Where Angels Cry HD is a nicely drawn adventure that takes your character on a secret mission for the Vatican – to investigate the "miracle" of a statue shedding tears of blood. Your journey begins in a snow-covered country monastery where you will explore the chapel, surrounding grounds, kitchen and stables. Things look as they should and there is charm to the art. The objects scattered around for you to collect are not necessarily obvious, so you will have to keep a keen eye out for things to use in your quest of discovery.

The background music is appropriately haunting and orchestral, sometimes even sweeping at times. It worked well with the feel of the game. Sound effects were appropriate whether it be hammering nails or collecting materials. Voiceovers overall were pretty good, but there were a couple of characters that I really didn’t like at all. A young boy in the village had a high-pitched voice that sounded very fake, while the Templar Knights all sounded somewhat brutish but not exactly "right." Everyone else was enjoyable to listen to and for the most part, I listened to their dialogue even though I read much quicker than the spoken word.

Where Angels Cry HD takes you to a monastery where Prior Santino has recently passed away, naming Prior Pakal in his stead. On the grounds of the monastery sits a statue weeping tears of blood and it is your job to find out just what is going on at the monastery. Pretty quickly, you find that Prior Pakal is a man who keeps to himself and has the church shrouded in secrecy, but you have to determine whether his reasons are for good or evil.

Where Angels Cry HD is touted as a hidden object adventure, but it is really an adventure where you pick up objects along the way. Most of the time, you won’t know what you are looking for, so you just have to click on anything that looks useful. If you require multiples of one type of object, once you pick up the first one, you’ll see that you have obtained 1 of 6 (or whatever the number is that you need), so you at least have a goal there. Other than that, you’ll travel throughout the monastery getting tasks from the different brothers there, as well as the menacing Templars who are guarding something for Pakal, but what?

You will encounter numerous puzzles in your quest and most are standard fare. There are slide puzzles, rotate the picture puzzles, puzzles where you move items around to make colors match, etc. One puzzle that I thought was really novel for an adventure game was a Puzzle Quest variant. Here, your character goes up against a Templar knight in a battle, but instead of an action-filled fight sequence, you play this Match-3 game where you match colored marbles to eliminate them from the screen. There is a life meter for you and the knight located on opposite sides of the screen and when you match 3 skulls, the Templar is injured and his life bar goes down. When you match 3 swords, you actually injure yourself. I just quickly skimmed the directions and was eliminating skulls and sword matches left and right until I noticed my life bar growing increasingly red. It always pays to read the instructions thoroughly. As with these types of games, you can always skip a puzzle after a specific amount of time has passed, so if you get stuck, you aren’t truly stuck for long.

The difficulty level in Where Angels Cry HD depends on which setting you select when you begin the game. If you choose Casual, you will see sparkles on any active areas (hidden object scenes, places where there is something to collect or a puzzle to do), you’ll get fast Hint and Skip recharge, and an extended Task List. This means that you can look at the basic Task List and click on each task, further revealing more detailed tasks below. It just gives you a little bit extra to go on, if you get stuck. Adventure ramps things up a bit by removing the sparkles in active areas, but you still get the fast Hint and Skip recharge and the extended Task List. Challenge is the hardest where you have no sparkles in active areas, a slow Hint and Skip recharge, and you just have the basic Task List. Since I don’t consider myself an expert at adventure games and Where Angels Cry HD was more of an adventure game than anything else, I played on Casual. Naturally, you can always skip any puzzles that get you stuck, once your Skip meter fills up, that is.

Where Angels Cry HD plays like your basic adventure game, with your character wandering through areas and following arrows to indicate where you may proceed. You’ll pick up any items that may look useful and sometimes combine them to accomplish whatever goals are set out before you. Some of the tasks were pretty straightforward, while others seemed a bit convoluted to me. Again, my forte is not the adventure genre, so adventure game fans may see things a bit differently.

If you see sparkles, those often indicate an area where you can play a hidden object scene. Simply click on the sparkles and you’ll be taken into the scene where you’ll have a list of items at the bottom of the screen to for you to locate. One item among this list is the real item you need to proceed, but the hidden object scene is your means to an end. I typically enjoyed these and they broke up the areas where I might be searching for something and I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed.

Most of the puzzles seemed to be standard adventure game fare, but once again, you are never stuck when you come to a hard puzzle. All you have to do is wait for the Skip meter to fill up and you can bypass a puzzle. The same goes for being stuck when you might not know how to proceed. If you have exhausted your options with extending the Task List, you can always click on the Hint button and it will point in a direction to go. Your Hint doesn’t actually get used until you have arrived at the correct location, so if you are several screens away, you can keep clicking Hint until you arrive at the place you need to be, which is helpful.

Overall, I enjoyed Where Angels Cry HD, even though it was more adventure-y than I tend to like. The storyline is very dark though, so be prepared for a story filled with intrigue, murder and a strong dose of evil.