Blackwell Deception

Blackwell Deception is the 4th title in Wadjet Eye's Blackwell series. You can still switch control between the main protagonist, Rosa, and her spirit-guide companion ghost, Joey. Joey can also talk to ghosts, and phases through walls but can't interact other than using his ghostly power of blowing on things. His tie (which is used to send ghosts to the afterlife) and his blowing skill are now inventory items- but I don't think that really adds anything. There is even one ghost where Joey automatically uses the tie anyway, which was probably an oversight by the developers.

There's something that doesn't sound quite right with Joey's voice but it is the same voice actor. The sound quality of the voice acting across all voice actors is consistently better now due to Dave Gilbert obtaining better audio equipment. So no longer have the random crackles/distortions.

The first thing you notice is the worse graphical style, and you are greeted with a really ugly title screen where Rosa looks really strange. The character portraits that appear in dialogue look off too, and maybe the reason they seem to have been switched for cartoon portraits for some versions of the game.

As usual, you can enable Director's Commentary in the options and I played with this enabled. A strange tweak is that the commentary is now activated with on-screen buttons which clutter the environment. In previous games, features like bloopers were accessed at the end of a game/through a separate menu but now contribute to the clutter. I suppose if you don't play the game with the feature enabled then you just miss out on the bloopers which probably disappoint many players.

At the end of the previous game, Rosa said she would set up a website and advertise for ghost investigation jobs. The initial tutorial level is one of these jobs and involves a haunted boat. It has no bearing on the main plot. The main game involves Jeremy, an old colleague who tells Rosa to meet him. He works at the City Post newspaper and wants help finishing his article because he is ill so can't investigate/interview the required people. Jeremy is now a ghost but doesn't know it. So you have to follow his investigation to solve that mystery and send him to the afterlife.

One tedious mechanic of the previous game is that you had to keep returning to Rosa's apartment in order to use her PC to search for names/addresses. Now you can use Rosa's phone at any point. Creator Dave Gilbert stated he has taken some creative licence - given that Joey interferes with electrical signals, so he has allowed the internet to work on her phone but Joey must move away for her to take phone-calls.

There's not many items involved, and instead the puzzles involve acquiring information. Just like the previous games, topics are added to your notepad. 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. Notes can be combined to deduce new facts - this was a feature removed in the previous game, but now it is back. If you aren't sure where to go, talking to Joey will hint on the next objective.

I think it is interesting how the series’ stories seem to introduce new ideas for an interesting conclusion. I do wonder if the plot was written all at once, or if Dave Gilbert is just making this up as he goes along.

The game took me around 6 hours to complete, so much more content than previous games in the series.