Where Angels Cry review for Nintendo Switch, PC

Platform: Nintendo Switch
Also on: PC
Publisher: Ocean Media
Developer: Cateia Games
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E10+

The good news about Where Angels Cry is that it?s better than Where Angel Cry: Tears of the Fallen, its sequel that actually predates it on the Switch by a couple of months due to licensing issues. Admittedly, Tears of the Fallen was terrible, so that?s not really saying much, but still: it?s good to take a positive view of things.

The bad news? The series may have gone downhill, but Where Angels Cry shows that it wasn?t exactly starting at a high point.

The main reason that it?s better than Tears of the Fallen is that it?s less ambitious. Unlike its sequel, Where Angels Cry opts for mostly static cutscenes, rather than animated ones. The other characters still look horrifying, but you don?t encounter nearly as many of them, and their movements are less jerky and creepy. This game also feels shorter, which means you finish it sooner, and the less time you have to spend with a mediocre-verging-on-bad game, the better. So it?s got those things going for it.

The drawback of being less ambitious than a game that was incredibly lifeless — as Tears of the Fallen most definitely was — is that the gameplay in Where Angels Cry verges on comatose. Like its sequel, Where Angels Cry is a hidden object/adventure game, except it doesn?t really ask anything of you. You go from room to room picking up objects here and there, but there are no dedicated hidden object scenes, and the objects you do have to find are all incredibly obvious. You stumble across minigames, but again, they?re all very simple, to the point you barely have to do anything.

In other words, Where Angels Cry is just kind of there, existing without really doing anything, taking up space on your SD card. It?s not aggressively bad, so you could do far worse, I guess, but I don?t know why anyone would want to play it when they could play literally anything else.

Ocean Media provided us with a Where Angels Cry Switch code for review purposes.

Grade: C-