own truly epic depictions of demonic beasts. This is apparent from the very start of the game when you defy the grim reaper himself when he turns up for your sinning soul, and instead steal his scythe and give him a taste of his own medicine. Here the literary meaning of epic, the classical style of poetry embodied by the Divine Comedy, is replaced by a more modern meaning of the word: terrifying and impressive in scale and scope.


The protagonist of the source poem, the author himself Dante Alighieri, is a pilgrim wrestling with his faith; a passive observer of hell as he is lead through it by the pagan poet Virgil. Video games, of course, require a more active focus and so Dante is recast as a soldier from the crusades who, having realised the central hypocrisy of the Catholic church, is wracked with sin (he sews his sins literally into his own flesh in the form of a cross) over his actions and physically battles his way through hell. By recasting the protagonist as an absolute badass the game will almost certainly alienate the literati who sneer at the medium of video games, but there’s fundamentally absolutely no reason why the poem as source material should not be played with in this manner. Rather EA should be congratulated for having the ambition to tackle making a game out of an ancient piece of literature, and may even help turn a fresh young audience to the source material (in the same way that film adaptations often renew interest in the source novel). And just as the best film adaptations are those that take liberties with the source text, so that its meaning is better explored in a visual medium, Dante’s Inferno reimagines the elements in the context of a video game, trading in the literary aspects of the poem for a more immediate and visceral experience – in short replicating the kind of experience that poetry strives towards.

Ultimately there may be more of a line of continuity between literature and video games then we are initially seeing. Bayonetta’s inversion of heaven and hell was first put forth by Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost (itself inspired by Dante), which in a controversial allegory of the English civil war depicted God as an authoritarian monarch and Satan as a revolutionary who turns hell into a parliamentary democracy by constructing Pandemonium. This heretical tradition was taken up by William Blake in his critique of society A Marriage of Heaven and Hell and by the romantic poets, where Satan was often used as a metaphor for creative potency. Some might consider the medium of video games a highly unlikely place for this age old literary tradition to turn up, but for me it is just another indication of the artistic maturity of the medium.