🎉🎉🎉 Here we go, after 2 days of work, the text is as neutral as possible. 

This includes the two* main characters (the player and their avatar who is risking their life in the castle) and all the collective names of the people populating the story, from nobles to knights, from prisoners, to crowds, musicians and artists, that in Italian are masculine by default. 

In the following pictures, on the left you can find the original masculine version, and on the right, in blue, the gender-neutral one.

Of course, this whole adaptation was just a challenge I decided to face: as you could see, many strings needed long periphrasis that are not always possible in the limited space of video games subtitles. 
Still, it was a great sandbox to find new solutions and add a few of them in my constantly growing glossary for gender-neutral solutions.

It was a longer job than expected, and even after a couple of proofreading phases, I realized that some sentences that didn't seem to refer to a specific gender were actually a trap I had fallen hook, line and sinker into (i.e.: the prisoners, the Scottish). 

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The most challenging part was dealing with the "achievements". 👇

🙃 In Italian, these were all gendered as masculine and contained references to popular culture or literary works (such as "The Betrothed", novels by Italo Calvino or famous Italian tongue twisters).

My solution was to choose common-gender (epicene) words, which are anyway quite uncommon. 

I had to forego the literary and popular culture references, recreate a generic scale of nobility and transcreate a joke using the parallel between Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) and Boccaccio (Decameron) in the string where the punchline revolved around the Archbishop of Canterbury (the Italian tongue twister is based on Constantinople's Archbishop). 

As you can see, I've tried my best and injected a bit of humor by localizing the pun even further in Italian geography, overlaying Canterbury with Fiesole, where Boccaccio would have set the Decameron (sort of Italian version of Canterbury tales).

For the same reason, since I had to reluctantly give up references to Calvino, I also replaced QFWFQ, the dwarf's name, with another quite famous gnome that also had to deal with a labyrinth...

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Let's check some more examples 🤓

👆 These two were also quite annoying, as I had to use both a common-gendered term and a common-gendered adjective starting with a vowel, so that I could elide the previous adjective and preposition in order not to express the gendered ending (quest-i, masculine plural VS quest-e, feminine plural for the first example, a-llo VS a-lla for the second one).

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And below, something unexpected... Once again I had to search the gender of folklore/mythology creatures. Have you ever wondered what gender the Loch Ness Monster belongs to?

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👆 *I guess the main characters to address in a gender-neutral mode are actually three... 🐉 Apparently Nessie's gender isn't known, so this also needed to be addressed with a gender-neutral solution!

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👆 For insults and swearwords, I decided to add both masculine and feminine insults that the user might address to the avatar, including the neo-ending ə.

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👇 Below, all the other changes needed to make the game gender-neutral 🥴

In conclusion: 

Usually, changing the auxiliary verb from "to be" to "to have" is enough to avoid the gender issues. In other cases, the whole sentence needs to be rephrased, usually changing the subject (from "Wise is the man" to "Wisdom resides in those who...", for example).

Sometimes we already have a common-gendered word (alchimist/alchimista, nobles/nobili, rulers/regnanti), but the preceding adjective, article or preposition will determine the gender, so it's important to omit or tweak enough that part of the sentence.

The whole process was incredibly time-consuming and little compatible with the usual schedules and deadlines of gaming projects.

It's not always possible to keep the Italian version of one game completely gender-neutral, and while I personally believe that we need to quickly adapt to the solutions that have already been proposed. In the meantime, until this will become the new accepted standard, the default masculine option is still the quicker and most widely accepted solution, when time is limited, space is tight, and special characters are not supported.