Breaking Séance Of Blake Manor Review
This enthralling mystery quickly had me in its ghostly grip and refused to let go.
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It's never a good thing when a creepy shadow-woman bursts into a murder of crows during a thunderstorm, is it?
What is it? An entertaining mystery with a supernatural twist.
Reviewed on: Intel i9-13900HX, RTX 4090 (laptop), 32GB RAM
This is just The Seance of Blake Manor's way of saying hello before leaving me trapped inside a remote Irish hotel with a bunch of weirdos and would-be murderers a few days before Halloween. I'm here to solve the disappearance of Evelyn Deane, a woman the hotel manager insists isn't missing at all and most of the guests have a strong, and often not particularly positive, opinion of. To do this I've got to cautiously listen at doors before sneaking inside using stolen keys, eavesdrop on conversations held in quiet corners, and piece this puzzle together using clues found amongst crumpled up letters, half-burnt notes, and polite conversations at dinner.
This is classic murder mystery stuff—and also where adventure games can quickly lose grip of their own plot. But The Seance of Blake Manor never does.
There are dozens of suspects to work through and even more rooms to explore, all spread across a three day timetable that sees everyone moving to new and equally suspicious locations at the start of every hour. The game is stuffed with useful features to help stop the many threads I'm pulling at from unravelling into confusion, ranging from plain old maps to a personal research desk in the library and an at-a-glance hourly schedule, although it's often on me to learn someone's plans for the day, either via secretly rifling through notes and journals or asking them what they're up to.
Blake Manor's clear and meticulously detailed interface is the key to keeping me engaged with it all. This is my work up on the screen. I'm never able to glean anything from this help that I haven't already heard or seen for myself—it's just been laid out in a way that saves me from rummaging around my inventory or screenshot folder to find a specific scrap of paper I think I remember seeing an hour ago.
Despite how thoroughly Blake Manor lays out all the evidence for me to reference, what I do learn isn't always accurate. People can lie or be evasive about their int
Source: PC Gamer
