Thanks, that's all very interesting. I'm not up on many of the references you make, so that's very helpful context for me. I forgot about comics, never having read them much (apart from the Beano and a couple of years of reading my brother's cast-off Marvels), and never played RPGs. You're right that my speaker could easily have drawn his contrast more unproblematically by choosing a different novel: I think it's interesting that he didn't.

It's striking that the Inferno game superimposes a quest structure and the biggest, baddest Big Bad - he has to rescue Beatrice from the clutches of Lucifer!