Leaving a review after about 3 hours. GREAT Halloween spooky vibes! Perfect game for the best holiday of the year. It is currently buggy, so save often. You also have to manage the time mechanic, which is fiddly when combined with the save system (you can easily load back to before you burned time on an irrelevant object, so the game is more about making larger decisions involving who to investigate when, not having to micro-manage your time resource to actually solve the mystery). If I had a shilling for every detective game about a manor house with a fountain outside its front door, released in 2025, I would have two shillings, which isn't a lot, but it is weird that it happened twice.

Blue Prince but better.

The load times for new rooms and areas are sooo long. Kills the flow

Haven't fully beaten the game yet, but oh my god, this is a gem. Anyone at all taking joy in playing detective needs to check it out. The devs deserve every penny for this work of art. I don't love the comparision to Obra Dinn though - Blake Manor is, for me, stronger in many aspects. A more intimate story with no random seamen and topmen you need to identify. Every character is interesting and every interaction can give you important leads and clues.

Imagine if you would, A narrative investigation game that took time and reduced it to turns, allowing you the take the investigation in your own time but one that does not allow you to be frivolous in it's usage. Walking around doesn't waste the 48 hours you have to save people, minutes do not fly by while you think. It's only when you act, reviewing a book, reading a paper, questioning a guest, the the time moves forward by a single minute. A handful of things (going to dinner to chat with the guests, attending a lecture on mythology, joining for the silent dinner) use more time, but never so much that you feel like you were robbed by going. The writing is surprisingly top notch, and you feel for each of the characters. Some who you decide you hate early on will turn around and show depth and change your minds. The only negative I can state is that there are several 'gateway' clues that you can miss for literal in game hours just because you don't realize that a particular piece of furniture opens up, or it blends into the walls. Your 'Detective Vision' helps with this to a point, but you will at least once find yourself tearing about a room or rooms or wondering which room you need to tear apart to find the final clue. Additionally, filling out the mad libs to define the mystery will, occasion, specifically IN ONE CASE, feel a bit off in their discriptions. But, these are nitpicks. I beat the game in 30 hours without a guide and was fairly close to 100% with time to burn, and despite me knowing the answers for everything I do intend to play a (much faster) second play through later this weekend. I highly advise this game, and it is one I will talk about for years to come.

Absolutely wonderful! Kinda like Blue Prince but this game is actually good :D

Loading times when moving from game area to game area are painful on Steam Deck, but this is a GREAT game nonetheless. There's an incredible freedom on how to tackle the variuos mysteries, and with that freedom comes some complexity, but if having to use some additional brainpower does not scare you, this is a very satisfying experience.

I was realy excited when I saw this game, I thought it perfectly fit the type of vibe that I enjoy and it sure does ! The artistic direction is really good, the artstyle manages to encapture jsut the right feeling for the theme, time and location. The designs and voices are also really good, generally the ambiance is really well done. However, I must say I expected a rather "non-linear" story to unfold in front of me. Of course linearity is an illusion and I am okay with it. But I have managed to be completely off rhythm all along as I played this game ; it is so "on the rail" and takes your hand so much that you won't really have time to enjoy your "investigating". You don't investigate. The game does it all for you. As a matter of fact, it's actually a story game, nothing else. I was invested in all the character's storylines to be fair, but I wished to end all the "side quests" as I played. Now, to fail is one thing, but the way I did is exactly what is making me NOT recommend this game as much as I want to ; I was going WAY too fast, I managed to find clues and understand situations so fast that even the script had issues following up (for example, in the basement, even after I unlocked the "right to be here" the script still led me to be caught my a character as if I wasn't. Like, what.). It's something that occured a lot and in a sense it is fine if I'm just going fast and understanding rapidly right? Well the issue lies within how the game expects you to play it. It was always missing that one "click". I had figured out character's stories on day 1 that I never managed to finish simply because I didn't click on very specific thing, therefore I was not rewarded for my investigative skills and rather spent several hours frustratingly looking for not what the answer is, but what THE GAME expects me to answer. It is not a matter of obviousness but rather of thinking in different ways. That being said, I essentially understood most storylines on Day 1 (if not all) but then spend most of day 2 confused because I couldn't get those links/chains to unlock. And on the last hour, everything managed to be so jumbled up together that I had to rush things and still failed at saving everyone JUST BECAUSE I didn't click the right thing / spoke to the right character etc... There's a lot like that that makes no sense. I HAD 6 CHARACTERS waiting for me to confront or do an action that I just couldn't do because the game didn't let me. It all ended up being so frustrating that I lost all forms of interest in the story and the game overall as I reached the final act. As I said, it's one thing to fail, I'm okay with it, but the frustration here come from the fact that the game witholds your gameplay ; you're supposed to find things EXACTLY the way the game wants you to. And I felt so locked by the game itself, just because I think differently. Lastly, I didn't want to restart because it takes SO LONG to go through everything again. And once you know everything + understood how railroaded you are, you lose all motivation. I tried for a bit, but it was hell because the game is not only so slow, but also it will restart every tutorial etc. There's nothing to motivate you to replay it. Like, PLEASE add some "fast paced" mode liek a new game + so I can go to the intrigues I like. That's what visual novels do because they know people replay them for different ending ! I'll conclude by saying, y'all, make a film. You'd make a great film, you got the voices, you got the art, you got the story, and very clearly you got the passion. Make a film. Otherwise never forget that a video game must first focus on gameplay. And yes your time idea is very interesting, but wasted potential. So yes, perhaps if you update the game to change at least this abiltiy to replay it without "wasting" hours of my time (I do have a busy life and that is the case for many players) then I'd recommend it because it is still a very very well done piece of media. But not a well done game.

