Blurblogs
Global
Popular
Log in
InShaneee's blurblog
9604 stories
·
98 followers

Detective Games Don't Get Better than The Séance of Blake Manor by Bee Wertheimer
Monday November 10th, 2025 at 2:29 PM

Endless Mode
1 Share

2025 has been a fantastic year for detective games. Following the release of titles like Type Help and Blue Prince earlier this year, The Séance of Blake Manor arrives in excellent company. But Blake Manor’s approach to the genre is so compelling it places the title as a strong contender for game of the year. 

There aren’t any major spoilers in this review, but I still strongly recommend you at least begin playing The Séance of Blake Manor before you read on. Going in blind is the best way to experience any game, especially a mystery, and I promise it will prove worthy of your time.

Developed by Irish studio Spooky Doorway and published by Raw Fury, The Séance of Blake Manor is a dazzling supernatural detective game set in 1897 Ireland. You play as Declan Ward, a private investigator who has been anonymously commissioned to investigate the disappearance of one Miss Evelyn Deane. The investigation sends you to a remote hotel in Connemara called Blake Manor, which has attracted an eclectic crowd of guests in hosting a Grand Séance that is said to mark humanity’s first ever communion with the dead.

The game is rendered in a gorgeous comic-book style consisting of cool tones and striking black shadows, with hand-drawn cutscenes and UI elements blending seamlessly with the 3D environments. The majority of the dialogue is voice acted, which adds a rich depth to the diverse cast of characters. As you navigate the manor, your actions—which include rifling through drawers, profiling the hotelgoers, breaking into bedrooms, and cracking safe codes, to name a few—will progress the in-game time. You have the weekend to solve the mystery before the Grand Séance takes place on Halloween night, so you must choose your actions wisely in order to solve the case before time runs out. And time can actually run out.

However, the time limit is not as intimidating as it sounds; most actions consume only a minute, with the exception being special events like dinners and talks (the Séance-goers give panels over the course of the weekend, which evokes the vibes of a magicky, old-timey GDC). The time mechanic mainly serves to benefit the game’s extremely tight pacing as well as provide dynamism to the environment, as characters can be found at different locations over the course of the day. That is to say, you have plenty of time to futz around and obtain extracurricular information that enriches the playing experience. One of the most intriguing areas in the game, the library, offers additional insights on a variety of topics such as the cultural significance of white heather and the history of the Magdalene laundries, and these topics are also entwined in the narratives of the hotel guests. 

The Séance of Blake Manor

The game’s cast is a delightfully odd bunch. There are two dozen people connected to the disappearance of Evelyn Deane, and most of them hate her guts. They are all affiliated with the occult in some way, coming from a variety of ethnic and spiritual backgrounds, including a fringe branch of Catholicism that believes we are actually in hell and don’t realize it. While the sheer size of the cast and the nature of the investigation doesn’t lend itself to the most fleshed-out characters, they are nonetheless charming in their own fashion and end up connecting with one another in unexpected and deeply endearing ways.

The main character in The Séance of Blake Manor, though, is the manor itself. The house is teeming with supernatural entities, including apparitions flickering in the corners of your eyes, strange visions haunting your dreams, and arcane sigils protecting the manor’s secrets from you. As you acquaint yourself with the manor’s floorplan, the essence of each location in the house reveals itself to you through mysteries interwoven with Irish history and folklore. 

Spirituality is the crux of The Séance of Blake Manor, and, like any oral history, is malleable and contradictory; each character’s religious beliefs serve as lenses through which the cast interprets the true nature of the manor, so that they all overlap one another in beautiful ways. One example of this (light spoilers ahead) is a questline that channels three forms of the same being: the Haitian Vodou Ioa Maman Brigitte, the Celtic goddess Bríd, and the Catholic St. Brigid.

The game’s love for Irish culture is palpable and inspiring. A game structured around the discovery of information is inherently wonderful, and The Séance of Blake Manor doesn’t disappoint with its wellsprings of historical knowledge and unyielding respect for the victims of said history. 

I won’t speak too much on this point, but the game’s ending recontextualizes the entire story and absolutely rules. It’s hard to wrap up a compelling mystery in a way that’s both subversive and satisfying, and The Séance of Blake Manor not only rises to the challenge but defies all expectations.

With its one-of-a-kind charm and narrative chops, The Séance of Blake Manor is a master class in the detective genre and a delicious supernatural treat for the exact kind of freak I am.

The Séance of Blake Manor was developed by Spooky Doorway and published by Raw Fury. It is available on PC.

Bee Wertheimer is a writer, cultural critic, and gamemaker based in NYC. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their site beewertheimer.com.

