The Séance of Blake Manor revolves its whole story around the one thing that I hate seeing in my detective games: real ass supernatural shit. I expected the game to play around with the idea that the seance could all be a farse and people are grasping at straws to recover what they’ve lost, but they go hard on the supernatural and it only gets more and more prevalent as you go to an almost hysterical degree. There’s so many ghosts, spells, and demonic activities afoot that it’s absolutely insane that anyone would think that magic doesn’t straight up exist in this world.

The game started off pretty promising, but got more and more grating as the story continued. A large part of that being the ludicrous amount of running around you’ll be doing across this giant manor. Would have loved a fast travel option, even if it was just a few select spots to make all of this a bit more palpable.

I was excited by people comparing this to the Golden Idol games and Obra Dinn, but it really didn’t scratch that itch at all. It does have that mad libs style of bringing everything together, but it only becomes available once the whole mystery has been spelled out entirely for you, making most of the them super easy to put together. The only reason I got tripped up on a few were just issues with semantics that I needed to work my way around. And whenever you crack someone’s case, you confront them about it in the most direct way possible and they buckle almost instantly every time.

Near the end of the 3rd day, I kept running into dead ends caused by inaccurate hints (a lot of “search room x” when I had already picked the place clean) and pointless and time consuming running around. I had finished all of the main mysteries by that point, but still had plenty of personal quests to get to the end of. Ultimately I just kind of gave up on them because I didn’t really feel like bashing my head against them, trying to find a scrap a paper I probably overlooked in one of the areas that would let me progress. They definitely hinted towards the fact that anyone that attended the seance would die, but I didn’t really care about any of these characters and I just wanted to see the end at that point.

The whole system of solving key mysteries to get clues on the killer to then eliminate suspects was a fun enough system to engage with, but once you whittle it down to the last 5 or 6 and you notice that one of them has a mystery that doesn’t show up for some strange reason … then you can kind of just figure out who the big bad is from there which was unfortunately pretty deflating.

While I do often find these supernatural detective stories largely disappointing because you’re throwing real world logic out the window for the most part, I do think that the overall plot and the way that the mastermind’s plan comes together at the end does play well with all of the spooky mumbo jumbo they had set up to that point, so at least there was that.

Really hated how most of the puzzles revolved around The Witness style connect the dots. After doing the 15th one, it just feels like a super unfun chore.

The presentation here looked super clean and unique, so they definitely get some points there. I did really find that the English VO of the main detective didn’t really fit the look that they went with and his overall delivery was pretty lacking.

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