If Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room had a physical release, it would have to come with pen and paper – but that’s a good thing. Some of my earliest gaming memories are of Apple II games like Zork, King’s Quest, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These were games where having a pen and paper next to the keyboard were absolutely necessary. Sometimes my father or brother would sit down with me and we’d work our way through the next section of the game together, referring to old notes and jotting down new ones. Maybe that’s why I was happy to settle down with Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room, a pen, and a notebook for a few nights.
The game opens with a series of animations telling you the story of the Blackrock family and how you came to be hired to investigate the mansion. Your goal is to unravel the story of what happened to the children of Black Rock Manor and to find the fortune that Augustus Blackrock locked away behind rooms filled with puzzles. To do this you must solve several puzzles in each room – mostly by entering codes or flipping dials and switches – while gathering information about the family. Eventually you will be rewarded by unlocking the door to the next area and so on until you reach the final room and the entire story is laid bare.
The environments are detailed but devoid of most decorations that don’t provide a clue. It’s easy to tell where an interactive puzzle is by the prompt that comes up when you approach it. Some items in the room can be moved to reveal clues and other times clues will be right out in the open or hidden on the edge of some object that isn’t visible until you move into the correct position.
Each room is a self-contained set of puzzles that don’t require any outside knowledge either from other rooms or from subjects outside of the game. For example, there are several puzzles that involve musical nomenclature but you don’t need to know how to read music or what the various symbols mean. As you explore each room, you might find documents that contain clues, and these are then placed in your inventory, making it convenient to revisit them while working on a related puzzle.
Some puzzles in the room can be completed in any order but others will require clues or items from solving other puzzles. Each interactive puzzle has one hint that you can request to see with the left trigger. These hints typically show you the location of the clue or puzzle that is necessary to complete the current puzzle or they might go so far as to give you part of the solution. If you use a hint, there is no penalty other than having to wait five minutes before you can request the hint on another puzzle.
Conclusion
I enjoyed my time with Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room. I found the difficulty to be just challenging enough that I didn’t need to pull up a walkthrough for all but two or three of the puzzles, and even those might have been solved if I had kept at it. While I wish the hint system offered a tad bit more, I’m looking forward to trying more escape room games from this publisher.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
