Blackwell Convergence

Blackwell Convergence is the 3rd title in Wadjet Eye's Blackwell series. This is the direct sequel to the first Blackwell game, but it also draws on events from the second title, which was a prequel involving her aunt Lauren. So this is back to Rosa's story, who is now much more comfortable with her spirit guide Joey.

Just like the previous game, you can now switch control between the main protagonist and Joey. Joey phases through walls but can't interact other than using his ghostly power of blowing on things. He can also talk to ghosts.

The game is linear but it feels really well-paced. If you aren't sure where to go, talking to Joey will hint on the next objective. I think you interact with more characters to progress the story and the way the characters are linked together is interesting. There's two characters that are based on real people, The New Yorker journalist, Joseph Mitchell, and his last writing subject, Joe Gould. The story explains Mitchell's writer's block.

There's not many items involved, and instead the puzzles involve acquiring information. Just like the previous games, topics are added to your notepad, but you no longer have to combine facts to make deductions. The notepad acts as a menu to select topics of discussion when interacting with other characters. You can re-use a sentence several times to get more information on that particular topic.

You often need to use Rosa's computer to search for topics in order to find out more information or find the location. This has a typing interface that you saw in the previous game, or The Shivah. This mechanic can be quite clunky for a few reasons. Firstly, it is easy to get confused when you misremember the name/spelling or make typos when entering. Secondly, there's a few instances where it doesn't seem obvious to even find the phone number for the person/place. Finally, sometimes you end up looking up a place/person, travelling there, discovering the name of something else, so have to return to your apartment to look up the next place. It's a bit of tedious travelling. When returning home, you start in the hallway and have to click on the door. What is the point? The hallway does provide a use at the end of the game but it doesn't seem useful to include it during the main game.

The animated character portraits when in dialogue are back. The voice acting/recording seems generally higher quality, although there's still a few instances of inconsistent recordings and breathy dialogue for some characters.

In the options, you can enable Director's Commentary. I played with this enabled, and it took me around 3.5 hours to complete. That is short for a point-and-click, but comparable to the previous games in the series.