A remote manor house on the west coast of Ireland, an eccentric cast of misfits and ne’er-do-wells, a dapper investigator with secrets of his own. The Séance of Blake Manor sounds like the stuff of cosy Sunday evening gaming. Thankfully, this folk-horror drama has much more to offer than a bit of fun for Agatha Christie fans.
It’s October 1897, and you play as private investigator Declan Ward, sent to the aforementioned manor – now a grand hotel – to discover the whereabouts of one of its guests, Evelyn Deane, who has gone missing in mysterious circumstances. What you discover is a gothic mansion filled with eccentrics: from a psychic researcher wielding a spirit camera to a vodouist oungan and a Brazilian woman tracing her family roots. They are here to attend a grand seance that will take place on All Hallow’s Eve, when the phantasmagoric barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest. But as you discover while you wander the ornate rooms and meticulously planned gardens via first-person viewpoint, each participant has a secret – some deadly, some tragic – and many know more about young Miss Deane than they’re letting on.
What follows is, in some ways, an archetypal detective adventure, told in the visual style of a graphic novel, the art heavily inspired by the works of Mike Mignola (Hellboy) and Eduardo Risso (100 Bullets). You talk to suspects and witnesses, explore rooms for hidden clues and useful items, and slowly draw up a list of culprits. All the while, the game has an internal clock and a timetable of events that your investigations must fit into. The clock only ticks forward if you’re actively searching a location or interrogating a guest, so you must make efficient use of your detective skills, and you always need to make sure you’re in the right place at the right time to eavesdrop on clandestine meetings, or to catch useful talks on spiritualism, mythology and the history of the manor that take place in the grand drawing room.
All your findings can be examined and connected via a series of graphical inventory screens, which include an evolving mind map of clues and actions. It can be overwhelming to begin with, all these systems suddenly booting into life with every letter, key and clue you discover, but you gradually get the hang of things and realise that making your own notes is a must. While it’s not as structurally innovative as Blueprints, the game has interesting ways of prompting you in certain directions, including a word game deduction system that gets you to create hypotheses of motives and backstories with which to confront suspects.
As your investigation unfolds, you begin to understand that this isn’t simply a cosy little period adventure. It is a game with a point to make. The mansion has been built on top of a site of ancient historical and religious importance, transforming it into a colonialist symbol, while the wealth of the visitors is contrasted with the poverty of the hotel’s staff in subtle and meaningful ways. This is a game about appropriation and sociocultural destruction as much as it is about one character disappearing, and as we learn about folklore and paganism, we also come to understand what the manor and its rich owners – the troubled Blake family – really represent. Woven into this is the theme of diaspora, with several guests arriving from colonised countries, seeking the answers to complex family mysteries. Here too are tales of drug addiction, abuse and grief, all carefully woven into the central narrative. There are also some genuinely spine-tingling moments as apparitions appear at the edges of your vision and things go bump in the night.
The result is an absolutely gripping detective tale and a beautifully researched work of interactive folk horror to stand alongside the recent Strange Antiquities and Wadjet Eye’s seminal The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. It completely immerses you in its world of clashing cultures and supernatural revenge, managing to explore complex themes of colonial trauma, religion and identity within the confines of a single location and event. It will have you rushing to the bookshop or library to read more about spiritualism, folklore and ancient Irish history.
Sure, The Séance of Blake Manor is an autumnal treat filled with spooky scenes but it is also that most joyous of discoveries: a game that challenges, delights, thrills and educates in equal measure.
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