Everybody loved Blue Prince, and at this point it feels like everybody has finished (or, “finished”) Blue Prince, but I’m still here thinking “boy, I really should get back to Blue Prince” while knowing there’s a good chance I won’t. As much as I liked what I played, it just didn’t get its hooks in my brain the way it did with others, and it’s the kind of game that needs passion to see it through. But I have finally found my sicko mode, “can’t stop thinking about it and need to talk to everyone about it” puzzle game: The Seance of Blake Manor.
The Seance of Blake Manor casts you as Declan Ward, a detective in 1890s Ireland who’s been called to a mysterious manor hotel to investigate the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Deane. A diverse crew of guests has gathered at the manor to attend a seance, and it quickly becomes clear that they all have their reasons to wish Deane harm. You have the weekend to figure out what happened to Deane and who’s responsible before the seance occurs on Sunday night.
The time limit can feel pressuring, but time only passes when you undertake certain clearly-marked actions, such as examining objects, questioning guests, and attending events like meals and lectures. An important first step in solving the mystery is filling your timetable with the weekend’s activities and guests’ schedules, so you’ll know who will or won’t be where every hour. The latter is particularly helpful; one fruitful avenue of investigation is to break into everyone’s rooms and go through their stuff, and you definitely don’t want to get caught. Ask me how I know.
Every guest and staff of the hotel has a backstory, motive, and relationships with other characters. And they’re not just cursory stuff for atmosphere; I almost immediately forgot about the game’s central mystery as I dug into secret love affairs, thwarted career ambitions, cryptic plots, mystical societies, class and race tensions, failed romances, and people struggling to square their faiths with a changing Ireland and with the popularity of Spiritualism, a 19th and early 20th century movement to communicate with the dead that threatened much of society’s status quo. (Spiritualism is one of my top niche interests, and I’m also currently learning the Irish language; the fact that there’s a game about both is very exciting for me specifically.) To add to the plot stuff, the game is also full of things to learn about the history of the manor, Chrisitian gnosticism, and Irish folklore, politics, and history–a lot of this information is kept in the manor’s library, where you can research plot-essential stuff, but also browse the shelves for more detail on a topic. I’ve spent way more time doing this than I have actually trying to figure out what happened to Deane; I’m currently just before Saturday dinner and feel like I have no hope of solving her mystery and preventing whatever horrors it’s hinted will happen at Sunday night’s seance. With over 20 characters to learn about and whose problems to solve, I’m constantly panicking about the time limit, though players who’ve beaten the game tell me not to worry and that they ended things with time to spare.
The game has a robust set of menus to help you keep track of all this and figure out what to do next. When you talk to characters, available topics are represented by icons to choose from, and while characters will only talk about certain topics so you don’t fritter away your time too badly, not all of them are essential for your investigations. Discovering more about the topics that are important places those topics on a mind map/ conspiracy board that shows how they’re connected and paints an overall picture of a character and their story. (I’d show you images, but they would be full of spoilers; you can see a glimpse of this in the trailer above.) When you’ve connected enough bits of information, you’re given a Mad Libs-style screen in which to create a hypothesis by filling in words from your conspiracy board, and then you can confront that particular character about it. I found these Mad Libs a little fiddly on occasion to express my hypothesis exactly how the game wanted me to, but it’s a fun mechanic with a lot of guardrails to make sure you know what’s going on. So far, some of my confrontations have wrapped up a character’s story, while others have introduced actions I need to take to fully resolve things, which means more investigating.
The game menus do their best to keep everything organized for you and to nudge you about where to go next, but I haven’t always found it to be quite enough, so I also keep a notebook beside me while I play. Occasionally I’ve been frustrated when I feel like I know enough to confront a character but haven’t discovered all the things to let the game know I know them, but those instances have been pretty rare. My main problem is that everything is so interesting that I’m constantly getting off track, suddenly remembering that time is ticking down and I’m no closer to putting my top priorities to bed.
For me, The Seance of Blake Manor echoes Blue Prince’s interlocking mysteries and sense of place without having to contend with its life-eating RNG and open-endedness (I’ve also seen some players compare the two game’s art styles.). There’s some Lorelei and the Laser Eyes vibes too (a game I actually did finish!), and I’ve wrestled with wanting to start again to introduce the game to the friend I played Lorelei with, and not wanting anything to come between me and seeing its end. But at the same time, I’m tempted to start again just so there’ll be more game to play, even though I have a full in-game day and evening left; like a good book, I both want to know what happens in the end and to never be done with it.
It sucks to be writing about Blake Manor on a Monday morning because now I want to be playing it but a whole work day stands in the way. There is just so much in this game, all of it given so much detail and attention that I’m thoroughly lost in it, while still providing enough guidance to keep me from getting totally washed away. It’s captured the obsession and passion of all those puzzle games I couldn’t get into this year, while still being a constrained experience I can actually tackle, with that time limit bringing a tension that feels essential to the game’s story and atmosphere. There’s a free demo on Steam if you want to get a feel for it first; you should do this not just because the game is good, but because then I’ll have more people playing alongside me to talk about it with.
