Graphics: In a rather bold design decision, the developer has imbued Murder in the Abbey with a cartoon look, featuring exaggerated faces and movements and lots of solid colors. Once you get used to the idea of playing your favorite Saturday morning animated TV show, however, you discover a litany of errors. Leonardo will occasionally walk through Bruno instead of going around him, and Bruno’s got his own problems. Every so often the young apprentice will do his best mime imitation and walk in place for no apparent reason. Arcadio spends an entire five-minute conversation continually watering his favorite plant, and the lip-synch animations are dreadful. Some of the backgrounds are very attractive, and little touches such as character shadows and dusty breezes are well rendered, but, for the most part, the animation is mediocre at best.

Interface: Simplicity is the rule of the day with The Abbey’s interface. The drop-down inventory pane is an excellent idea; being able to access the inventory without searching for a keyboard key keeps your focus on the task at hand, and there’s a map that can be used as a rapid-movement device; just double-click on a destination and you’re there. But, as user-friendly as it is, the interface is littered with unfortunate problems. Dialogue subtitles frequently don’t match the spoken script; sometimes you can see the character’s jaw moving as if he’s speaking an entire paragraph, when there’s only one word in the subtitles. The map transport system only works outside buildings, and not at all in the third part of the game. The journal defaults to the first page of text every time you open it, so you have to cycle through an entire game’s worth of entries to get to the most current one, and the camera is not adjustable, which is a problem when characters stand between you and objects that have to be examined or collected.

Gameplay: Most adventure games mix a liberal amount of puzzle solving into the usual gameplay scheme. Murder in the Abbey, on the other hand, is all about reading and/or listening to spoken dialogue. There are times, especially in the final scenes, when you will literally spend as long as 10 minutes waiting for conversations to end (if you read faster than the actors speak, you could right-click through the subtitles, but you take the risk of missing something important). There are only two real puzzles in the game, and one of them is solved by Leonardo in a cut scene. The other is a diabolical tile-sliding puzzle that must be completed to get to the end of Act 3.

Then there’s the story. Cinefiles will recognize it immediately from the film version of Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose.” The sharp-minded, crime-solving monk and his young, naive novice; the unusual deaths at the isolated abbey; the library filled with labyrinthine passages; The Abbey has all of these in common with the movie, including other plot points I won’t mention to avoid spoiling the game’s ending. There’s even a character named Umberto, seemingly a nod to the novel’s author. It’s this shocking lack of originality, and the mountain of dialog, which make this game relentlessly boring to play.

Sound FX: Sonic heavy-handedness abounds in The Abbey. All of the characters make a loud clopping sound when they walk, no matter upon what type of surface they are walking. Other ambient sounds are practically non-existent, with background music being the primary vehicle for setting the mood. The voice acting varies from merely adequate to outrageously over-the-top. For an abbey presumably located in the Spanish mountains, there are all kinds of British dialects, but not a single Spanish accent.

Music: The score, by composer Emilio de Paz, is Murder in the Abbey’s saving grace. There are plenty of well written cuts that emphasize the mood of the proceedings, some of which involve a menacing-sounding choir singing in Latin. The only real problem is that the default volume of the music is set much too low, but a quick visit to the options menu sets things right.

Difficulty: As usual, one of the measures of an adventure game’s difficulty is how much of it you can get through without outside help, and I managed to do surprisingly well. The dialogue generally does a good job of successfully guiding you through The Abbey’s plot with a minimum of head-scratching, and when you find a room containing a vital clue to the mystery, the game does not allow you to leave without finding it. The most difficult aspect is staying engaged long enough to get to the end.

Overall: I didn’t know what to expect when I started playing Murder in the Abbey, but I was not anticipating a plot seemingly reworked from a mildly obscure 1986 Sean Connery film. The children’s cartoon art style is at odds with the decidedly adult nature of the story, which includes some disturbingly creepy double entendres (parents, be prepared to answer some uncomfortable questions). The interface, although pleasingly simple, is filled with bugs. Any murder-mystery game that has you spending more time reading than you do playing is bound to lose the interest of its players long before the killer’s identity is revealed. With so many other choices in the adventure genre out there, Murder in the Abbey is one that can easily be skipped.