Silent Valley: Mansion Mystery HD is pretty much pure adventure. You'll experience environmental puzzles throughout the game and you'll need to pick up lots of objects in the environment to get through the game, but I don't recall any actual hidden object scenes. The puzzles I came across were often odd. In one, I came across a child's toy that depicted a farm scene. Your goal here is to make cheese, but nothing about your situation really told you that or how to go about doing it other than the question mark that simply said you must make cheese, or something like that. Another puzzle had you line up objects on a wheel according to their color. Still another one had you trying to light up totems by outlining them correctly. One of the more obscure puzzles aside from the child's farm was one where you open a cabinet to discover a grouping of flags from various countries and the foods that might come from these countries. You must match the foods to the flags and if you don't know your flags, you are pretty much screwed because some of the food items weren't that obvious. Another puzzle had you going through a pile of door knocker halves and matching them all up. The remaining one was the one you needed. Another puzzle had you connecting circuits to deactivate an alarm, and another had you encounter a soldered shut door. The question mark here wouldn't activate to tell me what I needed to do next and I had forgotten that I had picked up a soldering gun much earlier. The Hint button simply directed me to the door panel. Only through trial and error did I get to the soldering gun and then even while using it, you had to hit the exact spot to get it to work. There's also a puzzle involving dates and names and unless you were paying a lot of attention and writing info down while you were looking at tombstones in the cemetery, you'll have to simply try all of the date combinations listed in your diary. To me, this just isn't fun.
All throughout Silent Valley: Mansion Mystery HD, I just felt like the game gave me no true direction. Sure, I could keep hitting the Hint button to see where to go, but I wasn't compelled to see the story through to the bitter end or even what happened to the characters. The Strategy Guide didn't give me much help either. Sure, there were notations, but it wasn't super useful. I must also mention that there are 20 grey bird feathers located in and around the areas of the game. Typically, these would be optional pickups that earn you some Achievement, but the game insists that you pick them up. Basically, if you look inside of a basket and there is a needed object and a feather, if you pick up the object, the game will stay focused on the basket until you snag the feather. I liked having the running total of how many feathers I had and still needed on the HUD though, as it told me how much longer I had left in the game. When I neared the requisite 20 feathers, I was glad the game was almost over; however you actually have to use those feathers to complete the game by creating an Indian headdress to save your husband's life. Huh? Again, it didn't really make sense to me.
