I finished The Séance of Blake Manor, which I’ve been playing on weekends with my sister and brother-in-law for the past few months. On the whole I must say I was disappointed, especially given the hugely impressive reviews it has garnered.
We can start with what the game does well: it’s a very well-researched game about mythology, particularly Irish mythology but also some 19th century occultism and mysticism. This is by far the most interesting part of the game. If you view it as a glorified few hours of stumbling through Wikipedia pages about Irish folklore and mythology then maybe you’ll enjoy it.
Unfortunately it’s an absolutely lousy deduction/detective game. Actually maybe that’s too weak a word. I found it to be complete garbage. I’ll go into more detail, but the short version is this: at every single step of the way the game fundamentally fails at the central principle of a deduction style game - making the player feel smart.
Now, I do concede that constructing a detective game is very difficult. A central challenge is the interface with and verification of knowledge: how does the game know you’ve figured something out? Obra Dinn had an elegant way of solving this, Blake Manor does not. You will constantly be frustrated, shouting expletives at the moronic protagonist as you’re clicking on every interactible object you can find in the hopes of the game finally accepting that you know the thing you as a player figured out three hours ago. The “hypothesis” mechanic is terrible. 90% of the time you already know the hypothesis long before you’re allowed to actually input it by the game, and the rest of the time there is usually only one word in each slot that makes grammatical sense. Again, never making you feel smart. Also the protagonist farcically exclaims ‘Wait! I know what happened here!’ every time, which is less euphoric when you’ve known what happened for hours as a player.
And this poorly implemented mechanic of what “clues” unlock the state of something being known leads to further problems, too. You have a myriad of discussion topics available to you, but there is no real throughline or logic about which topic leads to actually unlocking new “clues” or “evidence”. If there was a sound logic here, this would be an opportunity to make the player feel smart: “Wait… I need to talk with this person about that subject!”. That would be good design. Unfortunately Blake Manor does not have good design. Sometimes a completely random person-topic combination gives you the clue, sometimes a very clearly important person-topic combination gives you nothing. The end result is that you’re just kind of talking about everything with everyone, exhausting every available topic until you finally talk about the one random thing with the one random person that the game decides will give you the next piece of “evidence”. It doesn’t make you feel like a detective. And that is the central defining trait of Blake Manor mechanically: it fundamentally fails at the raison d’être of the genre. You’re never really investigating or deducing, you’re just walking around clicking on things until the game gives you the next thing to click on, which gives you the next thing to click on, etc etc.
The only actual deduction in the whole game is related to who the central “culprit” is, and that is so laughably easy I hesitate to call it a puzzle even.
I also had a lot of issues with the writing. Especially the “character arcs” of each NPC are bizarrely written, with almost all of them doing a complete 180 after you simply confront them with their own plan. Like imagine you have someone plotting to consume the soul of another person to obtain magic powers, which they’ve desired their whole life. This would be actual dialogue in game:
Protagonist: You plan on murdering Johanna and consuming her soul to obtain her magic powers!
Previously magic-obsessed woman: Oh no! I see the error of my ways! How horrible! I must give up on this, and never again pursue the allure of magic!
Also the voice acting wasn’t great either, or at least very uneven. Especially one climactic moment in the endgame was let down by poor delivery. And it felt like most of the cast struggled with the Irish accents?
Anyway, I could go on but I’ve probably ranted enough.
I finished The Séance of Blake Manor, which I’ve been playing on weekends with my sister and brother-in-law for the past few months. On the whole I must say I was disappointed, especially given the hugely impressive reviews it has garnered.
We can start with what the game does well: it’s a very well-researched game about mythology, particularly Irish mythology but also some 19th century occultism and mysticism. This is by far the most interesting part of the game. If you view it as a glorified few hours of stumbling through Wikipedia pages about Irish folklore and mythology then maybe you’ll enjoy it.
Unfortunately it’s an absolutely lousy deduction/detective game. Actually maybe that’s too weak a word. I found it to be complete garbage. I’ll go into more detail, but the short version is this: at every single step of the way the game fundamentally fails at the central principle of a deduction style game - making the player feel smart.
Now, I do concede that constructing a detective game is very difficult. A central challenge is the interface with and verification of knowledge: how does the game know you’ve figured something out? Obra Dinn had an elegant way of solving this, Blake Manor does not. You will constantly be frustrated, shouting expletives at the moronic protagonist as you’re clicking on every interactible object you can find in the hopes of the game finally accepting that you know the thing you as a player figured out three hours ago. The “hypothesis” mechanic is terrible. 90% of the time you already know the hypothesis long before you’re allowed to actually input it by the game, and the rest of the time there is usually only one word in each slot that makes grammatical sense. Again, never making you feel smart. Also the protagonist farcically exclaims ‘Wait! I know what happened here!’ every time, which is less euphoric when you’ve known what happened for hours as a player.
And this poorly implemented mechanic of what “clues” unlock the state of something being known leads to further problems, too. You have a myriad of discussion topics available to you, but there is no real throughline or logic about which topic leads to actually unlocking new “clues” or “evidence”. If there was a sound logic here, this would be an opportunity to make the player feel smart: “Wait… I need to talk with this person about that subject!”. That would be good design. Unfortunately Blake Manor does not have good design. Sometimes a completely random person-topic combination gives you the clue, sometimes a very clearly important person-topic combination gives you nothing. The end result is that you’re just kind of talking about everything with everyone, exhausting every available topic until you finally talk about the one random thing with the one random person that the game decides will give you the next piece of “evidence”. It doesn’t make you feel like a detective. And that is the central defining trait of Blake Manor mechanically: it fundamentally fails at the raison d’être of the genre. You’re never really investigating or deducing, you’re just walking around clicking on things until the game gives you the next thing to click on, which gives you the next thing to click on, etc etc.
The only actual deduction in the whole game is related to who the central “culprit” is, and that is so laughably easy I hesitate to call it a puzzle even.
I also had a lot of issues with the writing. Especially the “character arcs” of each NPC are bizarrely written, with almost all of them doing a complete 180 after you simply confront them with their own plan. Like imagine you have someone plotting to consume the soul of another person to obtain magic powers, which they’ve desired their whole life. This would be actual dialogue in game:
Also the voice acting wasn’t great either, or at least very uneven. Especially one climactic moment in the endgame was let down by poor delivery. And it felt like most of the cast struggled with the Irish accents?
Anyway, I could go on but I’ve probably ranted enough.