My recommendation for this game comes with a lot of ifs and buts. It's ultimately a pretty good experience, but I have to do some expectation managing here. Other reviews are comparing this game to Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn or the Golden Idol games. This is actually what led me to buy the game and to be disappointed even if I did end up enjoying it for what it is. This game is simply not up to those standards, because it's barely even a puzzle game. Yes, it has puzzles, but I can only think of one instance in the whole game where I actually had to stop for a minute and figure out what I had to do. So, if you're looking for a good puzzle game, this is not it. I don't want to linger in that negativity too long, so I'll start talking about what IS good about this game and make my way into the more flawed aspects.

The lore

This game was clearly made with love, and about 90% of that love goes into one thing, which is Irish folklore, mythology and history. If you are Irish or are interested in these subjects, then I definitely recommend this game. I myself wasn't particularly interested in them, but the game honestly got me hooked on most of what it told me. It was so interesting to learn about the aspects of modern western culture that are influenced by Irish mythology and its clash with catholicism. While there's obviously a lot of focus in all of this, the game also touches on other cultures (from which many of the characters originate), always with a focus on the occult, and it overall feels very respectful of these cultures (emphasis on "felt", because, to be honest, I'm not knowledgeable enough to be sure about this). If this paragraph doesn't make you interested in the game, it might be a sign to skip it entirely, because I think it's the only thing that the game does well in a unique way.

The plot

Apart from the lore that the game exposes, the plot itself centers around a disappearance that you, as a detective, must solve. The plot itself is pretty good, with some nice few twists here and there. However, the actual "detective" aspect of the gameplay is not that satisfying, mainly because of what I already said about almost never having to actually figure stuff yourself as the player. Adding to this, the game lets you keep track of each character and mark them as to rule them out as possible culprits. This sounded like a great idea at first. However, about the time you enter the endgame, you realize it is barely necessary to do such a thing. Regarding the dialogue... it's kind of hit or miss. There is a lot of it and a lot of characters too. Each character has its own little story and its own resolution. Some are better than others. Some had very unsatisfying resolutions. As a whole, though, I'd say it's okay.

The limited time mechanic

The game has a time mechanic. You have a limited amount of time to do your investigation. However, time does not actually behave as time. It's rather like a currency you spend to do certain actions (mainly looking at things of asking people questions, each action taking one minute). At first, I wasn't sure if I liked this mechanic. Now, I think it's kind of genius, but with a few flaws that honestly might be worth it. Basically, the game forces you to be economic with your actions. There's lots of things to look at and lots of questions to ask. I think it's great because, in most games where you go around talking to people and have like ten things to talk about with each one, I always feel like I have to exhaust every option or otherwise I will miss content. In this game, you can't do that. You have to be mindful about what you spend your time on. Even so, the game gives you more than enough time to do everything important, even if you stumble a bit. It is a nice balance, where you don't feel rushed, but you also can't go around looking at every piece of silverware in the manor or asking each character about every other character in the game (which the game lets you do, by the way). It still has its flaws. For example, there was a certain kind of thing that I quickly learned not to waste my time inspecting because it never yielded any useful information, but I eventually found one that I did have to inspect, even though it looked like any other (if you're curious, I'm talking about libraries ) Also, the game has certain events at certain hours that you can attend to and will take a considerable chunk of your time. These events can give you interesting tidbits about lore or the characters, but I don't recall any of them actually aiding my investigation, so it kind of felt like wasting a lot of time with nothing to show for it.

