L'Abbaye des Morts

About the game

It is the 13th century, and the Cathars of the Languedoc, in the south of France, are being driven out by a crusade. One of them, Jean Raymond, runs from the soldiers and slips into an old abandoned church to hide. The doors close behind him, and the only way forward is down, through a building that has clearly been waiting for someone.

L'Abbaye des Morts is an exploration platformer made of fixed screens, each one a room with its own name. Jean can walk, crouch and jump, and that is all: he has no weapon, so bats, rats, skeletons, ghosts, spiders and worse have to be avoided, along with spikes, falling drops, fire and water. The rooms connect in every direction, from the forest outside to a bell tower, wine cellars, flooded caves and catacombs, and the goal is to find the twelve crosses hidden among them. Switches open locked passages, checkpoints mark where you return after losing a life, and the occasional heart adds a life to the counter.

Scrolls found along the way carry short messages that hint at how to get past the harder rooms. Only with all twelve crosses does the way to the end open.

Playing it here

This is the MSX version, a homebrew adaptation for the 1980s home computer standard that was especially popular in Japan, Europe and Brazil (where it sold as the Gradiente Expert and the Sharp Hotbit). It is a fan-made port by an independent developer, not a commercial release, written for MSX1 machines on a 256 KB cartridge. It runs here in the blueMSX emulator with C-BIOS, a free replacement for the MSX system software.

Click Play, wait for the Retro Deluxe logo to pass and press Enter on the title screen; Space there switches to an instructions screen and back. The short introduction that follows waits for Space. Your computer keyboard works as the MSX keyboard, and F2 saves the full state of the emulator in this browser while F4 brings it back. A gamepad acts as the MSX joystick, with the bottom button for jumping; to leave the title screen you still need Enter on the keyboard.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Read every scroll. The messages are short and sound cryptic, but each one points at a specific obstacle somewhere in the abbey, and some of them mean exactly what they say.

Touch the checkpoints. After losing a life, Jean comes back at the last checkpoint he touched, not at the room's entrance, so it pays to step on each new one as soon as you see it.

Look for low and thin passages. Crouching lets Jean slip through gaps too low to walk through, and on some thin platforms holding Down drops him to the floor below.

Use F2 before a risky jump. The game has no password or save of its own, so a quick emulator save before a hard room can spare you a long walk back.

Credits and licence

L'Abbaye des Morts was created by Locomalito, with music and illustrations by Gryzor87, and first released for Windows in 2010. Locomalito publishes it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which is how ports like this one can exist. The MSX version was made by Enric Martin Geijo, as Retro Deluxe, in 2020, with the graphics, maps and music converted to the MSX's hardware, on top of his own RetroDeLuxe Engine. Its music player is based on the Vortex Tracker II PT3 player by S.V.Bulba, as adapted for the MSX by Dioniso, MSXKun, SapphiRe and mvac7, and its sound effects on SapphiRe's ayFX replayer. The port is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3, and the author's repository at the release tag is hosted alongside the game. The licence texts are linked from this page.