The Séance of Blake Manor's lead designer on why she made the game's clock so important

One of my favorite games of 2025, The Séance of Blake Manor, is a lightly creepy mystery game set in 1897 Ireland that takes inspiration from games like Return of the Obra Dinn, the Golden Idol series, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. But there’s a big difference for players of Blake Manor: you won’t need to fill out a real-life notebook while playing this. Instead, Blake Manor’s protagonist, a private detective named Declan Ward, has an in-game notebook that gets filled out automatically every time he discovers a relevant clue.

That’s how lead designer Treasa McCabe wanted it. “I am a woman in her 40s who has the brain of a turnip,” she told me on a recent video call about the making of Blake Manor. “I've got three kids, and so I've had lots of games where I’ve wandered off and come back, and just like — I lost my notebook, and therefore I can never play it again.

“I really do love those games with the notebook,” she went on. “There's something really lovely about, you know, holding that notebook and writing down everything and going back and deciding what was important. But as I said, they killed — sometimes — a game experience for me, because I couldn't come back to them.”

The challenge with Blake Manor, then, was to still give the game an appropriate level of narrative tension. If Declan Ward fills out his notebook on his own, then what work is there left for the player to do? Blake Manor’s tension ends up being more mechanical, and it has to do with the nature of time.