Let the Dead Talk, Let the Clock TickThe Séance of Blake Manor

Humans are nosy creatures. Show us a closed door and we want to know what's behind it. Show us someone keeping quiet and we want to know what they're hiding. So do we really need a murder, or a ghost to chase down hotel corridors, to scratch that itch? Or will an interrogation table, a notebook and a dwindling clock do? I say they'll do, and sometimes they're more than enough. The Séance of Blake Manor is one of the games that takes the second road, and it has reached consoles a year late.

First, the ID papers. The game was developed by Spooky Doorway and published by Raw Fury. The PC version (Windows and Linux/SteamOS) came out on Steam on 27 October 2025. The console versions arrived exactly one year later, on 27 October 2026, for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2. The Nintendo eShop listing says 28 October for Switch 2. That gap almost certainly comes down to time zones, so don't panic. The game is on Game Pass from day one, and the PC version is coming to the Microsoft Store along with it.

The story in a nutshell: the year is 1897, the place is Ireland. You play Detective Declan Ward. A woman called Evelyn Deane has vanished before a séance that's due to be held in a remote hotel. Everyone who'll sit at the séance table is a little suspicious, and the hotel is a little haunted. This has nothing much to do with anything, but holding séances really was the fashion in Britain and Ireland at the end of that century. Mediums did the rounds from parlour to parlour, tables rapped, and then half of them turned out to be frauds. So a detective prowling round a table like that doesn't clash with history at all (how much it clashes with the ghosts, you'd have to ask them).

Now to the real business, which is how the game actually works. On paper it stands on four legs. You question the suspects. You enter the clues you gather and the motives you sense into your journal, which is to say your notebook. You wander the parts of the hotel said to be haunted and solve environmental puzzles. And most important of all: everything you do eats time from a fixed number of days. If you ask me, that last item is what lifts the game out of being a detective story and makes it an actual game. With unlimited time you'd ask everyone every question, comb every room in the hotel, and then sift the answer out of the heap. The time limit forbids that. You have to choose who to question, which door to open and which to leave for later. Deduction starts with choosing. Among the old-school adventures, Sierra's The Colonel's Bequest also moved the clock forward in a mansion and made you feel you'd never see everything. Blake Manor rebuilds the same idea some thirty-five years later, with clearer rules and an interrogation system.

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This design has a price, and I'll say so up front. The player who can't rest until every stone has been turned, who can't sleep until the completion list hits zero, will feel boxed in here. My advice: don't try to see everything on your first playthrough, that's not what the game wants from you. A missed interrogation waits for the next run. If you can't live with that, this game isn't for you, and I think it's better to know that from the start.

What are players saying? After a year, the picture is pretty clear. On Steam, 94% of 3,273 reviews written in English are positive, for an overall rating of "Very Positive". Recent reviews are even better: 96% of 137 are positive, in other words "Overwhelmingly Positive". It's not every day that a game's recent reviews beat its all-time average a year after launch. Usually the scores drop once the first rush wears off, and the bugs and half-finished bits come out into the daylight. Not here. The critics point the same way. On Metacritic the PC version scored 89 from 18 critics: 17 positive, 1 mixed, none negative. On the same site 47 users gave it 8.3, 4 of them negative. The outlets that reported the console announcement also praise the atmosphere and the carefully built mystery.

Now for the console version, because that's what this piece is really about, and here we come up empty-handed. As of 28 October there's no average for the console versions. Metacritic shows 3 reviews for Switch 2 and 1 for Xbox Series, both "tbd". So how fast it loads on PS5, whether the text is readable on Switch 2, whether flipping between interrogation and notebook on a controller is comfortable: right now nobody can confirm any of that. I can't ignore this when scoring the console version. The game itself is proven. This version, nobody has put to the test yet.

The practical warnings are part of the verdict too, so read them carefully:

The PC version is English only. Full voice acting and subtitles, but no Turkish. In this game the text isn't decoration, it's the whole job. Miss a small dodge in a suspect's sentence and your notebook stays incomplete. If your English isn't up to reading a novel, think twice. There's a free demo on Steam. Download that first and use it to measure both your English and what the time system does to your nerves. For the console versions' language options, check your own store before you buy.

The price business is a bit of a mess. On Steam the PC version is $19.99. Console prices, though, we haven't been able to confirm from the official PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo stores. There are figures floating around: the eShop's UK and Australian pages show £16.75, French retailers show €19.50. There's also a $34.99 PS5 listing at GameStop, probably a boxed edition, but that isn't confirmed either. Don't believe anyone until you've seen the price tag in your own store (me included).

When your subscription ends, the hotel door slams in your face and Evelyn Deane vanishes all over again.

A word or two about Game Pass. Playing on a subscription is kind to your wallet, no argument there. But don't forget: you're not buying the game there, you're renting it. When your subscription ends, the hotel door slams in your face and Evelyn Deane vanishes all over again. This time nobody goes looking for her. For a detective game you'll solve once and put on the shelf, renting makes perfect sense, I think. If you're thinking of coming back to it later, buy it.

A few more small notes. On PC it wants at least 8 GB of RAM and about 10 GB of free space. The game contains violence, murder, and references to drug and alcohol addiction, so it's not for the little ones at home. There are also two paid DLCs: the soundtrack and a digital artbook. Neither adds anything to the game, they're for the keen.

On to the verdict. As a story, The Séance of Blake Manor is solid, and as a game it's the kind that genuinely asks you to think. Interrogation, notebook and dwindling days together force you to make choices. That's exactly what separates a good detective game from a time-killing click-through. Steam scores that are still climbing a year on and near-unanimous critic ratings back this up.

There are two reasons the score doesn't climb above 90. First, nobody has tested the console version yet. My score rests on the assumption that a game proven on PC stays the same on console. For that assumption I'm docking a few points. Second, for Turkish readers the language barrier is a real barrier. In this game, whoever misses the text misses the mystery. And the reason the score doesn't drop below 80 is plain to see: the same systems have been in front of thousands of players for a year, and the complaints are shrinking, not growing.

My advice, then: if your English is up to it and you can accept from the start that you won't see everything, take a seat at the séance table. If you'll be playing on console, give it a few days for the first reviews to come in. If you have Game Pass, you don't even need to wait, because a near-free try costs you nothing.