A medieval monastery is a great setting for an IF game, with its built-in creepy atmosphere and its natural and clearly-defined map. The divisions of the monastic day are ideal for a Gabriel Knight model of the passage of time, and the limited set of characters is an ideal cast for a Name of the Rose-style mystery, or some M.R. Jamesian horror. Vespers is one of those great game ideas that seem so obvious once you've seen them that it's a mystery why they haven't been done before.
So why did I hate it? Well, to begin with, the plot is boilerplate stuff, the standard one-gets-bumped-off-at-a-time slasher horror fare, all caused by some generic demonic evil. Then the writing is all over the place, veering from failed Plotkinesque ("mould creeps from the blackness", warmth "awaits" everywhere) to careless modern plebianism (monks says things like "I would normally write in my journal..." and "Oh, fine... Just fine"). The pseudo-bible quotes are worth exactly one chuckle, but they're a poor imitation of the real KJV. And there's the odd awkward phrasing like the near-zeugma of "the walls glisten with dampness and dance".
The game spends so much time straining to be atmospheric ("Time passes. Slowly"; "it smells of sweat and tears" -- what do tears smell like?) and horrific (the unrelenting mentions of blood, mucus, slime) that the effect is ridiculous. Maybe the intended effect was camp, but Vespers is not entertaining enough to be camp -- it's just hysterical and dull. The sense of history -- not high on the game's agenda, I know, but this is still a historical game -- is very poor. I hope no reviewer says "this is the Middle Ages", because the goings-on here resemble the middle ages only in someone's fevered and unpleasant imagination.
The gameplay has an element of learn-by-dying, with some puzzles being poorly hinted (the PC is too weak to push a bed, but strong enough to carry a woman?) even when you read the hints. There are multiple endings, and multiple solutions, which I suppose is a good thing. Some reviewer will doubtless make solemn comments about "evil being the easiest path", but all that proves is that it's easy to conceive and program a murderous solution, not that it's easy to actually do it. To its credit, the game explicitly claims not to be a theology lesson.
Rating: 4