L'ABBAYE DES MORTS

GAME INFO: L'Abbaye des Morts is a side-scrolling action game intentionally styled after video games developed for the Spectrum ZX home computer in the early 1980s, characterized by vivid block colors, simple music, and single-screen gameplay. The player controls a Cathar monk named Jean Raymond as he attempts to elude crusaders who were sent to murder the Cathars on the order of Pope Innocent III in thirteenth-century France. After the game's initial release in 2010, several graphical updates were implemented that make it resemble ports on the Amstrad PCW, Commodore 64, MSX Home Computer, Nintendo Game Boy, Sega Genesis, and for Microsoft PCs with the IMB's Video Graphics Array card.

SETTING: As stated, this game is set in thirteenth-century France, specifically between the years 1209 and 1229 CE during which the Albigensian Crusade took place. Known primarily for being critical of the material world and for insisting that reality was governed by evil, the Cathars were considered heretics for several complex religious and political reasons to the point where Pope Innocent III declared that any French noblemen who occupied Cathar land would be granted ownership of said property. An army of crusaders ravaged Southern France and obliterated Catharists at the seat of their faith in Montsegur, where only a small, informal sect of Catharist practitioners still remain to this day. In trying to escape the crusaders, the player enters an old, abandoned church, and traverses its eerie emptiness only to find a treacherous subcurrent of undeath and devilry far below its foundation.

FUNERARY IMAGERY: Immediately before entering the church, the players cross a ruined graveyard with small breaches in the earth opening into spiked pits. The graveyard is populated with upright headstones vaguely resembling capstones bearing crosses and the indication of weathered inscriptions that fade into the shadow of night that forms a pitch black backdrop over the entire introduction of the game and would become its equally dark cthonic environment as the game progresses. When players begins their descent beneath the church, they encounter a crypt lined with skeletons entombed in coffins, some of which have already emerged and are seen wandering back and forth.

ANALYSIS: L'Abbaye des Morts is a fascinating example of Gothic semiosis in that it offers a fictionalized, and indeed mythic, representation of a very real and notable historical event that is, aside from being infused with supernatural elements, is also anachronistic. Despite taking place in the thirteenth century, the game features post-modern tombstones at its outset that were not commonplace until the seventeenth century. By and large, Medieval European graveyards were much more transient environments where bodies would be regularly inhumed and exhumed, and where bones would be placed in designated spaces like charnel houses and ossuaries if not strewn throughout the burial grounds or in the church itself. While permanent graves were less common, they were marked by different tombstones, in most cases taking the form of grave slabs placed horizontally over the body, but also in stone sarcofagi and chest tombs. Upright headstones like the kind depicted in L'Abbaye des Morts were almost entirely absent from burial grounds in the Middle Ages. However, players expect certain symbols to manifest in video games, particularly in games that intend to invoke horror and certainly in games with medieval themes, thus enduring as an anachronistic element that never truly feels out of place. This form of anachronism is also one of the defining elements of the original Gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, wherein authors attempted to describe Medieval Europe with sensibilities that were distinctly contemporary in their own time. L'Abbaye des Morts operates in the fullest Gothic modality by re-telling a Medieval story with all of the trappings of video games from the 1980s and 1990s, incorporating familiar symbols that have already become well established in videoludic culture at the time of the game's release in 2010.

Gallery

Graveyard in the style of Spectrum ZX


Graveyard in the style of Sega Genesis/Megadrive


Graveyard in the style of MSX Home Computer


Graveyard in the style of Amstrad PCW


Graveyard in the style of Nintendo Gameboy


Graveyard in the style of VGA for MS-DOS


Graveyard in the style of Commodore 64