The Seance of Blake Manor

11 Oct, 2026

Declan Ward, a private investigator based out of Dublin, receives a letter in the mail. A young woman named Evelyn Deane has gone missing from Blake Manor, and no one seems to care - in fact, it seems like no one has noticed at all. Thus does Declan find himself off to the far reaches of Ireland, in hopes of resolving a missing persons case before things get any worse. Upon arriving at the hotel, he quickly finds himself tied up in the local happenings: a so-called "Grand Seance" is set to happen in just two days, and it has attracted all manner of supernaturally-inclined folk. With 24 suspects between the guests and the staff of the manor, Declan needs to figure out what happened to Ms. Deane, who's responsible, and find out as much as he can about everyone involved in the seance.

As far the basic premise goes, Blake Manor has a very strong one. The gothic horror vibes are immaculate, the cast is (mostly) a wonderful bunch of weirdos, and the game presents a compelling mystery for the player to solve. The art in particular deserves a shout-out, with a strong use of darker, flat colors that makes the whole thing feel like a comic book come to life. I also really enjoy the game's deep dive into Irish mythology, a corner of the world that rarely gets a full, respectful look outside of the occasional mention of their mythological heroes or the fae, generally.

As for the actual game, it's a fairly straightforward point-and-click interface. The game opens with a brief investigation tutorial where you need to break into the manager's office and snoop around a bit, and the first proper day starts with you being challenged to expose one of the fellow attendees as a fraud - which, again, mostly involves breaking into their room, going through their stuff, and then talking to them about whatever you find. Once you have enough pieces of evidence to form a hypothesis about someone, the game will prompt you to do so, and after solving a brief, Golden Idol-esque sentence that goes over their deal, you can confront them and see the conclusion of their storyline. Most of the time this involves performing a small task for them or finding some specific piece of evidence, but it's rarely that involved. The game also labels which of the 24 characters you can talk to about any given piece of evidence, which is helpful when there's an unexpected face among them, but broadly just seems to exist to tell you that you can talk to Mr. Dupre about the evidence that you found in Mr. Dupre's room.

However, something that should be said before we get too ahead of ourselves is that Blake Manor is not a detective game; it is an adventure game. Sure, the effect is pretty convincing at first. There's a ton of stuff to do when you first arrive at the manor, almost an overwhelming amount considering how much time you have to get it all done. And this is not to say that there are not mysteries to be solved along the way, of course - everyone at the manor has their own reason for being there, and discovering who they are and what they want is key to figuring out what happened to Ms. Deane. But the illusion completely collapses around the time you begin to explore the basement, a required area to reach the end of the game. You need a key for each of the dorm rooms, and all of them are locked behind some kind of out-of-place puzzle, including figuring out which vintage of wine is the code for a padlock, making a cleaning solution with some booze you stole out of a staff bedroom, and a "move the carts so you can reach small openings in the box maze" a la Rush Hour or whatever name you know it under. None of these are hard puzzles, mind you; they just seem to exist because the game has no idea what to do when you need to investigate a place rather than a person.

Speaking on the plot itself, I actually quite liked the way that it blended the supernatural with the mundane. It's very easy for a game like this to fall into the "Professor Layton Trap," wherein its attempts to explain how all these things ACTUALLY happened are somehow more convoluted and unbelievable than if it simply stated "Ghosts ARE real and we're going to summon one and talk to it."¹ Blake Manor sidesteps this by directly weaving the supernatural elements into the mystery. One of the earliest concrete leads you can find is a hard confirmation that not only is magic real, the culprit is very much capable of using it. And yet, the very first personal mystery that you solve shows that not everyone at the manor is so gifted, nor are they necessarily being truthful about their abilities. For that matter, nor does it mean that boring and "real" motives aren't at play - land and titles are just as powerful of a motivator as tracking down members of a magical bloodline.

That said, the actual mystery at the heart of Blake Manor is pretty unsatisfying because it fails at both ends of the spectrum. The "who" is trivial to figure out, and you can mostly puzzle out the "how" by reading between the lines on some of the major mysteries, but the why? Good fucking luck. It's possible the answer is buried in one of the optional texts that we didn't care about, because I would really like to give the benefit of the doubt to the developers here. But as it actually plays out in-game, the motive reveal comes out of left field and I am skeptical that anyone figured it out before it was spelled out in the endgame. This isn't to say that mysteries NEED to be fair-play, but if you're going to sell your game as "Solve the disappearance of Evelyn Deane" then I should damn well be able to solve the disappearance of Evelyn Deane before the villain stands up and says "This is why I did this!"

We should also very briefly discuss the time limit: it exists, and you will never come anywhere near running into it unless you actively try to. This is by design, of course. Gamers shit their pants and throw gigantic fits at the mere mention of a time limit in any capacity, so any game that actually commits to using one will give you far more time than you actually need to complete the task at hand. Blake Manor is no different, and we easily solved every single personal mystery AND had the guilty party pinned down with 6 full hours to spare. And this is not a real-time game, to be clear - rather, time is a currency where looking at something or asking someone about a piece of evidence costs you a minute each time. Bigger things like going to lunch or a talk in the drawing room have a fixed time cost, but they're few and far between and rarely give you information that you couldn't find elsewhere.

This feels like a massive missed opportunity. If you really wanted to lean into the "detective" side of the game, there are any number of levers you could pull here: shortening the time limit (generally), making the events costs more time or give out exclusive information, making characters less available so that you have to know and work around their schedule, or simply do away with the time limit altogether since it really doesn't do anything in terms of player pressure.² You would have to rework a lot of the game that currently exists to remove the time limit, but I feel I would rather have that than one with a time limit that serves no real purpose beyond shuffling NPCs around the manor every hour. While Steam Achievements are hardly scientific data, it's telling that a whopping 24% of players got the achievement for clearing all the character mysteries. An equivalent achievement in, say, Lightning Returns clocks in at nearly half that (14.1%), with even less clearing the Hidden Lair (8%).

The vibes of Blake Manor are immaculate, and when it sticks to being spooky or having you investigate which Irish god is behind the strange appearances in the hedge maze, it absolutely rules. Even the individual character mysteries are mostly well done, with a good mix of involved trios and "This woman is just here for a vase and has nothing to do with the seance." But the core of the game, the big mystery and the reason you're here, is just...fine. It's not bad, though I certainly wouldn't call it good, and the fact that it's so easy to solve does leave a bit of a "that's it?" feeling when you inevitably hit the point where you start skipping past hours at a time. But hey! It's nearly Halloween as I write this, and there's no better time to give it a shot if it looks like something you would appreciate.