In the excellent puzzle strategy game Blue Prince I walked around exploring a mansion while collecting clues and solving puzzles. In the grisly murder mysteries The Case of the Golden Idol and its sequel I solved crimes by collecting words and using them to fill in the blanks.
So I'm pretty happy right now because I'm getting to do both of those things in first-person mystery puzzle game The Seance of Blake Manor. As a detective in the late 1800s investigating a disappearance, I'm walking around a sprawling hotel absolutely packed with potential suspects, solving a bunch of little mysteries Golden Idol-style by collecting verbs and nouns and using them to build sentences that explain my theories.
Delighting me just as much is that it's a real Agatha Christie setup. You're summoned to a hotel on a weekend when a seance is planned for All Hallow's Eve, and a whole host of varyingly suspicious people have shown up to participate. You've been hired to find a woman who checked into the hotel but apparently didn't check out, and the clock is ticking: you'll need to solve the crime before the end of the weekend and all the guests depart.
As you explore the spooky hotel, talk to guests and staff, and investigate clues, you'll be trading actions for time. Want to look through a book, examine a note, or slip into someone's hotel room and go through their drawers? Each action will cost you a minute of time, and with so many interactable objects in the game, you can spend a lot of time very quickly.
With so much information to process, it's great the game neatly keeps track of things for you. There's a timetable you can use to keep an eye on everyone's movements and personal schedules, a conspiracy board that strings together clues for you, and a menu that makes it easy to dig through all the information you've collected. That said, you should probably keep a notepad handy: there are a lot of locations, characters, rooms, and items, and you might want to jot a few things down for reference.
Despite playing for almost five hours, I feel like I'm not all that far in yet: It's only Saturday morning in-game time, and I haven't even met all the potential suspects yet, even though I've already ruled a few out. It's not a straightforward case: there's plenty of supernatural goings-on beyond just the titular seance, so I suspect it'll be a lot more complicated than someone bonking my missing person with a candlestick and dumping their body in the bushes.
In fact, I don't even know if it's a murder case at all at this point. All I know is, someone disappeared, nearly everyone is a suspect, and the clock is ticking. If you're looking for a spooky mystery this Halloween, The Seance of Blake Manor is 10% off on Steam.
