This game is a masterpiece. I put 15 hours into it over the course of two days staying up til like 3 AM each time because I just couldn’t put it down. There’s really nothing better than a good ghost story.
The Seance of Blake Manor is by Spooky Doorway, the developer of Darkside Detective. I noted that the strength of that game was character writing, and this game has a similarly large cast it manages just as well. The truth is this is just a really talented team that clearly has good direction in both art and writing and it’s really wonderful to see them put out their first ‘big’ game and have it turn out so well.
I said earlier in the detective reviews that while I like supernatural mysteries, it’s very easy for them to be very bad, especially when they don’t think carefully what they want to be about. This game knows exactly what it’s about. It is set in late-19th-century Ireland and it fundamentally about the ravages of colonialism and its legacy. This is a good theme for a ghost story. I’ve long had a working hypothesis that middle-class white people being obsessed with their houses being haunted is a form of white guilt about the legacy of the Native American genocide, but it also works in the other direction — this game is focused on the damage done to the Irish and their culture and land by the English, and the aftershocks of that pain. It’s also just nice to see people talking about what the English did to the Irish; I feel like the horror of the conquest of Ireland gets lost in a lot of discussions of English colonialism.
The story starts when our protagonist, Declan Ward, gets an anonymous letter asking him to come investigate the disappearance of a guest at Blake Manor, an estate-turned-hotel that is hosting a spiritualism conference.
The thing that a lot of supernatural investigations get wrong is they think the game is more interesting when the culprit is unknowable and events are explanationless. But this falls flat because it can’t evoke anything in us. What this game gets is that the opposite is true: the supernatural is scariest when human evil is also mixed in, because human evil is real and acts on real emotions and motivations we understand. The game beautifully establishes that while there’s definitely some ghost shit going on, the person responsible for the woman’s disappearance is a human being acting for material reasons, even if they used supernatural means. We learn pretty quickly the missing woman kind of sucked — she was a wealthy lady who seems to have viewed the people around her as disposable and beneath her and basically left a trail of burned bridges among the guests at the conference. The problems you have to solve, the mysteries you have to unravel, may be inflected by ghosts and magic, but they’re fundamentally human problems with material solutions.
There’s definitely horror elements here, but it’s the kind of horror I personally prefer — the tension comes from an atmosphere of pressure and powerlessness, not jumpscares and gore.
I liked the kitchen-sink mythology and the themes of different spiritualities being different ways of interpreting the same phenomena; I liked how naturally the game let things like vodou and gnosticism and paganism and catholicism exist alongside each other and how one of the points is that conflict between these things is manufactured and not innate.
I liked the art a lot, the pen-and-ink 3D really worked for me. And the sound design was excellent, including the voice acting, which was clearly carefully considered and performed.
I loved exploring the manor and grounds, and the layout design was really excellent. It was only at the very end when I was cleaning up loose achievements that walking back and forth felt like a little much. Though I will say that on the Steam Deck the load screens felt a bit long — I didn’t play on my computer so I can’t speak to that (and I have a shit first-release Steam Deck that’s had the hell beaten out of it, so that probably doesn’t help…).
Also, maybe this is just me, but one issue I’ve had with a lot of these games is… I don’t want to violate people’s privacy? I don’t enjoy strongarming suspects or rifling through private papers or breaking into safes, it just feels mean. This game really understood that you need stakes to make those things feel satisfying and necessary. Having two days to save a woman’s life makes every moment count and you don’t have time to make nice; plus, that everyone at the seance is super sketchy right off the bat makes you feel a lot more justified. So I actually had a lot of fun breaking into rooms and rifling through belongings, lol.
It helps that Mr. Ward (Declan? Are we on a first-name basis?) is just a really nice guy. He’s empathetic without being a pushover and he’s got his own ghosts without being melodramatic; I just liked spending time with him. It made it easy to believe that people would open up to him and reveal things to him; the writing was good enough that I was sold on him having good vibes to the people in the game, too.
The game is on a pseudo-time limit. Most actions take 1 minute and you have roughly 48 hours to figure out what’s going on. The two tutorial missions hammer this in, giving you an hour apiece, so I was worried it’d be some awful “play 23 times to see everything!” but it’s actually totally possible to see everything on one playthrough and I did with time to spare. The biggest things you have to be aware of are peoples’ schedules — if you’re in someone’s room when they come back it’s game over, and people and events happen in certain places at certain times. Asking people which sessions they’re attending and finding their written schedules is important to being able to get the info you need and I thought it found the perfect balance between adding stakes and giving you room to see everything. I went through almost all the dialogue and flavor options and still had spare time at the end, but I still felt like I was constantly watching the clock. A+ game design.
My one complaint is that I wish you’d been able to knock on doors to talk to people in their rooms — maybe have it so they’ll only answer after getting to know Declan, like only on Sunday, or only after finishing their mystery. But there were times in the endgame where I just needed to talk to one person and couldn’t get to them for huge chunks of time, which was annoying.
Gameplay wise, this was probably most like a 3D point-and-click, and I thought the mystery design was excellent. It was one of the few games where I really felt like I personally was solving the mystery, where I was constantly evaluating bits of information and trying to piece them together. I thought the construct-a-sentence method of putting things together was solid, and I liked the way it picks up items from the logic trees you slowly build out. I think the logic-tree method of keeping track of things worked well, and I appreciated that the game gestured in the direction of what you needed to do to to progress each questline. This is not a game you need a guide for.
So yeah, if this genre interests you at all, I feel entirely comfortable saying this is one of the best games in it. This is far and away the best mystery game I’ve played, and it’s instantly become of my favorite games, period. It did only things I personally like and did them extremely well. My only disappointment is that I don’t know what Spooky Doorway is going to release next.