Our Lady of Thorns

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/16/26
Playtime: 2.75hrs, used walkthrough for goosing, failed in tombs (repeatedly, due to remote open door), eventually undid to try an accusation but soft-locked out? Officially score 43/55

The closer you are to something, the more unique it becomes. This is a completely reasonable compromise between physics and evolution. In the unthreatening distance, we need know nothing more than ‘cow’ or ‘coyote.’ The fact that light attenuates over range makes it biologically convenient to deprioritize. (Not ignoring you, Sharp-Eyed Hawks, but until you start playing IF I don’t have much to say to you.) Up close though? Boy do I want to SEE small thorns before finding them other ways.

This works metaphorically too. To my wife, for whom all IF is “Colossal Cave” (technically, it’s all ‘that thing JJ does that is at least quiet’), OLOT’s charms might not feel so unique. To me, who is so close to parser development I may as well be wearing it, authorial voice is a strong distinguisher. OLOT’s voice is really polished, most obviously in its authoritative command of its setting. The monastery is so well conceived and complete, I might accuse it of being implemented from a real-world floorplan. The language used to describe it is consistently jargony, in a way that sets the scene AND slowly integrates us into monastic life. Obviously, I liked this, but I found the work’s more subtle writing even more impressive.

If you’ve consumed some amount of my reviews, you know I am fond of what I call the “Implementation Horizon.” The level of detail (and inherent cuing needed) that the game operates at. Parser players are well comfortable with the idea that we will never get thread count when examining sheets. We agree to operate at the level of the game. It is up to the game to 1) cue us where that level is and 2) then be consistent about it. OLOT takes a specific tack here: the level is deeper than it appears, and absent cuing that might suggest it. But it is, to my playthrough, completely consistent. This meant that I kind of had to discover the Implementation Horizon on my own? Learn the dialect of this game as it were. I needed a walkthrough goose to get there, but once I did, the consistency of it was reassuringly firm and nearly always rewarded. This had the effect of building a very coherent, very robust world to knock about in, whose unspoken limits became as much a part of the scenario as the prayer schedule. I don’t know if I’ve seen it done better.

On top of this is imposed a clock of sorts - the day resolutely dribbles by, alternating between daily duties (where the cast is conducting their daily chores, and available for interview) and Offices (where the cast is collected in the Chapel, leaving their locations unguarded and explorable). It is a nice gameplay feature: predictable, alternating NPC states that you can exploit to different ends. It also marks a game timer - if you do not solve the crime in time Cruel Tempus will halt your investigation.

Yes, you are solving a Monastery Murder - a classic of the ‘closed setting mystery’ genre. You must establish method of death, motive and suspect via decidedly lo-tech forensic work of tasting and smelling. As well as the usual interviews and poking your damn novice nose where it doesn’t belong. There is a large cast. Almost too large to be manageable, but wisely with at least a job-personality quirk combo to sort things. I found it (mostly) really well constructed: puzzles integrated naturally into the setting, deep curiosity both needed and rewarded, red herrings and dead ends sprinkled realistically throughout, but unambiguous clues once found.

I felt a few glitches where puzzle solutions might seem to run counter to the setting, most notably the completely casual ‘climbing on altars’ move which, as a testament to the writing, I felt REALLY bad doing. Glitches like that were very much the exception though. I liked that disturbing your Brothers’ rooms might trigger their suspicions. That points were awarded for monky behaviors unrelated to the mystery. That you spend so much time smelling plants.

As a way to convey how well-tuned the prose was, let me share my very frustrating endgame performance. Patience, dots will connect. I found my way into the Crypt during an afternoon Office, meaning all monks collected in the Quire. I had foolishly left a door open that I should have shut. This put me into a tight box: I needed to explore and escape a dark crypt while the game timer only had limited turns before my snooping was discovered and Game End.

This awkward situation meant 1) try a bunch of stuff until 2) timer expires and you lose, then 3) UNDO a WHOLE LOT to give yourself a tight block of additional moves. Repeat. A Lot. Eventually I find my way out, into the in-Progress Office where I am informed hey, I can SHOUT an accusation to solve the mystery! Only I couldn’t. Despite being told BY THE GAME that I could end things (and having assembled enough clues to have confidence I could do so), I ended on a failure. Jeebus was that frustrating! I think it was a bug?

Now this kind of endgame kludginess could reasonably be expected to poison the whole experience. Backing into a hard time limit because of something I neglected to do 10s of moves earlier, needing to recycle with UNDOs SO MANY TIMES, eventually getting to a legitimate solving position, only to be soft-locked OUT by a seeming bug. Here’s where I connect the dots back to the writing.

