I arrived at Blake Manor at 11 p.m. and Mister Varley told me a porter would come to take me to my room within the hour. That means I had enough time to snoop around the lobby and see what my detective senses could tell me about this very spooky place. I ventured from room to room, rifling through every document I could find. As I returned to the lobby, I noticed a red specter staring at me with skeletal eyes, its mouth open as if caught mid-scream. It appeared only for a second before disappearing, and that was the moment I sat up in my bed, quit out of The Seance of Blake Manor on my Switch 2, and booted up Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave instead.
I needed to decompress by watching one of my Fire Emblem himbos attempt (unsuccessfully) to flirt with another one of my party members.
Nothing quite prepared me for just how creepy The Seance of Blake Manor would be. I’d heard nothing but good things about this game since it originally released last year, and with Raw Fury finally releasing it on Switch 2 this quarter, this seemed like the perfect time to finally check it out.
The Seance of Blake Manor opens with protagonist Declan Ward (a private investigator) receiving a letter requesting his assistance in investigating the disappearance of a woman named Evelyn Deane. All we know is that she was last seen checking in to Blake Manor for something called the Grand Seance.
The game plays out largely as a point-and-click adventure, which makes it well suited for the Switch 2’s portable form factor. You move Declan around from the first-person perspective, interacting with things you see around Blake Manor, and all evidence, clues, and information are compiled into one of the most intimidating, yet impressively detailed flowcharts I’ve ever seen in a video game.
I’ll note here that trying to navigate around the flowchart with an analog stick is a little cumbersome. It’s made a little worse by the fact that I enjoy playing my Switch games in handheld mode, so the small screen doesn’t exactly make it easy for me to read the tiny text either. It’s clear that The Seance of Blake Manor was made with a mouse cursor in mind, but if you’re willing to make a few compromises in exchange for the portability (which I was), you’ll get used to it soon enough.
What makes The Seance of Blake Manor stand out from other games in its genre is the time management aspect. Right from the start, the game makes it clear that every action you take will cause time to pass by one minute. Be it talking to a person, analyzing them, or even just examining something, every action matters. The game gives you various deadlines to meet as you try to uncover its myriad mysteries, so you do have to be somewhat selective about what you’re choosing to investigate.
If this sounds scary, don’t worry. It’s really only an issue very early on in the game. In the first hour, I was tasked with finding my first clue about Evelyn Deane’s disappearance, and I ended up wasting my time examining things that didn’t matter. This led me to my first Game Over screen — which I certainly wasn’t expecting — and that was a serious wake-up call for me. Like, okay, I see you, Blake Manor. You’re challenging my drilled in gamer instincts of looking at every single thing in every single environment and are actively punishing me for putting into practice what has been instilled in me since birth. Alright. I see you.
But in all seriousness, past that first bit, The Seance of Blake Manor becomes much more lenient with the time management aspect. It has to. There are 17 people in the manor that you have to talk to, analyze, and investigate — all with their own personal dramas and mysteries for you to solve. As I got further into the game, I began to notice that I had more and more leeway, especially if I was able to solve some of the mysteries early or more efficiently.
To assist you with this, the game also comes with a pretty ingenious schedule/timetable system that lets you keep track of everyone’s whereabouts at all times. You can’t just snoop around someone’s room while they’re still in there, right? It’s on you to try to extract that scheduling info out of all the characters or find some way to gain access to their notes or journals, and that information will be automatically reflected in your timetable. Given how big the manor is, and that you only have one weekend to figure out what happened to Evelyn, you’ll need to know what everyone’s up to at all times, and snoop accordingly.
As far as the mystery itself goes, I’ll tell you right now that I’m not the most familiar with 1800s Ireland, which is the time period and place in which The Seance of Blake Manor is set. All I know is that this was pretty much the peak of the Victorian/gothic era, and the game nails that aesthetic pretty perfectly. As a fan of mystery/detective games myself, I was both surprised and impressed with the fact that Blake Manor was so upfront about there being major supernatural elements to the story, and that the mystery could not be solved with simple logic alone.
You’ll still be using logic and reason to make deductions and solve mysteries, but you do also need to account for that extra element of magical realism and spiritualism when doing anything. As I alluded to at the start, I was also not prepared for just how haunting and unsettling this game could be. The Seance of Blake Manor doesn’t shy away from the brutality of that era, nor does it pull its punches when it comes to its themes of spirituality. The game makes brilliant use of color and symbols to help you make some horrific connections to the things you see in the manor, and I was both afraid and sucked in at every moment.
The Switch 2 port itself is excellent, though it does also have that random issue of the voices being way softer than the music and sound effects. Even after making some audio adjustments in the game settings, I still had to turn up my speakers for a more comfortable listening experience. It’s annoying, but not a dealbreaker. And as I mentioned earlier, once you get used to navigating the menus — of which there are many — with the analog stick, the whole experience starts to feel more enjoyable.
While The Seance of Blake Manor doesn’t really lend itself all that well to the gamepad experience in some areas, I still found myself completely immersed in its mystery while playing it in handheld mode on the Switch 2. The game’s gothic horror mysteries are so engaging that I’d recommend genre fans play this in whatever format they can.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on Switch 2.
