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So let?s get this started. That?s us there on the title screen, the angry looking monk. As far as I am aware he doesn?t have a proper name, and he has an uncanny resemblance to the hero from another game I?ve LPed before. But in any case, if you?ve ever played a HOG (and why would you have, really) you?ll recognize a lot from this game. In fact, it uses the same engine all hidden object games use. It also still has the three HOG difficulties (Casual, Adventure, and Challenge) and so I pick Casual. Casual means you get hints on where things are hidden more often, and this will come in handy, as you will see.

So in any case this is an adventure game and it has a plot, and the plot starts in

Year of Our Lord 1286
Rome, St. Peter?s Church

Our hero is receiving an assignment from his superior.



You?ll notice the horrible compression here. The game just... the game just looks like that and there?s nothing I can do about it so just deal with it.

You?ll travel to the north ? to Lombardy. There?s a monastery there high in the Alps mountains. Few days after Prior Santino passed away brother John went missing. Nobody knows where he is. And then the statue in the main square started to cry tears of blood. A miracle?!



Travel there and investigate the situation. The world has no need for false prophecies! Monks who live there will not know we sent you to investigate. I?ll inform them of your arrival. But they will think of you as of replacement for brother John.

So our mission is to go and solve a murder. But first, we visit our room to find all the things we will need for the journey.



Can you see the things we need to pick up? Actually, some of those are red herrings, and the first thing we need is this:



Our monk hero?s ring is missing a gem. You might wonder why someone would need a ring without the gemstone, but fortunately our next job is to fix it. In fact, we can?t leave until we do so.

We grab the key (I don?t really need to tell you where the key is, do I?) and then we try grabbing that weird angel cherub thing and



I don?t understand. I also grab the crucifix. Now, that chest seems suspicious, and we have a key; let?s see what?s inside it.



Oh for fuck?s sake, this is our trunk. We live in a monastery.



Why is there a lock like this on our trunk? Why would there be a lock like this ever?



We rotate the dials until they match and a gem appears out of nowhere. We combine it with our ring to make a signet ring, we grab the cloak hidden behind those curtains on the right, and we?re ready to head off on our journey.





Now, before I leave off, I want to say a little something about adventure game design. Early adventure games often would have necessary items in locations which you could never return to ? missing an item like this is often called ?dead man walking? adventure design, because from the time you leave to whenever you need the item, your game is unwinnable with no way to know this. Slightly more sophisticated adventure games will circumvent this by just not letting you leave until you find all the items that you can?t win the game without ? annoying for the player, but ultimately an improvement. So when I played the beginning bit, I assumed that was what was happening ? the game was giving me key items (a crucifix for defeating some monster or something later on, for example) to solve puzzles with later on.



Actually, though, you lose all your items between Acts. The game developer was just fucking with us for no reason, and that will only get more and more obvious as the game goes on.


Welcome to Where Angels Cry.