Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive
Developer: Alcachofa Soft
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.4 GHz CPU or Equivalent; 512 MB RAM; 3 GB free disk space; 64 MB graphics card, GeForce4 Ti generation or ATI Radeon 9500 (DirectX 9.0c compatible); DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card; 4x CD-ROM; keyboard, mouse and speakers
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The gaming public must really love their point-and-click adventures. Publisher Dreamcatcher Interactive pumps them out so fast; it’s hard to keep up. Now they’ve teamed up with Crimson Cow and developer Alcachofa Soft to release Murder in the Abbey, a murder mystery with a very familiar plot.

Brother Leonardo de Toledo, a former imperial advisor, has a keen analytical mind and a dark past. Bruno, his novice, is the teenage son of an aristocrat.
They are traveling to a remote monastery to investigate the mysterious death of Anselmo, the abbey’s gatekeeper, who has had an unfortunate encounter with a 200-pound frankincense censer. Before they reach the monastery’s front gate, a shrouded figure tries to crush them with a rolling boulder, and thus begins an investigation that leads to more murders and reveals links to the occult within the abbey’s walls.

Murder in the Abbey is populated by a cast of quirky characters. There’s Egidio, the haughty stable boy who has taken over Anselmo’s gate keeping duties. Eladio, the healer, is in charge of the abbey’s hospital and is a long-time friend of Leonardo’s. Marcello, the librarian, jealously controls access to the library, refusing entry to everyone who is not a copyist, and then there’s Arcadio, the monastery’s oldest resident, who seems to have a conversational relationship with a belladonna plant. All of these people play important roles in the mystery Leonardo tries to solve.

Continuing Dreamcatcher’s current trend, Murder in the Abbey ships on multiple CDs (three, in this instance) instead of on a single DVD, making the install take longer than it probably should, but it’s also possible to play without any of the disks in the drive. The install process places an icon on the desktop, which can be used to access the game.

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