The Séance of Blake Manor

A great first person point and click mystery game that does a good job of making you feel like a Sherlock Holmes style detective through a variety of puzzle mechanics. The investigation mechanics are a big part of why unravelling the mysteries seems satisfying. The larger mystery that has brought you to the manor is broken down into sub-mysteries in a UI screen which tracks your evidence and the links between them, and upon collecting enough evidence in one of the sub investigations you can hypothesize the answer, which entails using the evidence to fill in blanks in an answer sentence. This is a nice level of guidance and handholding, ensuring, fairly effectively, a reasonable difficulty where it feels tense but solvable. Coupled with a plot design that means the player is mostly free to investigate threads in their preferred order at first (which a much tighter second day where it narrows greatly back down as proper investigation depends on events at certain times you have to wait for), and there is a nice degree of player agency. When interacting with objects or questioning characters, time advances by a minute, and every hour the cast moves around the house, with events such as "dinner" or "academic talk" happening at certain times. Many items give only a basic "It's just some pens" type of description on interaction, and quickly you learn to avoid the gamer mentality of wanting to click on everything. At the start of the game this ticking clock added a pressure that made me act incredibly economical with my questioning (in a way that actually hindered me getting to know the cast, since asking them about themselves or each other was largely flavour so not worth spending time on), but by the end of the game this meant I had more than two spare hours to fill. This slightly ruined the pacing, since I was making small talk with everyone at what should be the point right before crescendo, but at least I got to see more of their personalities. In terms of the characters, there's a quite large cast of mostly distinct character who felt like they had their own voices. The depth of them varies quite a lot, and two of them are essentially used as tutorial in a way that actively incentivises the player to not interact with afterwards, which is a shame. I am a big fan of how the cast are drawn from the breadth of an increasingly globalised Victorian world, which also benefits the various intrigues greatly. Voice acting is sparse but largely well done. The art style is largely very nice, and the comic-book style cutscenes make sense for the art. There's a few things that I think looked TOO comic book-y in a way that dampened immersion, but only a few things. I won't name them to avoid spoilers. The ending scene stuck the landing good enough. There was some nice twists but some things that felt too suddenly revealed or arbitrary. The game has four "endings" but there's a clear one to aim for while another is basically a fail state. After the ending, you get an epilogue for everyone that survives, which a nice note to end on. Things that frustrated me: a few times, I got stuck on mysteries that I already knew the answer to because I was missing one piece of info that the game insisted I needed despite me having all the info from other sources. On three occasions, I just googled to see what I was missing because it felt so tedious retracing my footsteps across a giant manor with no fast travel that I'm already spending hours running between people in. I also replayed it to collect all achievements, and on a replay it becomes frustrating how many cutscenes aren't skippable. Thank god for the ability to skip ahead an hour, though this also felt slightly clunky. Overall, really enjoyed and would recommend.

Genuinely one of the best puzzle games I've ever had the joy of playing :) 10/10 - would wait for the guests to leave their rooms for three hours in a row again

Great mystery. Wasn't expecting to learn so much Irish mythology from it! Really enjoyed that aspect. Zero bugs or inconsistencies. Everything is solvable and logical. There is a clever time mechanic that adds just the right amount of pressure. There is more narrative than I usually want from my games but that's just me, and in this case it was interesting because it went beyond the world of the game.

Fun detective game with too much handholding, some very frustrating mecanics that prevent you from solving something you've already figures out ages ago, a bunch of backtracking through halls and, in my opinion, a quite lacklustre ending. Had fun though, would purchase again.

Ein wirklich sehr interessantes Detektiv Spiel mit frischen Ideen. Sehr empfehlenswert.

Super fun mystery!

Poorly designed game, no fast travel means you spend majority of this game walking around. The time mechanic want you to be deliberate with your investigations, but missing a single item might mean you cannot progress, so you end up needing to click on every single thing. Very disappointing.