Gravely Silent: House of Deadlock Game Review

A scary dream about your sister and a troubling phone call from her husband spurs you into action in Gravely Silent: House of Deadlock. Investigate a mysterious castle and try to find a way to pluck your sister from death's door. Learn about the similar fates of other unfortunate women and figure out a way to prevent this from happening again. Use your hidden object and puzzle-solving skills to unlock the mysteries of Castle Rainheart!

Gravely Silent: House of Deadlock is another hidden object adventure game by Vogat, the minds behind best-selling hidden object games such as Shades of Death and Elixir of Immortality. Just like these great games, Gravely Silent features medieval and supernatural themes, themes that the people at Vogat excel at creating and weaving into an engaging story.

First of all, a warning. Do you like spiders? Big ones with furry bodies and legs? How about bats with beady eyes and dripping fangs? Moths, maybe? Oh, and hope you like mice and rats too. The game is full of these creepy crawlies, some of which fill up half the screen. Things also get more interesting when you have to explore dark rooms with nothing to light your way save for a small flashlight. So if you like to be creeped out of your skin by these creatures of the night, this game will be right up your alley.

The story begins as you are woken up from your sleep by a strange nightmare. In it, your sister is calling for you to save her from a terrible death. Things become even more creepy when you receive a call from her husband, the dashing Lord Richard Rainheart, telling you that your sister had died. You decide to get to the bottom of this and head off to Castle Rainheart. Once there, you find out that your sister was in fact the fifth Mrs Rainheart, and the previous four had all died under mysterious circumstances. Your further investigations take you from a murder mystery into the realm of the supernatural (and the creepy crawlies).

Gravely Silent is a dark gothic adventure game where you explore the castle and its surrounding areas. During your adventure, you will also explore the dreams and past lives of the various Mrs Rainhearts as you try to figure out what happened to your sister. This is a standard hidden object adventure game where you will encounter various obstacles and puzzles that need to be solved. Exploring the castle will give you the items and tools that you can use to overcome these obstacles.

Most of these obstacles can be solved by simply finding the right item. This includes finding a torch to peer into a dark corner of a room, or finding enough key fragments to get past a locked door. However, there are other puzzles that are more complicated and which need to be solved in a separate minigame screen. There are the standard minigames such as jigsaws and pattern-matching puzzles. But there are also quite a few unique puzzles with a gothic/medieval twist, such as the puzzle where you need to manipulate alchemical reagents into the correct forms so that they can be used to unlock a passage.

And there are the hidden object scenes that come standard with this sort of game. The hidden objects here are not too difficult to spot, but there are a few unique twists that make it more interesting. In dark scenes, you are only able to see objects lit by your flashlight. And there are a few objects in each scene that need to be manipulated before you can collect them. For example, if you are supposed to find a "lit candle", you will need to find a candle and a lighter, use the lighter to light the candle, then collect the resulting lit candle.

As you would expect from a Vogat game, the artwork in Gravely Silent is beautiful, but in a creepy, eeky and gothic way. The candlelit environments are gorgeously painted, and you can almost smell the moss-covered cobblestones as you travel through the castle. There is also plenty of animation in the game, mostly for story-telling purposes such as the in-game cutscenes.

Gravely Silent is a pretty good adventure game, and like you would expect from a Vogat game, it doesn't disappoint. You will love it if you liked similar gothic or medieval adventure games such as Shades of Death: Royal Blood or Margrave: Curse of the Severed Heart. The basic version of the game isn't out yet, but you can get the Collector's Edition of the PC game which includes bonus material such as additional gameplay, a strategy guide and other extras.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

You can read more about Gravely Silent: House of Deadlock and try the game at http://www.hidden-puzzles.com/gravely-silent-deadlock.html

Steven maintains the hidden object game review website at http://www.hidden-puzzles.com/ - a website devoted to the most popular hidden object and puzzle games. You can read game reviews, download and play them online.