It’s a game based on the novel The name of the rose by Umberto Eco. It initially came out in Spain in 1988 under the name La abadia del crimen on the Amstrad CPC, a european 8bit computer, and got ported to a few other 8bit computers in the country. It is extremely well-regarded over there but is barely known outside of its country of origin as the game has never been translated then. Recently, an extended remake was made for the PC and is currently available for free on Steam: remade graphics, rough translation, extended story, extensive hand-holding, it’s barely the same game in my opinion.
Regardless, the original CPC game was still out of reach and couldn’t be played by people unable to understand Spanish. Until now! The community over at cpcwiki.eu managed to put the words of Umberto Eco back into the game, in English.
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/games/la-abadia-del-crimen-the-abbey-of-crime-finally-in-english!/
It’s a game worth playing in my opinion, as it is one of the most polished game to come out of Spain for this computer, from the original time period. Being an adventure game helps a lot to avoid the stupid difficulty games from that era are known for. Still, it’s not an easy game! the camera is very peculiar, and it can be disorienting to navigate the massive abbey. The abbot is ruthless, if you get caught somewhere you shouldn’t be, it’s game over! Thankfully the game is very generous with its saving system. With its nine save positions, it’s the earliest game I can think of that uses actual save states to save your progress. At the press of a key, the whole game status is preserved, from the characters positions on the map to the exact position of the scrolling dialogue. And because saves are held in RAM and only written to the disk when ordered to, you can experiment with them your heart content, reloading the game will bring back your original saves.
The original thread has some more advice on how to play the game.
