"The Forbidden Labyrinth: On THE NAME OF THE ROSE as a Video Game" by Sean Gill
Once, in a high school English class, tasked with artistically interpreting a novel by Thomas Hardy, I created Jude the Obscure: The Video Game, based on Hardy’s bleak, humorless 1895 novel of the same name. (At the time, I had such a robust social life that I was teaching myself how to program text-only games on my Texas Instruments graphing calculator.) In my game, the player wandered Wessex County as the naïve, melancholic Jude Fawley, and the action unfolded in a Choose Your Own Adventure style, navigating Jude across a landscape of unhappy marriages, sexual disgust, alcoholism, and homicidal/suicidal children. "Obscurity Points" earned by performing a series of alienating and self-sabotaging acts, were the only barometer of success. Depending on choices the player made, there was a way to lead Jude toward a happier existence, but it was not the way to win the game.
Perhaps it goes without saying that I've long been intrigued by entertainment that challenges the concept of entertainment, particularly in media where the target audience is eager for light escapism, something to occupy the children, or a simple diversion after a taxing work week. Isn't life complicated enough?
The moment I learned of its existence, I was drawn to programmer Paco Menéndez and designer Juan Delcan's The Abbey of Crime (1987), a Spanish adventure video game based on Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980). I was tickled to learn that one of my favorite novels—a dense, labyrinthine, medieval mystery by an Italian semiotician, packed with Latin puns and meticulous historical detail—had been adapted upon the same 8-bit canvas that brought us distinguished works such as Rad Racer, Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!, and Excitebike.
Start-up Screen of The Abbey of Crime video game from Opera Soft.
The Abbey of Crime—where the harsher aspects of monastic life have been interwoven with the basic mechanics of the game—was originally conceived as The Name of the Rose: The Video Game, until Eco's agent denied Menéndez permission to use the title, and so it became La Abadía del Crimen with its lead character adjusted to "Guillermo of Occam" (in Eco's novel, it's "William of Baskerville," a figure equally inspired by Sherlock Holmes and the historic William of Ockham). Released by Opera Soft for 8-bit computers such as the Amstrad CPC and the ZX Spectrum, the game was made during what is known as the Golden Age of Spanish Software (1983-1992), a period when Spain rivaled the United Kingdom in European output and sales. The Abbey of Crime is widely considered to be one of the era's superlative titles and has maintained a cult following in subsequent decades.
Playing as the friar Guillermo of Occam, you and your novice sidekick, Adso, have seven days to solve a murder at a remote mountain abbey. You are serving at the pleasure of the Abbot, and in the game, this is meant literally. There is an "Obsequiem" obedience meter in the bottom right corner of the screen which shrinks whenever you disobey ranking figures or do not come quickly enough when summoned. Allow your Obsequiem meter to run out and you will be banished from the abbey forever.
Mandatory Prayers in The Abbey of Crime, Opera Soft.
There are other, even harsher ways to lose. In a genre where players often prefer to wander around and do what they like, the monastic regimentation of The Abbey of Crime is severe. You can be compelled to start over from the beginning if you, say, don't show up to the refectory for dinner, or if you neglect to follow the Abbot's preferred seating arrangement. Planning on skipping the evening prayers at Vespers? I hope you're also planning on not playing the rest of the game. (And, yes, you heard it right: Vespers. This is likely the only video game ever to be organized by canonical hours: Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, Compline, and "Night." I find this to be objectively magnificent.)
Graphically, Juan Delcan's 3D isometric projection of the abbey is lovingly rendered, brick by brick, and at times reminiscent of a foreboding Albrecht Dürer woodcut or a parqueted M.C. Escher maze. Your perspective changes each time you exit the confines of one screen and enter another, a diagonal reversal that is simultaneously disorienting and cinematic. It feels of a piece with Eco's own visual research for the novel, where, in the novel's postscript, he explains that he "conducted long architectural investigations, studying photographs and floor plans in the encyclopedia of architecture, to establish the arrangement of the abbey, the distances, even the number of steps in a spiral staircase."
Mandatory Dinner in The Abbey of Crime, Opera Soft.
