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.