Halloween is approaching and the veil between worlds is getting thinner. That makes it the perfect time for a séance, and as it turns out, a perfect time for all sorts of mysteries both supernatural and mundane. Set in the final days of October 1897, The Séance of Blake Manor puts you in the shoes of Declan Ward, a detective sent off to a manor in a remote part of Ireland to solve a missing persons case and getting drawn into much darker dealings along the way.
Developed by Spooky Doorway, creator of the excellent point-and-click adventure Darkside Detective, The Séance of Blake Manor merges point-and-click mechanics with first-person puzzle solving, time management, and some clever Obra Dinn-inspired deduction. Playing as Ward, you’re sent from Dublin to the west of Ireland, searching for a woman named Evelyn Deane who’s mysteriously gone missing. In three days’ time, the hotel will host the Grand Séance, an attempt to communicate directly with the spirits who call the grounds their home, and if you don’t solve the disappearance by then, the consequences will be disastrous.
While Ward is skeptical of the idea of talking to ghosts, the séance has attracted a host of guests interested in the supernatural, from tarot readers and druids to priests and debunkers. The night before Ward’s arrival, Deane disappeared without a trace, and anyone here could be the culprit. Fortunately, Ward is one hell of a detective, with a knack for keeping track of clues that verges on the supernatural itself. To solve Deane’s disappearance, you’ll need to use your keen powers of observation, interrogate the other guests, and do a little breaking and entering into their rooms to gather evidence, all of which gets laid out in a sprawling — and at first a little bewildering — series of menus connecting every clue you find together in a massive web.
Ward has only three days to solve the case, and time is limited for the player, too. You can walk around the manor and its grounds freely, but every time you stop to examine another guest, ask them about your findings, or inspect an object more closely, time ticks slightly forward. There are a few points where you can hit a game over by failing to meet a certain objective in time, but the bigger danger is leaving the mystery unsolved by the time the séance rolls around. As the game over screen warns you, no one who goes to the séance will make it out alive, so finding ways to convince guests to stay away becomes a secondary objective to finding Deane.
While finding the missing woman is always your main focus, your search quickly turns up fraudulent mystics, violent feuds, and simmering resentments among the guests — not to mention the very real spirits haunting the manor’s halls. Uncovering everything going on at Blake Manor is a massive undertaking, and one where following hunches and trying your luck by opening random doors can be just as helpful as carefully pondering the evidence. The mysteries of Blake Manor far precede the arrival of this batch of guests, it turns out, and events of decades and centuries past can feed into the stories of its current occupants in surprising ways. While Blake Manor itself is fictional, The Séance of Blake Manor draws on real Irish history and folklore, weaving tales of personal trauma and class struggle deftly into its ghost story.
That’s not to discount the importance of the ghosts themselves. While Ward enters the grounds as a skeptic, he’s quickly proven wrong, as spirits soon reveal themselves. The Séance of Blake Manor isn’t primarily a horror story, but it’s a surprisingly scary game at times, from little things like doors slamming on their own and strange figures seen out of the corner of your eye to more definitively supernatural occurrences.
Like the best detective games, The Séance of Blake Manor leaves the work of actually solving cases in your own hands. As you discover new mysteries, they’ll be added to your in-game journal, with entries tracking every possible clue related to solving them. When you’ve gathered enough clues to reach a solution, you’re prompted to make a hypothesis, which you do by slotting clues into blanks in a sentence describing your hunch. There’s enough guidance there so that you’re not simply guessing at what happened (and the game will tell you if you get it wrong), but you still ultimately need to figure out how the pieces fit together on your own to crack each case.
There’s a lot going on in The Séance of Blake Manor, and it’s easy to get bogged down in details, obsessing over one mystery at a time. But the real magic of the game is how tightly woven all its seemingly disparate threads are. You may be here to investigate one recent disappearance, but the relationships between every guest and the events of the manor’s history are no less important just because they’re not what you’ve been hired to find. The past never stops haunting us, The Séance of Blake Manor seems to say, and no one’s struggles are as separate from another person’s as they might first appear.
