TL;DR: The Séance of Blake Manor is horror Clue for the academic occultist in all of us: slow, smart, and stunningly immersive. Bring your notebook, your patience, and a strong cup of tea. You’ll need all three.

There’s something intoxicating about the smell of old wood and secrets. The Séance of Blake Manor opens like a story you were never supposed to read, the kind of tale whispered about in academic corridors and long-forgotten libraries that smell of mildew and bad decisions. It’s 1897, the west of Ireland, and you—Declan Ward, a man caught between logic and lunacy—arrive at a manor where time itself seems politely disinterested in behaving.

I’ve played a lot of detective games. From the buttoned-up deduction of Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments to the feverish surrealism of Disco Elysium, the genre has a way of making you feel both brilliant and foolish at once. But The Séance of Blake Manor, developed by Spooky Doorway and published by Raw Fury, does something rare: it makes you feel present. Like you’ve slipped inside a living, breathing puzzle box. It’s horror Clue come to life, if Clue had an Irish accent and a PhD in folklore.

This is a game where every guest hides a sin behind their smile, and every minute you spend peeking through keyholes or listening at doors feels consequential. Time is your currency, and curiosity is your debt.

The first time I stepped into the lobby of Blake Manor, I was greeted by a piano that played itself and a clock that ticked in odd syncopation, as though keeping time with my heartbeat. The décor walks that perfect line between gothic excess and believable opulence—think Bram Stoker by way of Guillermo del Toro. The lights are dim, the air hums with tension, and there’s always the faint suggestion that something—someone—is watching.

This isn’t your usual whodunit. Declan isn’t here to solve a murder so much as he is to dissect the anatomy of belief. Evelyn Deane has vanished, yes, but her disappearance is just the surface of a much darker lake. Underneath are cults, pagan rituals, forbidden magic, and a lot of very educated people pretending they don’t believe in any of it.

Time, here, is elastic. Every action costs you a minute, a tiny slice of your dwindling weekend. Check a letter, and the clock ticks forward. Spy on a conversation, and another minute dies. It sounds stressful, but it’s surprisingly freeing—like running a haunted escape room where you set the tempo. It gives the illusion of urgency without turning play into panic. It’s less a countdown and more a metronome for your curiosity.

Every guest in Blake Manor has a routine, and it’s your job to learn it. The mystic goes to the drawing room at nine. The priest sneaks off to the chapel after midnight. The druid—because of course there’s a druid—prefers the gardens when it rains. There’s something deeply satisfying about learning these habits, like you’re reverse-engineering their souls from the scraps they leave behind.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Sierra’s old Laura Bow games, those ambitious early experiments in schedule-driven storytelling. But Blake Manor modernizes the concept with style and subtlety. You’re always encouraged to poke around, to follow your nose (or your moral compass, whichever blinks first). The manor feels alive in a way that few game environments do—its inhabitants genuinely seem to have somewhere to be, something to hide, and someone they’re afraid of.

The writing, too, is exceptional. Each character speaks with their own rhythm, their own philosophy of the supernatural. There’s Dupree, whose cynicism hides a deep well of grief. O’Meara, the scholar obsessed with the Fae, who oscillates between charm and mania. Even the minor characters, the maids and attendants and forgotten guests, feel textured. You can smell their perfume and hear the hesitation in their voices. The voice acting doesn’t just complement the script—it deepens it.

Visually, The Séance of Blake Manor is a marvel. The comic book art style—somewhere between Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and the painted shadows of Dishonored—sets the tone perfectly. Each frame looks like it could be torn from a graphic novel about guilt and ghosts. The blacks are rich, the golds are decadent, and the flickering of candles feels almost alive. There’s even a kind of dark humor in the way the game uses visual onomatopoeia. The crackle of fire, the creak of a door—all serve as subtle cues to draw your eye toward discovery.

The lack of fast travel, though, begins to sting after the fiftieth trek from the hedge maze to the library. It’s a deliberate design choice—I get that—but one that occasionally tests your patience more than your intellect. I like a good haunted stroll as much as anyone, but sometimes I just want to teleport to my next séance without the cardio.

Still, the payoff is worth it. Each room, each corridor, each shadowed corner rewards attention. And when you do stumble upon a new clue—an annotated grimoire, a bloodied glove, a key slipped carelessly into a coat pocket—the satisfaction is electric.

What impressed me most about The Séance of Blake Manor is how it walks the razor’s edge between the rational and the supernatural. Its magic obeys rules. Its hauntings have logic. You’re constantly piecing together how different schools of mysticism—tarot, druidic lore, angelic studies—intersect with the rational detective’s toolkit. It never cheats you with dream logic or deus ex machina nonsense. Every mystery, no matter how otherworldly, has a reasoned conclusion if you think hard enough.

That’s what makes the game immersive. It respects your intelligence. It wants you to learn the language of its world and then speak it fluently.

There’s a lot of freedom in how you approach your investigation, though that freedom sometimes leads to a bit of narrative lag. You can spend hours on one guest’s subplot only to hit a wall, waiting for the next scheduled event to unlock the next clue. It’s immersive in theory, but occasionally it leaves you pacing the halls like an underpaid ghost.

The game’s structure also means you might find yourself asking a character about something they’ve technically already confessed to, because the conversation tree hasn’t caught up. It’s jarring, but not immersion-breaking—if anything, it adds to that board-game sensation, the feeling that you’re pushing at the edges of a beautifully complex system.

I played The Séance of Blake Manor over the course of a real weekend. It felt fitting. By Sunday night, I wasn’t sure if I’d solved Evelyn Deane’s mystery or if I’d simply become another guest lost in the manor’s echoing halls. There’s a psychological subtlety to the writing that sneaks up on you—an acknowledgment that the scariest thing about the supernatural isn’t the ghosts, but the believers.

What makes this game truly special is how it lets you own your discoveries. No flashing “Mission Complete” banners, no dramatic orchestral stings. Just the quiet thrill of connecting two threads in your mindmap, realizing that the druid’s missing ritual components tie directly to the maid’s nervous breakdown. It’s elegant. It’s smart. It’s respectful of the player’s curiosity.

Verdict

The Séance of Blake Manor isn’t perfect—it’s a little too proud of its corridors, a little too stingy with shortcuts—but it’s one of the most immersive detective experiences I’ve ever had. It’s a game about time, about secrets, about the blurry line between faith and delusion. It’s gothic horror with brains, mystery with manners, and magic with rules.