If you’ve seen the movie "In the Name of the Rose," you know the basic premise of this game. Of course, if you’ve seen "In the Name of the Rose," you’ll also be wishing the main character, Brother Leonardo de Toledo, had half the brains of Sean Connery. And his acolyte, Bruno can’t hold a candle to Christian Slater, either in looks or wit, or voice, or well, much of anything.
If you haven’t seen the movie (which you should go out and rent), the basic premise of the game is that you are a monk in some vague middle ages area in Spain, traveling with your pain-in-the-butt acolyte Bruno to a distant abbey to visit their library. Before you can even get there, you’re ambushed on the road and someone tries to kill you by dropping a boulder on your head.
This doesn’t really seem to bother you, and as soon as you meet the abbot, you’re given the task of solving the murder of the gatekeeper. Simple enough. Only problem is, the game moves at the pace of the monks themselves; ponderously slow.
The opening cinematic is quite nice, and the game features some rather refreshing "Disney-esque" animated style characters with well-drawn backgrounds for the interior shots.
Unfortunately, unless you’re actively speaking to a NPC, there’s no action in the background or other characters, making them seem even more unreal.
The voice acting was alright. I personally enjoyed the voices, but it seemed as if the actors had no idea what they were reading for and didn’t know what their character’s emotional state should be. There’s just something strange about seeing a plump abbot making pious gestures and the voice being all fire-and-brimstone.
The dialogue was a bit heavy and ponderous, although you did get to choose your responses, which at least made it more entertaining. Of course, Leonardo, who prizes himself on his keen wit, often seems dumber than a box of rocks, and can’t even solve an obvious murder right under his nose.
The movement and interaction system is slow and sometimes confusing, using both left and right mouse buttons to achieve only slightly different results, mostly pointless variations in dialogue.
The movement is painfully slow as well. In fact, aside from using a map to warp to various buildings, if you’ve got to actually walk anymore, you might just want to order a pizza and watch a movie. You’ll be consulting the users manual for quite a while when you first start to play, because nothing is all that logical, including the so-called puzzles.
Mostly tile-type or painfully simple puzzles, you would probably have just as much chance of being entertained by banging your head on the keyboard.
This game looks like it has so much potential, from the great packaging to the opening cinematic. Unfortunately after that, the only potential it has is to put you to sleep.