Our Lady of Thorns

The Name of the Rose is a strange inspiration for a murder mystery, because it isn’t. Like most Eco, it’s lavish, loosely interwoven tapestries of intertextuality as a mode of lifetexturing intellection hung in such a sequence as to imply progression for those in need of instruction. It’s more a mystery in the sense of medieval mystery plays, biblical stories breathing life into everyday scenes. William of Baskerville is precisely the joke, the Doylean deduction inspires the crimes towards a shared spiritual frenzy, whereas the real motive is and always will be a book.

This somewhat awkward inheritance is where I think the central tension of Our Lady of Thorns lies. On one hand, a murder mystery in a medieval monastery offers an excellent tinkerbox for the intrepid adventurer: the eight offices provide a carefully orchestrated timeline for you to explore, understand, then optimize; the setting is a redolent admixture of ambient physicality so readily repuposable to puzzling, with a Latin motto indicating how to open a secret passage and stained glass scenes indicating how to open a secret passage; and the extensive gardens and botanical knowledge thereby trained offers a grounded intuitional network for several satisfying guessworks. On the other hand, the weight of simulating so specifically stimulating a space stresses out the story’s modest ambitions: in lieu of the glossaries, the place is painted in vague accumulations of time, from “The stone floor is worn smooth by centuries of feet” to “The steps dip in the centre from generations of sandaled feet” to “worn floorboards where chests were dragged back and forth over the years”, repetitions dulling the atmosphere fogged; and the central motive for the mystery, that a brother is stealing psalters produced as the “primary source of priory income” to support his struggling family, isn’t really accurate, English monasteries didn’t make books as commercial objects on spec, as it were, but rather as gifts to patrons or to fulfill a specific commission from an important figure, and by the fourteenth century this gift would probably have been a book of hours rather than a psalter, so while the scenario isn’t implausible still it relies on a vague high monasticism rather than a genuine engagement with the monastery as a living social institution.

Of course, an interactive fiction game playing at a medievalism that vagues the prior to prioritize the puzzles is a story worn smooth by centuries of feet. If anything, it’s the delicate sense of craftsmanship that pervades Our Lady of Thorns which sufficiently stirs you from your default stupor to summon such complaints. Lucky we, treated to so laudsable a labor of love constructed from months of “ritual, timing, prayer, silence. It feels both comforting and confining. You’re not sure which feeling prevails.”

The setting is so vibrant and lovingly made that it's a pleasure to just exist in the game space, murder notwithstanding. So beautifully textured and described, nary a "I don't see any such thing" in sight. I experienced some tension between what I thought the game was signaling I could/couldn't do and what was required for a few puzzles, but the overall package is so well-crafted that all is forgiven.

The pantheon of great murder-mystery settings surely has a niche of honor set aside for the medieval monastery. Partially this is just aesthetics, and a lingering anti-Papism that’s long haunted anglophone culture: cloaked figures skulking in the shadows of great stone buildings, great artworks of gold and stained glass bearing witness to bloody deeds, men who say they’re pledged to God but who nonetheless commit the darkest of sins… Partially too it’s the fortuitous result of some exemplary takes on the premise, none looming larger than Eco’s Name of the Rose, which is of course name-checked by Our Lady of Thorns’ ABOUT text.

But partially, I think, it’s because the monastery and the murder plot share a dual nature. A monastery is a clockwork thing, with everyone dwelling in it assigned a particular role and duties, and the passage of time creating an orderly, coordinated motion from work to devotions and back. So too is murder a thing of intricate design, at least in murder mysteries: the killer’s design is obscured and complex, but subject to logic, it can be rationalized, dissected – so a murder is a devilish machine playing out within, and against, the holy machine on the monastery. And yes, monasteries are of course not purely mechanical, the point of all this activity is that it enables exactly that holiness, and for a modern audience, being confronted with this alien excess of devotion raises spiritual questions: does man have a higher nature? What does the soul consist in? And again, the murder mystery comes at these questions widdershins, as it provides an opportunity to see what will make a person stoop to the most infernal depths of crime.

OLT is a wonderfully realized illustration of the monkish-murder genre, leaning very strongly into the former element of its nature (in fact, to the extent that it’s a game simulating a monastery murder, here we have a machine inside a machine inside a machine…) A whole priory – a smaller-scale monastic community, as these things go, but still quite large by the standards of contemporary parser IF – is available for exploration, from the central cloister to the gardens, the dormitories, and the inevitable crypt, nearly a dozen Brothers carry out their duties and regularly come together to pray at the canonical hours.

