Silent Scream II: The Bride Review

A bride’s wedding day should be the happiest day of her life, but when newlyweds Jessica and Jonathan McNealy get into a car crash and land in the middle of a creepy forest, all of that happiness goes right out the window. Jessica’s left alone in the car, guided by a ghostly woman in white that pulls Jessica deeper into the woods and towards the McNealy mansion. With Jessica’s husband nowhere in sight, it will be up to you to help Jessica heal her wounds and track down her missing husband, with plenty of twists and suspense along the way.

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You couldn’t have a worse wedding if you tried

A bride’s wedding day should be the happiest day of her life, but when newlyweds Jessica and Jonathan McNealy get into a car crash and land in the middle of a creepy forest, all of that happiness goes right out the window. Jessica’s left alone in the car, guided by a ghostly woman in white that pulls Jessica deeper into the woods and towards the McNealy mansion. With Jessica’s husband nowhere in sight, it will be up to you to help Jessica heal her wounds and track down her missing husband, with plenty of twists and suspense along the way.

Silent Scream II: The Bride is a spiritual successor to the original Silent Scream, and it plays and looks much more like a traditional hidden object / puzzle game. Throughout the game’s three hour length (on the easiest of two difficulty settings), you’ll investigate a large mansion, abandoned farmhouse, church, graveyard and more through a basic gameplay format.

Silent Scream II: The Bride

There are plenty of hidden object scenes to explore as you find items on text-based lists, and some offer further interactivity via bags that must be opened, candles that must be lit, and so on. The game doesn’t contain a great deal of puzzles, which is almost a good thing, as some of its existing puzzles come with too little in the way of instructions and the skip meter charges at a painfully slow rate.

The majority of your time in Silent Scream II will be spent repeating some of these hidden object scenes multiple times and then backtracking through chunks of environments to complete tasks. You’ll encounter only a few other characters along the way, but the voice acting is handled really well, even if most characters are rather static, instead of properly animated.

Silent Scream II: The Bride

Unfortunately, Silent Scream II comes with some click recognition issues, especially when it comes to combining some items in your inventory. This combination ability brings extra challenge to the game, as you’ll need to find two separate items in order to complete a single task, but the game often ignores these clicks when you attempt to combine items. Without the proper click response, it’s easy to think that you don’t have the proper items to move on, when in fact it’s just the game having technical issues that’s slowing you down. 

Furthermore, the inventory doesn’t stay on the screen at all times, and must be opened by hovering at the bottom of the screen. This sounds fine in theory, but much of the game’s navigation between scenes also requires you to hover and click at the bottom of the screen. Due to this, you can spend a lot of time in the game accidentally opening and closing your inventory when you really just meant to click “back” to another scene.

Silent Scream II: The Bride

Silent Scream II‘s storyline comes with plenty of suspense, leading up to some pretty huge twists in the finale. The storyline itself is easily the best part of the experience, and it’s so good that it’s actually worth dealing with the game’s technical issues and clichéd “spooky” environments and jump scare tactics just to see what happens next. That being said, the storyline comes with an odd ending that actually makes little sense if you take the time to analyze it. In this, the game doesn’t offer the same cookie-cutter ending that you might be expecting, and Maximize Games deserves some credit for avoiding that outcome.

Silent Scream II: The Bride definitely isn’t a perfect experience, but it offers some nicely detailed, cluttered hidden object scenes, good voice acting, and a fairly fast charging hint meter to help you through. There’s plenty of backtracking towards the end of the game and some items may not be used in their expected ways, but the game is never so challenging as to be truly frustrating. As we said before, the storyline is definitely worth the price of admission alone, but don’t expect to be thrilled by the gameplay along the way.

The good

    The bad

      70 out of 100