Written by Mariano Falzone
Sir Sean Connery analyzing the final rating.
My days wandering (running for the most part) around the abbey are at an end. Will Guillermo and Adso solve the horrid murders? Will I keep my sanity? Will the final PISSED rating be ordained by God or the Antichrist? Let us find out…
Written by Mariano Falzone
And So I Go Again
You could say that last time I didn’t make much progress. I barely got to the morning of Day 3, and didn’t do most of what was supposed to be done by that point. But, in any case, I got used to the layout of the abbey, learned a bit how to play this thing. This is one of those games that has to be played repeatedly from the beginning just to understand what you’re doing, let alone beat it. Or, like me, you can save early and save often, and end up with dozens of save states.
I’ve read that the Big Bad Bug the game has is that you need to have the scroll, the one in the Scriptorium, by Day 4 or the game won’t progress anymore. Somewhere else I read that, more specifically, you need to get it by the night of Day 3. Some clarification here: as the days are divided in canonical hours, night is the first of those hours, so the night of Day 3 comes at the end of Day 2 and before the rest of Day 3.
So I decided to try something. I would get the scroll when everyone is either called to eat or to church, hoping Berengario, the monk at the Scriptorium that threatens to tell the Abbot if I pick up the scroll, would follow suit and rush off too. First time I try, we’re called to church, but Berengario just decides to stay put in his place, still not letting me take the scroll. Some double standards, hey, Abbot? Why is Berengario not scolded?
Anyway, I let this day end and decide to try again during Day 3. After all, maybe I still can get the scroll during that day? But after being called to church in the morning, the game just stops progressing. The Abbot is at the altar, Adso is there, and another monk too. But my guess is one monk is missing, and several minutes pass by and he never comes. He must have gotten stuck somewhere. I still use the opportunity to rush off to the Scriptorium, but when I get there, the scroll and the book are nowhere to be seen. And the Abbot eventually shows up and tells me I haven’t obeyed his rules, game over, all that jazz.
So I load back to Day 2, and this time wait to be called to lunch just in front of the scroll, under the vigilant watch of Berengario. And sure enough, we’re called, and Berengario rushes off to eat. I get the scroll and he doesn’t say anything. Yay!
Written by Mariano Falzone
Adventure games were highly popular in my home country of Argentina in the 90s and early 2000s, when I grew up. Actually paying for games, though, not so much. In our defense, video games were very expensive, the titles available were very scarce, and most parents, even if they could afford to buy one once in a while, never saw anything of value in them, or just didn’t know what all the fuss was about nor seemed to care. That’s why I and many other youngsters would spend our time scavenging through abandonware websites in Spanish. There were even many sites dedicated especially to adventure games, from both Spain and the Americas.
La Abadía del Crimen was a title that was always mentioned in those places. There was a cultish aura about it. I remember thinking that it looked interesting, but I was far more invested in LucasArts stuff, so I must’ve downloaded it, put it somewhere in my computer and forgotten about it. I mean, I could download Fate of Atlantis or Monkey Island in Spanish anyway. For all I knew, La Abadía del Crimen was just another translated American game. Only when I grew older did I learn that it was an 80s game from Spain and one that had never been translated into English, and why that made it unique.