The research that’s gone into the game is more than adequate to lend a pleasing aura of historicity – the priory layout is familiar if you’ve visited one in real life (or played Pentiment), the narrowness of monastic life is neatly portrayed through the regular offices and each monk’s particular role in the priory, and the only anachronism I noticed is that when I looked up the real-life Our Lady of the Thorns, it turns out she’s a Marian apparition that occurred a few decades after the game’s fourteenth-century timeframe. The prose is very nicely judged, too, avoiding throwing in excessive ornamental detail that might get in the way of the puzzles while still providing the appropriate sensual thrill:

"Centuries of incense have worked themselves into the very stone here. The smell is deep and resinous, threaded with beeswax. It is a smell that seems to belong to God rather than to men."

But as much fun as I had simply wandering through the halls, there’s serious business afoot: the player character is a novice apprenticed to the garden-keeper, and when your mentor dies in mysterious circumstances, you need to plumb every depth of the priority and unearth the monks’ hidden secrets to determine the who, how, and why of the murder. The game proceeds on a timer, but the passage of time is as much an opportunity as it is a threat: because while of course the game ends if you haven’t found the culprit by the end of the day, every few hours the other monks gather for their religious duties, from which you’re excused due to your youth and the horrific events, allowing you to poke into places where you’re not allowed.

Time isn’t the only system at play in Our Lady of Thorns; there’s an inventory limit and concealment mechanics to prevent you from waltzing around the priory with a giant pile of illicit material, and the monks do move around a bit, ready to prevent you from engaging in any unauthorized mischief if they see you (save for the few you might be able to convince to turn a blind eye…) Many of the puzzles also have multiple solutions. All of this means that there’s a high level of player engagement and advocacy, as you refer to the nicely-drawn map to plot out a path where you won’t be seen, track the clock to ensure your movements are well-timed, and furiously improvise when you’ve made a miscalculation. As far as I can tell, there are consequences to messing up, but they’re generally relatively mild – the game seems to track how many times you’ve drawn undue attention to yourself, and while eventually that can lead to a premature game-over, you’re afforded a generous amount of leeway (unless, of course, the monk whose attention you’ve drawn happens to be the murderer…)

The puzzles themselves are generally conventional ones, but that’s a good decision, I think, given that often getting to the puzzles undetected, with enough time to solve them, and with the right items in your inventory is already half the challenge. There are some predictable ways to befriend or hoodwink some of the monks, the architect of the priory had a convenient love for riddles and secret passages, and a few books offer important clues if you consult them about the right topics. They work well enough and are well integrated into the plot and setting, albeit there are a few that require an old-school specificity of interaction that’s at odds with the game’s generally friendly presentation – this is a game where you need to be very thorough, despite the time limit, or be comfortable consulting the hints. To cite an early example, it’s easy to miss an important object when examining the dead body:

x aelred’s habit

You see nothing unusual about his habit, and don’t see the things he was picking at.

search aelred

In an inner pocket of his robe, you find an iron key. You take it.

There are at least two other places where the player has to use very particular syntax, beyond simply examining the objects the game mentions, in order to progress, and while it’s not too hard to deduce the need to do so if you stop and think carefully, in a game this big, it’s easy to assume that if you’re not making progress on a puzzle, it’s because the solution is in one of the locked-away areas you haven’t been to yet, rather than because you missed something in a place you thought you’d already explored thoroughly.

The game’s other blemish is the characters, few of whom have much of a personality. The lovely exception is the librarian, Wilfred, who used to be the prior but who has retired to a life filled with books (and a cute orange cat) in his dotage. He’s a friendly presence – and also a puzzle element, because of course you need to get into those books – and responds to a variety of conversational topics. Most of his brethren aren’t so lucky, though; many of them have taken vows of silence or are otherwise uninterested in communicating, and few of them play a direct role in the gameplay. That’s all realistic enough, but it does mean that the revelation of the murderer was a fairly muted affair, based on gathering physical evidence and reading between the lines in a few documents; sussing out the culprit didn’t take much brain power, but struggling to recall whether I’d exchanged more than a single greeting with him certainly did.

More active characters probably wouldn’t have fit the setting, and the intended gameplay, quite so well, though – as I said, I enjoyed poking around the priory quite a lot, and having to trail half a dozen monks this way and that while interrogating them about all the other suspects, Infocom-mystery style, would be a far more stressful, and far less meditative, experience than what Our Lady of Thorns offers. That solitary vibe is very much in keeping with the subject matter, and makes the final dilemma – because once you’ve solved the mystery, you can choose whether to prioritize justice or mercy – one that plays out at a higher level, responsive more to universal principles than the concrete particularity of one person’s squalid motives and worse actions. So while it takes a while to get there, the game does ultimately touch on spiritual as well as mechanical concerns, a fitting capstone to a game that’s one of the standouts in this year’s Festival.