The puzzles...

Time to expand upon why I think the puzzles are so bad. There are two types of situations where it seems the game is trying to challenge your brains. One is simple, classic puzzles. That would be, having to arrange something, be it a code, password, combination or whatever. These are all pretty easy, to the point that it kind of ruins the immersion of you being this big time detective. For example (very minor spoiler here), at some point, a character asks you to translate a word for them. For this, they give you the notes they have about the language you have to translate, hoping you can fill in the gaps. Well, the "notes" are a literal one to one mapping between the English alphabet and that language's alphabet. All you have to do is match the symbols. You don't even get to write the letters yourself, you just click on the symbols it shows you in the right order. A baby could do it, and it is very jarring that this character seemed to need your help with it, because this character is supposed to be quite knowledgeable in the matter. The other situation would be when you actually have to follow the threads of your investigation, to know who to talk to, what questions to ask, and where to go exploring. However, the game holds your hand way too much on all of this, to the point you barely even have to think. You can simply go to your mystery board and, most of the time, it will outright tell you what to do. The problem is that the game just keeps track of way too much in this board. Sometimes it feels like you do anything and suddenly the game gives you five different notifications of evidence and threads being added to your board. You can mindlessly brute force your way through this game by just following the board.

Some technical aspects

For a game of this caliber, none of what I'm about to say really matters that much, but I will say it for sake of completeness. The game lacks some polish. There are some errors in the text, some errors in the map, some issues with the interfaces, sometimes things you can't interact with will light up in detective sight (idk if it's called that, I've just made it up). That being said, the only bug I had that was actually annoying was that at one point the camera didn't zoom into a safe when I went to input the code, so I just had to count the number of turns I made. Also... why does everything take so long to load? It's not like it drives me mad, but it's odd that a game like this, that I have in an SSD, takes three to four seconds to load every room and every cinematic. It doesn't sound like much, but this game has to load a new room at EVERY door. I don't know why. I don't know much about making games, but I don't see why the whole manor couldn't be seamless, especially considering that everything except the player in this game is stationary. If you're in the drawing room and want to get to the telegraph room, it's a short walking distance, but you have to go through four doors, which means you will spend roughly the same time walking as in a loading screen. All of this isn't a big deal obviously. I just wanted to rant about it.

It Is a Haunting You Don’t Want to Miss

I went into The Séance of Blake Manor expecting a slow mystery, but it completely pulled me in. You arrive at a gloomy Irish mansion in 1897, trying to solve a disappearance before a séance opens a door to the other side. The story, the atmosphere, and the strange cast of guests all make it feel like a playable gothic novel. The art is stunning, with every shadow and candlelit hallway feeling hand-drawn. The music and whispers in the background make you feel like you’re not alone, even when you are. Every clue you find and every question you ask feels meaningful, and the time pressure keeps the mystery gripping. If you like story driven games with eerie vibes and emotional depth, this one’s worth it. The Séance of Blake Manor might just be one of the most hauntingly beautiful detective games of the year.

Worth Buying at Full Price!

