The Abbey

In 1993, everyone knew that "text adventures" were a dead genre, but, as has been lovingly documented by Jimmy Maher and others, a few people here and there labored in obscurity to keep the nascent art form of interactive fiction alive. Art LaFrana was one of these, someone who eschewed the semi-commercial offerings of the time such as TADS and crafted his own custom system for MS-DOS.

The Abbey, LaFrana's second work (which is not to be confused with the 2008 title of the same name by Steve Blanding), received more attention than might be expected for a shareware entry with an extremely primitive parser. A review in SPAG Magazine by Cedric Knight suggests that it was considered worth paying for even 8 years after its release. I don't think I would have agreed at the time, but in an era when so few new games that even looked like a text adventure were being produced, it may have seemed a more attractive option than it does today.

To say that the game has a parser is being somewhat generous; my own interaction suggests that it is a simple keyword-matching system that doesn't really try to parse the player's command in any meaningful way. For example, a command such as >PUSH WAGON EAST will be interpreted the same as >PUSH WAGON or even just >PUSH. This doesn't matter as much as it might because the ratio of interactable objects to rooms is alarmingly low by modern standards, and the majority of the player experience is simple room navigation.

Other reviewers stress the text's ability to evoke an atmosphere, and I have to admit that I also found this to be the case -- but I don't understand it. It's really quite puzzling; the text is "evocative" in a paradoxical way in that on first reading it seems flat and uninspired but after extended exposure a fairly vivid mental picture of the environs emerges in one's mind. I'm not sure how much I can credit the author for this; in some ways it almost seems akin to the phenomenon of hallucinations experienced during sensory deprivation. (Is this the part that I've never understood about the appeal of Scott Adams games?)

Although the game is listed under the "Historical" genre, it certainly doesn't seem to be a very accurate portrayal of its ostensible period. (For example, the language of NPCs and signage can be anachronistically modern.) That's not to mention that Atlantis seems to have been a real place in the game universe.

It does seem more intent on historical accuracy with respect to architecture and living conditions. A large number of basically empty rooms are used to describe the sights and smells of the abbey complex, and I assume that this aspect is modeled after some real historical place -- there just doesn't seem to be any other motivation to include non-functional locations such as a pigsty. I have no special historical expertise by which to judge its correctness here, but it does feel believable.

The puzzles were to me the bad kind of old school, being based largely on intuition (which might not match the author's) and/or requiring a long series of essentially unmotivated steps without intermediate feedback. The largest part of player effort by far will be spent on creating a map, which is an essential step because room descriptions sometimes omit exit listings. Since I was trying to play this on a schedule (for the People's Champion Tournament) and wasn't finding anything to savor, I resorted to a walkthrough after a few hours, and I don't regret doing so.

I was ready to like this one, but in the end I found it to be a poor substitute for a proper parser, player-friendly puzzle design and minimally-interesting story. I'm tempted to go with one star, but, as mentioned, in the end it did end up engaging my imagination, and that part was enjoyable. I can't say I'd recommend it other than as example for someone studying the earliest examples of the form. Its most lasting impact might, ironically, have come from Knight's review: Inform 6's Standard Library 6/11, released afterward, implements many of the variations of the verb "pry" that he complained were missing in this game.

Wow! That was really really really cool!

The year is 1347 AD. You, a renowned scholar and theologian, have been summoned by King and Pope. There has been a tragic fire in the library of the great abbey at Montglane. The fleeing monks have rescued as much of the treasures as they could, but the location of certain ancient relics has been forgotten through the centuries. You are to retrieve them for the greater glory of King and Church.

The Abbey of Montglane is a 1988 DOS text-adventure. It is by far the oldest IF I have finished. (Edit: I see that the date on the IFDB page is 1993. I could have sworn I saw 1988 somewhere.)

Because of the limited implementation of objects and scenery, I had to switch my adventuring style from obsessively examining everything named in the descriptions to a more general exploring of the game-space. On my first evening, I spent more than two hours drawing a map of the abbey, and I hadn't even found the passage into the catacombs by then.

This game is awe-inspiring in its handling of space. The map is very large, and a huge chunk of it is open to exploration from the get-go. However, it is structured according to the layout of a historical abbey, a large rectangle contained within the outer walls. Most of the locations are next to one of the main paths, with enough of them to the side or in between to break the symmetry and give the map a more natural feel.
A medieval abbey was for the most part a self-sustaining entity, so the locations are very diverse. Next to the church and the monk's dormitories, there is a herb and vegetable garden, a bakery, a pigsty (with barrels for collecting the blood of a butchered pig!), a meditative fountain grove,... An impressive bell-tower looks out over it all.
The orderly structure of this above-ground map contrasts with the nooks and crannies and twisty passages of the underground catacombs. (No maze.) Mapping fun guaranteed!

The intro I have summarized above promises good writing, and the game delivers... for the most part. The descriptions are sparse, efficient and more verbose when needed. But: the juvenile 1980s text-adventure humour that pops up here and there broke the atmosphere enough for me to take away a star from my rating.

Solving the puzzles is mostly a matter of exploring thoroughly, taking the (surprisingly few) objects you find with you and remembering written clues until you need them. The best puzzle of the game is wildly unfair to modern standards, but it works and it is great and funny. Well worth solving without cheating.. (Spoiler - click to show)Learn by dying... A lot.

The Abbey of Montglane is a tremendous work of interactive fiction.
Highly recommended.

In this game, you are tasked with finding treasure and investigating evil in an old abbey. As you explore, you find things like casks of pigs blood, evidence of violence, and a library that is a real maze. Eventually, I realized that this all seems familiar, because it's based on The Name of the Rose! When I found the 'finis africae' it was clear confirmation. There's a lot more added, and it doesn't follow the plot of the book, so it's not an adaptation, but it's pretty clearly inspired by it.

I played this the way I do many older adventures: I wandered around seeing how much I could achieve for a half hour or so, then used the walkthrough. For about half of the game I thought, "wow, this isn't that bad. Just mapping every room and taking everything you see should solve the majority of the puzzles". Then I got to a puzzle or two that I think I never would have solved on my own, but Rovarsson's review states that he solved it by dying and someone else said something similar, so that seems fair.

The overall atmosphere is spooky and fun, just like the source material it was based on, but intercut with silly jokes in a way reminiscent of other games in that post-Infocom and pre-Inform era (like Unnkulia).

Don't expect anything to be described. You could find (hypothetically) a miniature alien with a tattoo of the Queen of England in the middle of kissing a moldy tuna sandwich and the game would say:
'>X ALIEN

You see nothing interesting.'

Most actions will say it's not understood. So for most of the game you'll be fine. There are a few actions near the end that are more complex, though.

Overall, a fun adventure and neat to see a game from an era that's not as common as others.

I had to play using the online link.