Dante's Inferno

The shades pick up one of the game's key mechanics. While EA is keeping the actual details of the character improvement under wraps for now in a secret satanic EA bunker (probably), the coin with which you pay for upgrades are souls themselves. The shades are just the biggest source of them. "Those shades you punish are rich in souls," says Knight. "The choice you make is either to get a guaranteed payout with a satisfying animation if you punish - or absolve, which comes with a fairly involved skill-based mini-game in which if you fail you get nothing or if you succeed you get twice the payout. We really play with people's sense of risk/reward and how good they actually think they are." The link to BioShock is easy to make, but it seems that the choice is more about tactics than the moral aspect.

Stepping away from the fine detail, when approaching a genre with a clear reigning champion it's important to nail the fundamentals. I ask Knight what he thinks is the absolute key for a fighting game. "Number one for the genre is a really simple idea: that the character is my avatar, and when I tell him to do something he should do it immediately," he says.

"When we talk about responsiveness, that's what we mean. We've learned by studying other games - and of course worked on Return of the King at the same studio a few years ago - that the thing about the genre is that you can branch from one move into any other move. It's that sense of responsiveness. If I tell him to dodge, he immediately dodges. If I tell him to move, he immediately moves. What happens with that is that you get a lot of moves which pop. So if you looked at a game at a distance and examined it like a movie, you'd notice it - but who cares? I'm playing the game, not watching it. When I put the controller in someone's hands, I've never had that comment. It just feels great. You have to be dedicated to that principle that the responsiveness and control of the character takes precedence over everything else visually in the game... because it's a game."

While it's an asset in actual play, EA's devotion to enormous frame-rates does come with a price. It's far from an unattractive game, with some splendid vistas and set-pieces, but it's not the immediate knock-down oh-my-god-I-have-never-seen-hell-like-this-before culture shock you may hope for in a game that's trying to bring Dante's Inferno to our doors.

Simultaneously, its individual ingredients - slashing, quick-time-event takedowns and gargantuan bosses - are very much the unholy terrain of God of War. You wonder whether the initial descriptions of it as God of War meets Dead Space will prove prophetic in an unintended manner. As in, much like Dead Space, it could end up being a rock-solid genre game somewhat overlooked in the Christmas rush amongst games with more outspoken, obvious attention-getting assets. But that's something that no-one other than EA's accountants should worry about it. For gamers hungry for diabolic - in a good way - adventures, Dante's Inferno is highly promising.

As I leave Knight, I ask him off-the-cuffly what his favourite bit in the original poem is. "In the eighth circle, he meets a sinner who was so bad that he went to hell when he was still alive," says Knight, after a few moments' thought. "He was damned and sent to hell when his body was still alive. So when his soul goes to hell, a demon inhabits his body and lives out the rest of his days. That concept, which was introduced by Dante, is so powerful and so out of step with contemporary catholic thinking [which says] you can always save yourself if you go through these rites... and here's Dante saying, 'Nope. There's some people who commit enough sin, they go straight to hell before they die and their bodies are walking around with demons inhabiting them.' That's crazy".