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This is a case where Steam needs more options than "yes" and "no". I didn't like it but I'd still recommend it and it's clearly made with a lot of love and effort and plenty of people would enjoy it. I don't think Golden Idol and Obra Dinn are the best comparisons for this game. I'd call those puzzle games, and this is more of an adventure, like the old Sierra mystery games. The games this gets compared to are simpler and smaller in scope, where there's little between the player and solving the puzzles. This game is much larger and has a significant amount of dialogue and world building. I'm lazy and impatient, so I didn't enjoy the amount of walking around and talking I had to do before I could solve puzzles. If you are happy to immerse yourself in the game, and enjoy character driven stories, you would probably really enjoy this. If you're more interested in it because of the detective/puzzle aspect, you may still enjoy it, but know that a significant amount of the game is exploring and learning about the setting and characters rather than just making deductions. If you're put off by the time aspect, don't worry about it. It's more about simulating everything moving around you than trying to stress you out. You have plenty of time to do things. Some specific criticisms: - There's quite a few bugs around sequence breaking. I performed an action which implied I had prior knowledge of it. When I spoke to a relevant character later, I received a task to complete for them that showed as already completed, but I was unable to progress anything related to it. - There's quite a few cases where a conversation doesn't make sense given knowledge already gained or things that are still unknown, like implying you've met a character you haven't yet. I can forgive that somewhat because there is a massive amount of characters and dialogue. - The loading times between rooms are far too long for how often you're changing rooms. - The UI feels clunky. There's quite a few layers to click through to get to relevant information. Panning around the evidence "web" is really slow (this may be tied to the camera sensitivity settings?). A frustrating experience was clicking through several things to view some information, exiting to talk to someone or do something else, and then opening the journal to check the information again. It starts you at the top level and you have to click through again. Opening back on the page you were on with a quick way to get back would be better in my opinion. - There's too many of the sigil puzzles. I would've liked an option that autocompletes them after you've already done the sigil successfully.

Very good. Approachable puzzles with good informational presentation. You how in Blue Prince everyone asked "why doesn't the game keep screenshots of the documents for you if you're going to have to refer to them later?" Well, this game DOES take the screenshots of the documents for you. My real review is a joke that nevertheless could be considered a mild thematic spoiler. Dublin man goes to a scooby doo style mansion but when he pulls off the monster's rubber mask it's Oliver Cromwell underneath

Would say it's worth it PROS: -Very nice style and settings, the art is superb -Great story, really digged the path they took with the plot -interesting gameplay, the confrontations are nice -Charismatic characthers -It's kind of silly but I really liked the drawing games as I could see a progress in difficulty in them and by the end of the game i've had strategies to solve them so it was nice -Simple but well thought puzzles, things connect very smoothly, in a way that it's not too hard but you need to pay attention -Brasil mentioned CONS: -Could use better controller experience -Sometimes the amount of things to do can be a bit overwhelming, i would remove a few of the useless interactions created to waste time, as it can be too misleading and boring, also too much visual pollution -Could use a quick travel button for at least the main areas, the garden and the atrium quick travel would be enough, like something unlockable mid-game to make the mid-late game gameplay less boring, i hate wasting time running around just for the sake of """gameplay"""" specially after i've already learned the paths, so most of the time was just useless wandering to get to talk to all people -I'm bored out of always being a bland white male detective with sherlock like personality

Video Impressions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WQlXo0hjlY Absolutely Outstanding. To be very reductive it's Obra Dinn with far more detailed investigation mechanics and a larger map. It kept me enthralled throughout (even if I panicked a bunch in the middle and couldn't find some clues). Fantastic atmosphere, writing, voice acting and art. Fun, light puzzles mostly - the story is the emphasis. I loved the characters, found the story impossible to put down and was satisfied with the ending. The story is the people you meet along the way, and the lessons they teach you about loss, faith, generational trauma and ultimately - empathy. Secondly, as a proud Irishman, this is the most accurate reflection of the complex tapestry of history, conflict, mythos, religion, immigration, emigration, sorrow and joy that makes up the country I call home. I have never, and will probably never again, play a game that touched me as an Irish person so deeply. The game is fantastic on it's own merits, but this is a must-play for any Irish gamer. (code provided by developer for press coverage on noclip_2)

I rarely bother to write reviews, other people often can sum up my thoughts and feelings i a far more concise way than I am able to. However, even after just a few hours of this gem, I felt compelled to try. Seance at Blake Manor has been a delight so far. The atmosphere is perfect, and the tone is set straight away. A wonderful setting and an intriguing cast of characters combine to get the hooks in you early, and take you along for the ride. Everything feels so charming, yet mysterious and ominous all at once. If you are a fan of mystery/deductive reasoning games like Obra Dinn or Golden Idol, please at least try the demo!

Great so far. The whole whodunnit/mystery/deduction gameplay loop is quite immersive and deep as well. Was a bit put off initially seeing how there's somewhat of a 'timer' while solving cases , but it doesn't work in the way you'd think. Actions taken cause time to pass, but a few cases in now it seems like there's adequate amounts so long as you stay focused and do what your tasked. Will update when done but as of now this is Must Play for any OG Holmes/Agatha Christie fans