Thanks to the cumulative effect of the previous gameplay not only was I thoroughly invested in the solution, the constraints I backed into made me MORE motivated to find it! Even after the ultimate failure, I kind of ignored that, mentally readied my accusation, and read SOLUTION. I credited myself with a “Justice” ending that the game did not award me! I solved the mystery IN SPITE OF THE GAME, and with no hard feelings! In the face of all that mechanical awkwardness, I left the game satisfied and impressed.

DESPITE A BLOCKING BUG AT THE VERY VERY END, the writing had laid such a strong foundation, the mystery had clicked together so smoothly, my overriding takeaway was “hey, that was pretty good.” It was not diminished (much) by its glitches. How many times can writing in IF survive that? DOTS CONNECTED.

Spaceship: Hermes
Vibe: Echoes of Eco
Polish: Textured
Gimme the Wheel! : The ‘cannot SHOUT’ bug at the end is most obviously in need of addressing.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

I didn't play any of the Spring Thing games until after Spring Thing finished, to get a little more neutrality. This one was one of the winners, so I was interested in playing it.

I had a bit of trepidation going in because I've historically struggled with complex timed murder games in IF; I'm think of Varicella and Make it Good, mostly.

I was pleased that this game had helpful guidance early on and I was able to have some success on my own. The game nudges you on things and places you can go to and do next.

At one point I messed up the online interpreter by undoing many times in a row while messing with the tab (a problem with parchment, not the game itself), so I restarted, and that gave me the confidence to just use the walkthrough and see the rest of the game. I'm glad I did; this game seems like one designed for careful exploration and note-taking, things I'm not too good at.

I do like mystery games and this is the kind that is mostly solved by doing puzzles using information in books and through things found in exploration. It does require looking under things (something I typically don't enjoy in large games with tons of furniture) but it is hinted when you need to do so.

The writing is often workmanlike, which isn't to say that it's bad (the flashback memories of Aelred are wonderful), but that due to the large nature of the game and the ascetic setting, writing is often utilitarian and sparse.

The time aspect isn't as big of a threat as it seems, if anyone else is worried as I was. Essentially it divides the game into segments of 'everyone is available to talk to' and 'everyone is away and you can search around'.

Overall, it's clear why it won.

Originally posted on intfiction. Minor edits were made.

I was intimidated from looking at the long (relative to other entries in the Thing) length and that you could mess up due to improperly managing the many moving parts like monks moving around and a strict time limit. But the setting intrigued me, so I bravely ventured forth.

It turns out that managing these parts is intuitive once you get down to it. The monks spend the entire game staying at their assigned locations until it’s time for them to go and sing choir. I personally found the schedule to be generous, starting in the wee hours of the morning until seven in the evening. You can freely look at the current time and when events take place through shortcut commands, and can wait until the hour choir offices start to minimize entering “Z” repeatedly. I meandered around a lot and was stuck in a couple of spots but finished with 30 minutes left before the deadline. Most people will probably get to one of the endings at a faster pace than I did.

To progress, you solve puzzles around the priory to get evidence, so you do have to look under several nooks and crannies, but thankfully you don’t have to find absolutely everything in order to accuse someone. I was stuck for a while on two parts, both related to (Spoiler - click to show)getting into guarded places by giving gifts, and had to use hints. Although, to be fair, one of these instances was because I completely forgot the flashback hint when examining basil, so I didn’t know what to say and the hint seemed to come out of left field until I did a replay. And as for the other, I just didn’t know you could give a cat to somebody (I did “SHOW CAT TO WILFRED,” assumed that was simply a moment of characterization fluff and moved on until I saw the gift hint). I also had to read hints about searching the barrels. Additionally, the first time I went to the crypt I didn’t catch a vital piece of evidence, thought “that was cool but pointless” after I escaped, then looked at the hints and saw I missed a thing, after which I reloaded a save right before going down there in the first place.

In my first playthrough, I spent a large amount of time having information about one person in particular, but didn’t find any connection to the game’s inciting incident. (Spoiler - click to show)Ultimately I pretty much stumbled into a solution by being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. The person who found me, who was also the culprit, attempted murder after seeing the evidence I was holding but divine intervention saved me. So my process of discovery went from “how does all this stuff lead to poisoning a kind old man” → Hugh tries to kill me after seeing I had the evidence to report him → “well if he reacted like THAT I guess that’s how there’s a corpse.” After getting the mercy ending, I started a new game to do things more efficiently and to see if I could get him to confess, incriminate himself, or open up to me, but after a while concluded that there’s no such thing implemented (and that it’s not that kind of game).

OLoT is a hefty parser IF that should be appreciated slowly. It would be best to play it not as a deduction game or a cross-examination of peoples’ alibis, but as a free-roam exploration with object manipulation as the primary element. Joel Burton is definitely an author to watch!

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.

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.