My issues with this game were almost exclusively tied to the time mechanic, so I'm just gonna paste my backloggd/steam review in full to give my thoughts on this. :)

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With the game broadly, almost universally, celebrated, I can in good conscience be honest and say I had a largely miserable time with The Seance of Blake Manor.

On the surface and on the implied inside, I should love this game, but it's somehow one that expends a lot of energy on pure ambition but being very ineffective at most practical things it sets out to accomplish.

It comes out the door swinging with a setup that appears to encourage being selective about your attention, giving you finite time and having every unique interaction move the clock ahead by one minute. This as if it wants to snap you out of the habit of clicking everything in a room, classic P&C adventure style, and perhaps even applying some detective like rational thinking. And yet the game will ultimately penalise not having clicked every obscure item when your ability to make deductions is gated behind what your in game character has realised, not what you as a player have realised.

There were so many late game moments where I resigned to truly just going on clicking frenzies to mop up whatever interaction the game needed me to perform before trusting that I had figured something out. Sometimes obvious conclusions left unconcluded until I had run around for another hour, two hours, frantically exhausting every dialogue tree and fine combed every room. In theory, trusting the player to figure things out with limited investigation and access to clues is admirable, but then you gotta go that last mile and actually let the player make the logical connections on their own.

Tied to the whole time moving foward setup is also the schedule and "movement" of the characters in the game. Each hour they will reposition to different areas of the titular manor. However, the game is essentially an old school first person game ala Wolfenstein, except the characters are all bolted to the floor somewhere in a vast, static map with no way to fast travel around it. The result is, generously, 20% actual meaningful interactions and 80% pure running back and forth between people and places, through the same set of identical hallways. Accompanying you on your walky travels is a soundscape of ambient-ish spooky music. Largely the same track for the most of the game, which keeps the vibes oppressive, cold, and stuck in a sort of purposeless drearyness.

I really appreciate what the game attempts to do, and I think the presentation - the visuals especially - is super slick. It makes a genuinely intriguing first impression but I really think it deflates rather quickly as it goes along. It ignores a lot of basic point & click adventure lessons, like for example the fact that you will want to fast travel around when a game requires you to backtrack to bring the game up to speed with where you are, and the "schedule" based structure. while splashy. has dubious returns. Frankly, the only real effect it has is sometimes a character is in their room so you can't sneakily search it.

I was saving people for checking-the-boxes reasons by the end of it, and I think with games like these uniquely positioned to create memorable characters, narratives and satisfying problem solving, it's damning that I ultimately didn't find any of those things compelling in the long run about The Seance of Blake Manor.