A friend of mine once said that when you're reading an Umberto Eco novel, your IQ automatically (and temporarily) jumps by about ten points, simply through osmosis. I think there's something to that—Eco's work is so Byzantine and immersive that the reader feels transported not only into the world of the novel (in this case, a Benedictine Monastery in 1327), but into the very cauldron of Eco's endlessly curious mind. This essential vitality is how a novel with heavy digressions into the Avignon Papacy and the vagaries of the Holy Roman Empire still managed to become an international pop-culture phenomenon, including a film adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. The novel is uniquely thrilling for bibliophiles, too, as at the center of its deepest mystery lies a forbidden book. With a nod to Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel," Eco lovingly describes the novel's pivotal locale, the aedificium library, as an arcane labyrinth—a place of danger, wonder, and enchantment that seems to exist outside of time and space.
Eco begins The Name of the Rose by explaining—in a bit of meta-Borgesian flourish—that his novel is "truly" a translation of a translation of a firsthand account by a 14th Century monk. As the book proceeds, its first hundred pages are notoriously difficult, driven more by papal history and cenobitic minutiae than a conventional plot. While it ultimately settles into a sort of Arthur Conan Doyle by-way-of Savonarola conspiratorial thriller, Eco readily admits there are sections of The Name of the Rose which are structured as a challenge to the reader, an outright test. In the postscript, Eco explains:
“I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey's own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.”
Scriptorium in The Abbey of Crime, Opera Soft.
In my correspondence with Delcan, he told me a bit about his own process in designing the game. At the time, he was a student at the prestigious ETSAM architecture school in Madrid, and, using Eco's descriptions as a foundation, he spent hours in the "beautiful National Library of Madrid, a magical building in the Paseo de Recoletos." It was there that he researched the floor plans of monasteries and abbeys from Germany, Italy, and the north of Spain in order to devise his own. I think Eco would find it fitting that Delcan's process mirrored his, and what better place to birth a virtual Eco world than in a cathedral of books?
The vast majority of The Abbey of Crime is spent traveling by foot from Point A to Point B. Along the way, you make observations, collect objects, and learn about the inner workings of the abbey. Frequently interrupted by mandatory meals and prayers, you’d think that the game was actively obstructing your investigation with a Sisyphean flourish. It is; it's forcing you into a patient, contemplative mindset, despite the continuous reminder of your seven-day time limit. Truly, you must, as Eco insisted, "accept the abbey's own pace." Having a Spanish-to-English dictionary at my side for the occasional translation emergency only amplified the general feeling of monk-like ritualism.
Ossuary at Night in The Abbey of Crime, Opera Soft.
Nighttime is when you sneak out of your cell and do some actual sleuthing. Wandering around after hours is forbidden, however, and if you are caught by the Abbot, who perpetually roams the darkened halls of the abbey, the game is over. This lends the game a survival-horror aspect, as a terrifying figure in black robes is always lurking in some corner of the screen, ready to put an end to your journey. Given the strict discipline of your days, it can feel psychologically transgressive to be snooping around at night. Each time you make a breakthrough in the case, you must hurry back to your cell before dawn. Immediately upon laying down to sleep, the screen flashes—it's morning already!—and before you know it, you're dashing off once more to make it on time to Prime prayers.
Among this pixelated graveyard of Game Over screens, there is a larger, and more artistic project at play. In forcing your obedience to a series of strict guidelines, you must test the limits of the abbey, gradually, to learn what rules must be obeyed and which may be flouted. Theoretically, it's not so different from being a renegade friar—an eager seeker of knowledge trapped within a rigid institution in the Dark Ages. In its own way, it aligns the game with Eco's ethos more than any straightforward adaptation ever could.
The Abbey of Crime offers none of the playful indulgences of the arcade; you never blast away at marauding aliens like in Space Invaders, nor do you swallow the occasional ghost as a super-charged Pac-Man. As Delcan explains, "there were plenty of games of immediate gratification and this was clearly not one of them." You might as well be a cloistered monk, writing diligently at your desk in the scriptorium. The closest it comes to traditional entertainment may be in its final moments, when you're chasing the murderer through the maze-like library. As in the novel, your victory is pyrrhic, and defined by loss. In other words, my kind of video game.
Sean Gill is a writer and filmmaker who won Pleiades’ 2019 Gail B. Crump Prize, The Cincinnati Review's 2018 Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the 2017 River Styx Micro-Fiction Contest, and the 2016 Sonora Review Fiction Prize. He has studied with Werner Herzog and Juan-Luis Buñuel, documented public defenders for National Geographic, and other recent work may be found in The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
