Courtyard - Clement Panchout (From 'The Seance of Blake Manor' Soundtrack)
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I'm pretty annoyed that I took so long to write these last few pages because I had quite a bit to say about this one but I forgot it all!
The Seance of Blake Manor really disappointed me. On paper it's a perfect mixture of various gameplay and narrative elements I usually enjoy, but it ultimately ends up being a weird mess. You play as a private investigator sent to Blake Manor to investigate a missing girl, but you end up getting sucked into like 35 more mysteries while you're there, which all ultimately tie into the main mystery in some way. Everyone staying at Blake Manor on the weekend you're in attendance is there to attend the titular seance, giving them all some kind of woes that you'll need to help solve. You're able to approach these mysteries in any order, and each character can be asked about 100s of different topics. Really cool on paper, but there's major elements missing from systems that would typically point the player in the right direction.
The main thing I enjoy about narrative based puzzles is when you feel like you're in conversation with the developer; you're able to understand what they're implying through the writing and use that to finish a puzzle. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Curse of The Golden Idol and The Roottrees are Dead are all really good at this. These games aren't really comparable to Blake Manor, which takes major inspiration from classic adventure games, but I think it would have been better if it was comparable. I hardly ever felt like I was in conversation with the developer during this game, and I think it was mostly because of the density of information. You can ask every character about literally everything, which makes it really hard to figure out what you're actually supposed to be asking about. Sometimes what you think you're supposed to be asking about is wrong, and you actually need some random additional piece of evidence from the kitchen trash can that you already looked in but now it's day 3 so it's different. Stupid stuff like that makes it extremely hard to engage with Blake Manor's systems without consulting a guide (which I begrudgingly did at least 10 times). The dense systems of information wouldn't even be that bad if they weren't alongside the weird time system this game also has.
Whenever you do ANYTHING in The Seance of Blake Manor, whether it be conversing with someone or looking at a bookshelf, it'll use up some of your time you have that day. Almost everything takes 1 minute (including INDIVIDUAL conversation topics with a person) and each hour people move around the house and sometimes leave entirely for a brief period. This, again, sounds like a cool subversion of the adventure game genre on paper, but actually just ends up discouraging you from ever engaging with anything that doesn't seem immediately useful. I completely stopped looking at random chairs, windows and ashtrays almost immediately, which is like half the fun of these games! ALSO ONE OF the PUZZLES is LITERALLY UNSOLVABLE UNLESS YOU INVESTIGATE ONE (1) OF LIKE 30 BOOKSHELVES THROUGHOUGHT THE HOUSE WITH NO! INDICATION! THAT IT'S DIFFERENT AT! ALL!!!! You just told me not to do that GAME! The main puzzle mechanics acts as this extremely simplified Curse of The Golden Idol fill-in-the-blanks template but you'll need to find EVERY single relevant clue before you can actually determine what happened and some of them are so impossible to discover you will literally need to check a guide.
Aside from my mechanical qualms, everything else is pretty good! I really like how committed the visual style is to looking like a comic book, with harsh shadows and flat colours. The character designs are all really distinct too, I could always immediately tell who was infront of me. They're all written really distinctly and I enjoyed discovering more about each of them, even if it was frustrating at times. I really liked how varied each of the side stories was! Some are about angels, some about ghosts, others murder and deception. It's a really nice mixed bag of spooky stuff. It reminded me of Scarlet Hollow in that regard, they weren't afraid to just put fucking everything in there.
Overall, The Seance of Blake Manor had a solid conceptual foundation but ultimately ends up conflicting with itself far too often mechanically. If you want me to inspect a bookcase, don't encourage me not to!! Really nice art and fun writing, it manages to capture a pulpy folk-horror feeling while also being semi-educational in regards to the paranormal in different cultures which is super cool. Sucks I didn't like this more, but I'll check out the next game from these devs for sure.
