Silent Scream II: The Bride set my teeth on edge from the first scene and couldn’t really redeem itself. Maybe I shouldn’t have played when I was in a surly mood, but, after a disappointing week at work, it seemed like a good way to relax.

Right from the opening scene, I wanted to smack Jessica McNealy, and our relationship didn’t improve from there. This began like a cheesy Harlequin romance novel. Jessica in perhaps the worst English accent since Kevin Costner took on Robin Hood announces that she’s such a “lucky, lucky ‘gull’” to be marrying Jonathan McNealy a rich, handsome royal.

Pass the barf bag now, please, I think I am going to need it. Through melodramatic vignettes, you see the happy couple wed and leave for their honeymoon only to experience a devastating car crash. Game play begins when you (as the lucky “gull”) awaken in the wreckage to find your husband gone and a creepy little ghost girl flitting about outside.

If you’ve read my reviews before, you know how much I appreciate game developers who take care of the little details. Well, the little details are pretty much swept under the rug in Silent Scream II: The Bride. They take great pains to paint this chick as a Kate Middleton-ish commoner who snags a "royal," yet, when they leave for their honeymoon, they are in a left-hand drive car. Making things even worse, the apparently English license plate reads "D. Bride." Not only is that particularly groan-worthy, it’s unlikely given that the UK doesn’t really issue vanity plates.

With no integrated strategy guide or an online game guide, game play can be a bit confusing. The game does announce in advance the objectives that you are pursuing, but then, you are pretty much left to your own devices to figure things out. I played on “easy” mode (called “thrilling” here, ugh!), and I still kept my finger poised above the quickly-refilling hint button.

Some of the objectives required protracted periods of gathering things and others were so simple as to be pointless. For example, the objective to tend the wounds you suffered during the car accident required finding a hut in the forest, breaking into the hut, building a fire in the hut fireplace to boil water, breaking into the medicine cabinet, grabbing the iodine, returning to your wrecked car to get cloth, chasing away a badger to obtain oil to oil rusty locks, and even more contortions.

Building the fire alone took so much time I felt like I should have packed a lunch. I go and fetch firewood (yes, with my wounded arm and in my wedding dress) and dump it in the fireplace. That’s when the program tells me I need more firewood. Umm, OK.

Off I trot to get another batch. Still not enough. I need to tote in four bunches of firewood. Then, dare I just toss a match? Of course not, I need to go get gasoline. Really? I’ve built plenty of campfires in my time and never doused them with lighter fluid.

After all of these motions, I’m finally able to tend to my arm, which one would think had become gangrenous after all this time.

Now, onward. One of my next objectives was to get to the mansion through the forest, which involved, wait for it, walking. Yep, just walking. So the tending my arm objective required me to traipse all over creation, and my mansion objective just required traipsing. I think I expected some equity when it came to objectives, and the fact that some were as involved as building an F15 and others just involved walking, lent to an uneven feel to the game.

Expect heavy HOAs, which is fine with me, and some games that require a bit of trial and error. The reset button comes in handy. I sort of enjoyed the game where you trap a rat by clicking hexagonal discs to hem him in. It took me a few times, but I ended up gleefully corralling the little varmint.

If you like plenty of hidden object areas and don’t require as much handholding as I do, you might want to check out Silent Scream II: The Bride. Play it when you are in a forgiving mood, so you can overlook the inaccuracies.