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.”