picked this up for 5 minutes cuz i was feeling nostalgic. concept is unremarkable but game predictably defaults to spinning as much vgame nonsense out of it as possible (points, challenge increasing in phases etc.) not necessary, v emblematic of the "one clever mechanic" type design in vogue at the time

i know im obnoxiously trashing in a decade-old jam game but it doesnt go far enough with "everything on the screen is part of the game mechanically" like the cursor isn't part of the game mechanically neither is the effect of a box getting sucked into your avatar

idk just seeing what i can learn... "solid color square spinning around" was a cornerstone of my vidgame aesthetics when i was 10

remember being left cold by this. sure flashes of humanity while out of your mind at the Club or w/e (i've never been to a party before) but showing a picture of a baby or a car crash on the screen or having an honest to god Love Minigame - subverted i guess but still too familiar - seemed like especially one-note ways of doing that. it really is just basic 2000s/2010s weepy artsy indie shit but with slightly more flair. idk strikes me as kind of obvious and self-serious when the increpares i liked most (namely opera omnia, universal history of light, subway adventure, the serpent) exhibited a lot of distanciation and shi and humor where applicable.

( notes on whole series)

To me this is deliberately a pointlessly gloomy series. That reading probably says more about me than the series but i at least reckon it's the kind of thing that requires you to provide your own emotional distance from what it shows you. LLL2 especially struck me for being cynical to the point of self-defeat: "if you steal from the rich the poor will get greedy and the rich will starve" is clearly not something the game actually believes in and speaks more to a general pessimism about everything (see also the new agey ecology and you slam poetry bgm) including the integrity of its own pessimism. this also holds for the amusingly bleak ending of LLL3. I think the series as a whole evokes such states of mind and in particular the fear of becoming a functional adult pretty well, regardless of where it takes them, if anywhere. (I should reiterate my reading of this game is very self-centered and rooted in the kind of person i was when i first played this game, take it as nothing more than a personal reaction!! I know nothing)

There's also a lot to be said for how these games look and sound. In particular, the distorted pixels that result from setting the gamemaker sprite editor's "resize image" function to "poor" quality and the blurriness created by its "rotate image" function really speak to me as someone who grew up with the engine. There's an alternate universe where this kind of thing is as much a calling card of gamemaker as unused rpg menus are of rpgmaker or plunderludic aesthetics are of unity, instead of the vaguer matrix of "z-games"/"newgrounds shitpost"/"boring workmanly indie"/cactus that its corpus ended up being. also, the song in LLL3 is an all-timer shittymidi vgm.

Gameplay wise the LLL games seem predictive of some of Jake Clovers walking sims, like galah galah, waterfall, and duck turnip, the last of which I would describe as one of the few games that actually understands the value of restraint.  I think these games are important in that their lack of interactivity leads to more elusive effects than you can get from either the mechanical or narrative/textual depth ppl usually focus on in vgames, or for that matter from tedious 'WASD essays'. Jake clover is generally more elusive (only being able to walk and other forms of non-interactivity become ways of focusing stray impulses meditatively or engaging in weird kinds of roleplay etc. etc) which I like more but I might be missing something with LLL.

- i'm mildly offended that this game expects me to find it entertaining

- i was initially drawn to the charmingly abstract economy including a mysterious minigame at the start of each session where you shoot at descending bags of money to determine your starting budget. well as it happens the economy never gets more complicated than "don't shoot at anything that isn't a bandit", so there's really nothing here

- not especially bothered by the fact that i couldn't tell at first that the bouncing little men were NOT bandits but were civilians pointing me to my quarry and shooting them was NOT legal - wasn't a problem once i found out. more bothered by the fact that their presence reduces the gameplay loop to taking a bunch of directions through one of the more frightfully monotonous videogame maps i've ever inhabited. not even an interesting kind of busywork and i think a part of my negative reaction is also that the game dresses it all up so handsomely instead of doubling down on the sparseness and monotony.

- this game's idea of "quick draw" is miserable. using a joystick to aim is always a bad idea. having half a second to aim is alright but not having half a second to identify where the other guy even is. to make matters worse, at the end of that half-second the man is guaranteed a hit on you. bullshit!! none of the drama or romance of a real (fictional) quick draw. i haven't watched a single western but i know this aint it nor was it never

- i'm not one to go boy am i glad for the Quality Control in games nowadays but boy howdee does this ever play like shit. your little guy can only walk forward, turning 90 degrees in every direction, which is a trouble when you are expected to a) aim and b) evade the civilians dashing all over the place at the speed of a carriage. the keyboard controls are predictably carpal tunnel-inducing but the joystick is somehow not much better: you may point it in any of the ordinal directions to move thataway but your little guy is still obliged to turn giving his movement a nauseatingly stuttering quality, especially in tenser moments. of course, the ordinal directions for your joystick do not correspond perfectly to those in the game's isometric view, either. i can abide and often enjoy excruciating movement controls but "excruciation" implies a kind of active struggle, tension, cruft, bearing with it. this is just slippery, and everything moves too fast. this all may sound nebulous and in fact it is; i'm not very sure myself why these irritations don't in fact complicate the tediousness of this game's setup. playing more actual games is making me reevaluate my immature unilateral stance on such "bad games". but in any case i dont want to just say Game Not Fun

- Game Not Fun

- i figured i'd played too many good old games lately so this was a welcome change of pace. from what i played of nightshade it seems to have all the same problems

- the tech WAS there, they weren't trying. manic miner and jetpac had been released two years earlier and are at least interesting to play. it wouldn't have taken much to make a game like this worthwhile

there's a 2004 win32 remake with built in english translation if you dont want to play the extensum remake https://la-abadia-del-crimen-the-abbey-of-crime.en.uptodown.com/windows

kind of a nightmare to get through but um im not sure what it did to my brain. its kind of living inside of me at the moment. maybe stockholm syndrome. rly terse in how it expects you to make sense of the evidence it presents to you as heavily abstracted into videogame form and also not interpreted for you by the characters. the terseness of dialogue is funny too, especially in contrast with the florid prose bookends taken straight from the original book, The Name of the Rose. i haven't read it yet but it would appear "adapt a classic novel/movie but make all the plot events Gameplay Sequences" as a general tendency has been with videogames from the beginning... la abadia never quite succeeds at conveying the full thematic or aesthetic content that i assume is in the original despite trying to sell you on it with the aforementioned prose bookends and with detailed simulation of the monks' movements (which makes their more insectoid or single-minded tendencies stand out all the more): whats left feels weirder, emptier, more mechanical... terser. more or less requires you to know the plot of Name of the Rose to progress, especially for a late game clue you're given all of five minutes to interpret, which i guess is not much of a step up from using the map that the devs published in a game magazine to get through the labyrinth. idk hard to describe. i will need to sit on it.

the abbey while not QUITE as mysterious as i expected is a new favorite videogame location for me. the monks' routines and even in a way the screen-to-screen shifts in perspective bring it to life. also, between this and yume nikki i reckon theres a deep symbolic charge to games having exactly one infuriating maze section

anyway this is a fun game, use a guide, its basically the intended experience https://www.habisoft.com/pcwwiki/doku.php?id=en:nuevos:abadia

idk if i really grasped it but i will say i haven't played many games that demand your acquiescence quite like this?? ascetic, devotional. also cute




































SPOILER i liked the scene with the spirit over the water. it would appear theres some random elements in this game.