I cannot tell whether Where Angels Cry was an earnest attempt to create a puzzle adventure game with serious metaphysical themes or if it was intended to be a parody of that style of game. You might say I'm not sure which reality I prefer, which simply compounds the confusion. There are layers here to unpack.

The player takes on the role of some guy, apparently a medieval Vatican detective/spy, who is sent to a monastery in the Alps to secretly investigate the recent disappearance of one Brother John, and (unrelatedly) claims of a statue on the grounds that weeps tears of blood. Why these investigations should be conducted in secret is not clear, except perhaps that it was a necessary pretext to introduce the Monastery Chore Simulator™ which comprises the majority of the gameplay.

I am inured to puzzle adventure games that subject the player to a barrage of seemingly disconnected tasks which all culminate in the opening of some door that permits the player to proceed to the next battery of unrelated threads to pull. Frequently, in these games, I look at my inventory and am never quite sure if there isn’t some other stupid thing I am supposed to do before everything fits together--right up to the moment it does.

In Where Angels Cry, the chores the player must undertake are all perfectly straightforward and ordinary, and are completed using perfectly straightforward and ordinary means. An illustrative example: The player is told they must tend to a horse. The horse must be brushed, shod, and fed. One might expect that the player cannot interact directly with the horse, and/or that the horse can only be tended to by engaging some Rube Goldberg mechanism, perhaps causing robot hands to descend from on high to administer to the horse’s needs.

Instead, the tools to complete these chores are the ones that immediately spring to mind, and can be located about the grounds. The tortuous, disconnected logic of the puzzle adventure game is instead engaged by moving the goalposts: You cannot use just any hammer you see lying around; you must find the one you can mouseover. You cannot just brush the horse with the brush you find, you have to wipe the horse down with water first. The game tells you these things as though you would be an idiot for believing otherwise.

Every chore is drawn out in this fashion, elaborately but not in a way that increases its difficulty, to the point that I have trouble interpreting it as anything other than commentary on the conventions of the puzzle adventure genre. In some cases--as with the wet horse example--the new goal post adds literally two clicks worth of gameplay. Is the game stupid for erecting such a nominal challenge, or am I stupid for expecting to perform some intellectual labour when the game told me plainly that I needed to brush a horse?

As the player navigates each act’s Monastery Chore Simulator™, they will be bottlenecked by traditional puzzle mini-games of weak to moderate difficulty. “Traditional,” in this sense, meaning implementations of basic brain-teasers like the Tower of Hanoi, leapfrog or Bejewelled; brain-teasers that lend themselves to simple heuristic solutions that just about anyone drawn to a puzzle adventure game will come armed with.

These puzzles are, again, so rote and uninspired that my mind rushes in to assume some intention lurking beneath their mediocrity. I look to the surrounding context for clues but there is nothing to latch onto. These mini-games are incongruous with the medieval Catholic setting, yet they are presented as diegetic--not some conceit for the sake of gameplay. The mechanisms are sometimes visible directly as the player traverses the environment, and the player’s chores in the Monastery Chore Simulator™ often involve the tidying up of various marbles, cogs, coins, skulls and other widgets which are placed into the puzzle in order to activate it.

I can hear you, the reader, screaming into your monitor now. “Where Angels Cry is a game for children!” you bellow, “These chores are easy and these puzzles are simple because babies are supposed to play them, not adult gamers, who are well known as serious intellectuals!!!”

And I would agree, but for the fact that Where Angels Cry is a tale of intrigue, betrayal, jealousy, murder, sin and divinity (and chores); themes rarely levelled at the pre-teen set. Don’t get me wrong, the treatment of these themes is all at a hilariously surface level, yet each is played completely straight and I simply don’t see how children are supposed to get it.

Another example (spoilers for the first story beat in the game): Once the player has completed the first act’s chores, they are directed to finally make an investigation of the statue that weeps blood. At the base of the statute there is a trap door with an elaborate lock mechanism. This trap door is not hidden (except by freshly fallen snow the player must do a chore to remove), it’s been there presumably the whole time people were coming to this statue to marvel at the divine miracle. No one thought to maybe have a look at what was beneath it.

Once this trap door is opened, it reveals the ghost of the missing Brother John. His body is down there, and the ghost has just been chilling there with it, presumably for weeks or months. Perhaps the player’s character has special ghost-seeing powers he learned in Vatican spy school? If so, it goes unremarked. The ghost of brother John tells the player many other things. He tells you he was murdered. He tells you who killed him.

Not only is the mystery solved at this point, the player is now also aware that there is an afterlife, and that living one’s life literally as a monk and dying tragically is not sufficient to gain entry to the gates of heaven.

As an adult gamer and serious intellectual, I recognized the profound implications of this moment. I was ready for this game to take me back to Rome, to overthrow the foundations of the church itself and lead medieval Europe out of the dark ages by unravelling the secrets of creation, apparently through very rudimentary puzzle mini-games.

Instead, the player goes to bed, and the next morning you do all those horse chores.

You’re telling me a child is expected to understand how funny all of that is?

This is maybe 30 minutes into the game. There are 5 more acts, and they're all like this.

I got Where Angels Cry for $1 on sale on Steam and I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.