The Abbey of Crime Extensum

"The Abbey of Crime Extensum" is a unusual retro 2D isometric adventure game where you take on the role of a monk, solving a few murders in a Benedictine abbey. Large elements of the game were pretty much plagiarised from a book by Umberto Eco, so this is creatively bankrupt. Hey, at least the developer didn't exhume the corpse of HP Lovecraft like most amateur developers love to do. I guess the line was too long. The retro imagery is clearly ripped off the Commodore 64-vibe, and the developer stole the font from the 1990's Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons games. It doesn't properly map either EGA or Commodore 64 colour palettes, however, so it looks extremely inauthentic. That's a fail. What do you do in the game? It's a lot of moving around the isometric environment with wonky controls and reading a badly written Umberto Eco fan-fiction. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. This features really godawful pixelcrap "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. Games like Terraria and Stardew Valley succeeded [i]despite[/i] the bad graphics, not because of them. This game is ancient, it's over 10 years old... it's heavily dated and isn't going to give you a remotely contemporary gaming experience... another reason for gamers to be hesitant about adding this to their libraries. This is the part of the review where we need to ask gamers to keep a straight face. This garbage was made with Java, it's basically a 1990's browser/Flash game/Java applet that's been dumped here on Steam Direct, it's polluting the place with 1990's browser tier garbage, and that's a real problem. Don't laugh, they seriously thought it was okay to make a game with Java and publish it on Steam! That's right, this developer was trying to profit from this, they wanted your gamer money for a Java applet. It's appalling, isn't it? Now on to pricing and value for gamers. Most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's usually some kind of monetisation, from nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, to any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable, or something you might want to spend your time on. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? Pass on this one. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.