The Séance of Blake Manor uses Irish mythology and Victorian spiritualism to create an intoxicating mystery

Spooky Doorway, the developer behind The Darkside Detective, is working on a new game — and it’s something altogether more serious. The Séance of Blake Manor, currently in development for PC, leaves behind the intellectual humour that we loved The Darkside Detective for and leans fully into the supernatural to create a dark, atmospheric game that’s absolutely shrouded in mystery.

It has some things in common with The Darkside Detective, however. You’re still a detective, and puzzle-solving is still at the heart of the game. But it’s delivered in a very different way. The Séance of Blake Manor isn’t full-on point and click: instead, you’ll be exploring a 3D environment. There’s still plenty of stuff to investigate, though, and you can pick up and interact with objects. But solving mysteries involves deductions, interrogating witnesses and suspects, and completing Madlibs-style puzzles to crack the case.

This is a game that, beyond the very brief introduction scene, doesn’t hold your hand or offer a great deal of guidance. It’s not that The Séance of Blake Manor wants you to fail; rather, it wants you to forge your own way, giving you the freedom to be your own detective. Naturally, that means failure is always just one wrong move away, and despite being a puzzly-adventure, this game isn’t afraid of chucking a ‘game over’ screen at you. Within 10 minutes of playing, I found myself on the receiving end of failure after going into Blake Manor’s office — somewhere I was explicitly told not to go. Needless to say, I was thrown out of the house, not welcome there anymore.

Don’t worry too much, though, because not all is lost. You’ll only need to restart from the last checkpoint, which shouldn’t be any more than a few minutes back, and you’ll (hopefully) learn from your mistakes. I did. Not that I didn’t go in the office. I still had to: I just snuck out of the window, so the blasted receptionist didn’t see me.

I was lucky enough to play through a demo of The Séance of Blake Manor with the game’s lead developer, Treasa McCabe, sat beside me, offering me some much-needed guidance here and there. While you are free to wander and look at whatever you want during the course of playing, you are bound by time restraints. You see, the entirety of The Séance of Blake Manor takes place over the course of two days — a woman called Evelyn Deane has gone missing 48 hours before the titular séance takes place, and it’s up to you to figure out what happened to her before it begins.

Every action you do, then, costs time — even if it’s just a few minutes to examine the contents of a drawer. Early on, you might not feel the pressure, but later, as that séance grows closer, and you’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions, you’ll need to pay close attention to the clock and prioritise what’s most important.

Treasa tells me there are multiple endings to The Séance of Blake Manor, depending on the actions you take as you play, and how much you manage to uncover. It is possible to discover everything in one playthrough, so there does exist a perfect ending — but I imagine it will take a lot of trial and error, and maybe a few runs to finally get there. Given my early failure in the game, I’m under no illusions that it’s going to go easy on you.

But, really, that’s sort of the beauty of it. Figuring out a puzzle without any real guidance — whether it’s the combination to a lockbox or drawing a strange symbol in a dream sequence — feels really good, as does managing to get some useful information out of one of your many witnesses. You’re just one of roughly 20 guests in Blake Manor, and each and every one of them might have some useful information for you. Providing they’ll talk to you, of course. It seems that certain characters might have their own agendas and secrets, so you’re going to end up uncovering much more than what happened to Evelyn Deane… providing you do a good job, of course.

As engaging as actually going through the motions of playing The Séance of Blake Manor is, though, its setting is equally as captivating. Taking place in the run-up to Halloween in 1897, it’s heavily inspired by Irish mythology and Victorian spiritualism. Those inspirations are clear to see right from the get-go, and Spooky Doorway has done an incredible job of creating a foreboding, creepy atmosphere that permeates practically every element of the game.

I’ve only played the first 30 minutes or so of The Séance of Blake Manor, but it’s all I needed to secure this as a must-play for me. I can’t wait to find out (or at least try to find out) what happened to Evelyn Deane, along with unravelling the other mysteries that await me in Blake Manor. If you’re a fan of the likes of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and enjoy the deduction puzzles of The Rise of the Golden Idol, ensure that The Séance of Blake Manor is safely on your radar.

The Séance of Blake Manor is currently in development for PC, with a release date still to be announced.