In Séance of Blake Manor you play as Declan Ward, a detective invited an unknown host to Blake Manor where a séance is scheduled to take place. Your mission: to find a guest who has gone missing. You arrive late into the evening, two days before the séance is scheduled to take place.
In the two days you need to not only find the missing guest, but also unravel the mysteries surrounding the other guests and the séance itself.
What I Didn't Like
Searching For Missed Clues
Here is the context-- as I would go through rooms and explore Blake Manor, I would be unraveling multiple mysteries at the same time, as there are many different mysteries to solve. My investigations would lead me to walk across the manor and head to a room where I would search it, find some clues and then continue following those leads.
The problem is thinking that I got all the clues when I really only got some of the clues.
For example, for each mystery graph in the notebook there is a list of action items. I found, much later, that the action item list would not change if I only partially completed a task. For example, if the task was "Search Room 11" and I searched through it and found some clues but not all, then the action list would remain on the list, even if there were new things added to the action item list.
I realize this is patially on me-- but there should have been something to help guide me or imply I should use other tools at my disposal. Things like encouraging the detective view, or the occasional poke of Declan reminding himself to "check the action items for things I might have missed" would have gone a long way.
I don't think there is a way for detective games to fix this. And really, it's not that big of a deal, but it is something that held back me back during my run with the game and maybe one day someone will find that perfect balance between hand holding the player and leaving them to struggle when they are stuck.
What I Liked
The Open Problem Space
When I think about Blake Manor, I think it is a very linear experience in a of ways. You are a detective that needs to solve a mystery, and so you solve the mystery. You start at the beginning and you end at the end. Plain and simple.
What stood out in this game was how you got to the end was in your control the whole time. You start out in the same place as every other player, but which mysteries you discover and which you solve all depends on the actions you take and the direction in the manor you choose to go.
This is what I would call an "open problem space". It's not open world where you can just run around in a huge sandbox and do whatever you want, but rather you have a sandbox where all you can do is investigate, but you get to choose who, what, and when to investigate anything you discover which I really enjoyed.
Character Development and Connection
There are a number of guests and staff members in Blake Manor, all of which have their own mysteries for you help if you so choose. Normally I would see this as a big checklist of "to-dos" in a game, but for Blake Manor I was genuinely interested in the stories of each of the characters.
They didn't have a ton of depth, but they way they shared their backstories, their problems, and themselves gave you enough to like them.
And for what they didn't have in individual depth, they had a breadth of relationships between each other. Many of the threads tied together in fun and surprising ways, and you could see this reflected in their actions, dialogue, and even with their movement around the manor in some cases.
All in all, I enjoyed these characters and I wanted to help them all.
Story Twists
There were a number twists and turns with the main plot, along with the side plots for the individual characters. I don't want to elaborate here for the sake of spoiling some of them, but there were a number of things that I didn't expect and I always really enjoy that.
The Conclusion
I completed Blake Manor...well, completely. I solved all the mysteries and saved all the guests. When I was playing it, I was thinking about it constantly just waiting to get back into Blake Manor to continue my investigation.
It's been three days since I finished it and I still have that urge to explore more rooms, find more clues, and solve more mysteries. I think that speaks to how much I enjoyed Blake Manor, and I wish I could nail what grabbed me.
Maybe it's the combination of 3D first-person exploration and solving mysteries, as I had a similar feeling (albeit not the same) when I played through Blue Prince and The Outer Wilds.
I'm not sure why the 3D first-person thing is standing out as a unique feature, but maybe there is something to that for my own game preferences.
In any case, I'm going to keep searching for more experirences like Blake Manor while I wait for
