Spooky Doorway
Company
2 documents in the library are about Spooky Doorway, from writers such as DiGRA. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Spooky Doorway, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Spooky Doorway
Player Enjoyment Through Mechanical Engagement With Text in The Séance of Blake Manor
This paper examines how the 2025 video game The Séance of Blake Manor uses mechanics built around text manipulation and examination to draw players into a supernatural mystery set during the late nineteenth-century revival of Irish national identity.
- The paper analyses The Séance of Blake Manor (2025), in which the player takes the role of Dublin detective Declan Ward investigating a séance in Western Ireland in 1897, and argues the game extends Clara Fernández-Vara's account of detective fiction as ludic reconstruction from the reader's act of anticipation to the player's mechanical manipulation of text.
- The game's core mechanics require players to deduce the identities of twenty guests from environmental nouns and contextual clues, form new deductions that open lines of investigation, and collect words to fill sentence gaps that reveal further clues.
- The game refines a lineage of 1980s and 1990s text adventure design in which players matched nouns and verbs into sentences to advance the story.
Oneiric Timescapes: History and Image-Affects in Benign Land and The Séance of Blake Manor
This paper examines the use of dreams as affective devices in two recent games about Irish history: Benign Land, a walking simulator spanning eras from the Neolithic to The Troubles, and The Séance of Blake Manor, a narrative game set during the Irish Celtic Revival.
- The paper argues that historical games such as Benign Land and The Séance of Blake Manor should be analyzed as representations of a process of dreaming about history, not only as representations of the past.
- Benign Land's levels, which collate material and immaterial heritage in phantasmagorical fashion from the Neolithic to The Troubles, are read as digital emulations of image-affects drawn from Bergsonian memory theory and Deleuzian readings of dreaming.
- Benign Land's non-chronological associations are interpreted as a virtual multiplicity of the past coexisting with the present, a structure the author claims challenges the categorization criteria commonly used in historical game studies.