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The Abbey

by Art LaFrana

(based on 2 ratings)
1 review2 members have played this game. It's on 4 wishlists.

About the Story

France, 1347. You are sent on a special mission by the king and the pope to investigate the Abbey of Montglane. The recent fire damaged the abbey and burned several old manuscripts, you're tasked to recover ten treasures that couldn't be accounted for. However things about the abbey are not as they seem to be, the unexplained fire and the strange panic it caused are only the beginning of the mystery lurking inside...

Ratings and Reviews

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Average Rating: based on 2 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 1
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Holy Relics!, November 11, 2020
by Rovarsson (Belgium)
Related reviews: History

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.

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2 Off-Site Reviews

Baf's Guide


This game answers the question, "What if The Name of the Rose had been written by H. P. Lovecraft?" The year is 1347. The famous Abbey has burned down mysteriously, and you are sent by the Pope to investigate and, with any luck, to retrieve the treasures hidden there. As you do so, you discover the site's dark secrets. The game is just brimming over with atmosphere. Unfortunately, the parser is very weak and some of the puzzles rather obscure. Gameplay is organized into chapters, with one major puzzle per chapter. A weird one, and deserving of a better game engine.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
[...] This old-time DOS adventures deserves a SPAG review for its attempts to bring the medieval thriller genre to IF, and for its good puzzles, plot, and imagery. This imagery is achieved despite descriptions which are not surprisingly economic considering that parser and world are condensed into a 51K executable. [...] (Cedric Knight)
See the full review

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Game Details

Language: English (en)
Current Version: 1.1
License: Shareware
Development System: Custom
Baf's Guide ID: 9
IFID: Unknown
TUID: jws3f7j27s1mbi5n

The Abbey on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for The Abbey:

Games where deliberately losing/dying/losing an item advances the plot by Andrew Schultz
The meaning of "deliberately" can be a bit broad, but I'm wondering about cases where an action clearly marked risky or fatal helps you see something or progress, and you would not have otherwise. I'm not thinking so much about where,...

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