I don’t know about you, but I plan to spend Christmas pinned to the sofa by a 15 tog duvet, watching through the family’s boxset of Poirot mysteries. The duvet alone won’t be sufficient, and like a modern day Giles Corey, I’ll cry “More weight!” at a nearby sibling until they crush me with extra blankets. Only one arm will be free from the blanket stricture. This is for operating the remote, reaching for selection box chocolates, and petting the dog. After all, nothing says cosy like ensconcing yourself before a grisly murder at a country house.
Which is of course why The Seance Of Blake Manor is just as apt a recommendation today as it would have been when it was released at Halloween.
Set in 1897, you play private investigator Declan Ward as he tries to solve the disappearance of Evelyn Deane, last seen staying at Blake Manor. With more than 20 guests and staff filling the estate’s rooms, your challenge is to untangle their different pasts and motivations to discover what has happened to Ms Deane and who is responsible. That makes for a compelling set up without the additional intrigue that has drawn all these characters to a stately home in a remote part of western Ireland…
In two days time, the master of the estate, Jonathan Blake intends to hold a seance and form a bridge to the dead. If you don’t solve the mystery of Ms Deane’s disappearance before the seance begins, everyone within the manor’s grounds will die.
If you aren’t ready to cry out “More weight” and reach for a chocolate then we are cut from a different cloth.
Mind you, that ultimatum isn’t an abstract constraint. As you conduct your investigations, every action – from inspecting a strangely askew portrait to questioning a guest’s whereabouts on the night of Ms Deane’s disappearance – will eat up minutes of your time. If you don’t solve the mystery before the seance begins, then all your investigations will have been for naught.
Time weaves through all aspects of Blake Manor. On the hour, every hour from when you arrive until the Seance begins on the third day, the guests and staff will move around the estate, following a preset schedule. You may want to ask the groundskeeper about his suspicious relationship with one of the guests, but if it’s before midday then he will be unloading goods in the basement and unreachable for questioning. Through quizzing guests (and ransacking their rooms) you can learn everyone’s schedules, and structure your investigation accordingly.
In The Seance of Blake Manor’s best moments, I’d a notebook full of leads to chase down, suspects to grill, and puzzles to solve. The minutes raced by and the mystery only deepened. The investigation felt like the interior of a folklore-infused Agatha Christie novel – every guest and staff member was a suspect wreathed in shade. And the cast is a wonderful collection of druids, tarot readers, mediums, and sceptics, all drawn to The Grand Seance for unique reasons, ready for you to unravel and question.
Unfortunately, the final hours of The Seance of Blake Manor don’t sustain the momentum of the mid-game. Once you’ve hammered out your leads and you are trying to tie off threads of your investigation, discovering the people you need to talk to are sequestered in rooms you can’t reach becomes frustrating. But that frustration is only a small portion of the whole and shouldn’t put you off playing.
So, if you find yourself looking for a good mystery this Christmas, something to bring a spectral chill to the festivities, see if you can’t work out what happened to Ms Deane. Just make sure you have enough chocolates and blankets at the ready.