Read the whole story
InShaneee
2 hours ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete

Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation by EditorDavid
Sunday November 9th, 2025 at 8:50 AM

Slashdot
1 Share
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise "MLB Slugfest" for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the long hours of airtime with bizarre, rambling conversations. ("I read today that kitchen utensils are gonna hurt more people tonight than lifting heavy objects during the day...") Now former Midway Games producer Mark Flitman has revealed the even weirder conversations rejected by Major League Baseball. ("Ah, baseball on a sunny afternoon. Is there anything better? We've been talking about breaking pop bottles with rocks. I guess that is...") The nonprofit Video Game History Foundation published the text in their digital archive — and shared 79 seconds of sound clips that were actually recorded but never used in the final game. ("Enjoying some smoked whale meat up here in the booth today...") Their BlueSky post with the audio drew over 5,500 likes and 2,400 reposts, with one commenter wondering if the bizarre (and unapproved) conversations were "part of the tactic where you include overtly inappropriate content to make the stuff you actually want to keep seem more appropriate." But the Foundation's library director thinks the voice actors were just going wild. "We talked with Mark on our podcast and it sounds like they just did a lot of improv and got carried away." He added later that the game's producer "would give them prompts and they'd run with it. The voice actors (Kevin Matthews and Tim Kitzrow) have backgrounds in sports radio and comedy, so they came up with wild nonsense like this." The gaming site Aftermath notes the Foundation also has an archive page for all the other sound files on the CD. Maybe it's the ultimate tribute to the craziness that was MLB Slugfest. Years ago some fans of the game shared their memories on Reddit... "The first time my friend tried to bean me and my hitter caught the ball was so hype, we were freaking out. Every game quickly evolved into trying to get our hitters to charge the mound." "I just remembered you could also kick the shit out of the fielder near your base if he got too close. Man that game was awesome." "You could do jump kicks into the catcher like Richie from The Benchwarmers." "Every time someone got on base we would run the ball over to them and beat their asses for 30 seconds. Good times." Six years after the launch of the franchise, Midway Games declared bankruptcy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the whole story
InShaneee
1 day ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete

Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using Translation Bot by EditorDavid
Saturday November 8th, 2025 at 1:46 PM

Slashdot
1 Share
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac: The Japanese branch of Mozilla's Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially disbanded after more than two decades of voluntary work... SUMO, short for Support Mozilla, is the umbrella project for Mozilla's user support platform, support.mozilla.org, that brings together volunteers and contributors worldwide who translate, maintain, and update documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla products... According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight. The article notes marsf's complaints in a post to the SUMO discussion forum, including the fact that the new automated system automatically approved machine-translated content with only a 72-hour window for human review. As a result, more than 300 Knowledge Base articles were overwritten on the production server, which marsf called "mass destruction of our work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the whole story
InShaneee
2 days ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete

You Can't Leave Unless You Buy Something by BeauHD
Friday November 7th, 2025 at 9:04 PM

Slashdot
1 Share
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: At the Safeway on San Francisco's King Street, you now can't leave the store unless you buy something. The Mission Bay grocery store recently installed new anti-theft measures at the entrance and exit. New gates at the entrance automatically swing open when customers walk in, but they're set to trigger an alarm if someone attempts to back out. And if you walk into Safeway and change your mind about grocery shopping, you might find yourself trapped: Another gate that only opens if you scan your receipt blocks the store's sole exit. During my Monday visit, I purchased a kombucha and went through the check-out line without incident. (No high-tech gates block the exit if you go through the line like normal.) But for journalism's sake, I then headed back into the store to try going out the new gate. While I watched some customers struggle with the new technology, my receipt scanned immediately. The glass doors slid open, and I was free. But if, like this person on the San Francisco subreddit recounted, I hadn't bought anything, my only means of exit would have been to beg the security guard to let me out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read the whole story
InShaneee
2 days ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete

Read this: A new report shows X is amplifying far-right accounts by William Hughes
Friday November 7th, 2025 at 9:02 PM

AV Club
1 Share

Today, in “Yeah, that just about figures” news: A new report from Sky News shows that Twitter—or X, if you insist—appears to have an algorithmic bias toward showing users right-wing and “extreme” content.

Specifically, the Sky News team ran a study where they created nine new Twitter/X accounts, three left-wing, three right-wing, and three politically neutral, and then tracked what content got dumped into their “For You” tabs on the Elon Musk-owned social media service during a one-month period in 2025. (Working with political analysts and data scientists to determine whether content was coming from “extreme” accounts on either end of the spectrum, and whether they were left or right-leaning in nature.) And, wouldn’t you know it: While the experiment’s right-wing accounts got almost exclusively right-wing material, all accounts got more of it than left-wing or neutral stuff. (Notably, the three “politically neutral” accounts got about twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content.)

And, before you ask, yes, the study worked to correct for the idea that the posts being shown were simply the most popular or engaged with: Sky News demonstrated that despite having equal or higher levels of engagement (and significantly higher follower counts), some left-leaning political figures had their posts dropped in front of users’ eyes way less than, say, Rupert Lowe, a far-right independent MP who’s gotten a lot of direct interactions and support from service owner Musk. (Being a British news organization, the Sky report is mostly focused on Twitter’s impact on U.K. politics.) The findings show that, given similar levels of popularity and engagement, the X algorithm is more likely to show a user right-wing content than from an author on the left.

Which is all pretty grim, if not necessarily surprising. (See also the finding that at least 50 percent of all content shown to users comes from authors who were determined to employ “extreme” language, on either side of the political divide.) Musk has been very aggressive in recent months about trying to put his thumb on the scale of U.K. politics, in a similar way to how he remora eel’d his way onto the body of the 2024 United States presidential campaign. Despite a lot of high-minded talk about buying Twitter in order to turn it into a free speech-loving, sink-filled paradise, the new findings suggest the far more obvious conclusion that he’s spent the years since the purchase turning the once-vital social media network into an incredibly expensive propaganda machine.

Read the whole story
InShaneee
2 days ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete

Condé Nast, union employees battle after "illegal firings" by Mary Kate Carr
Friday November 7th, 2025 at 4:49 PM

AV Club
1 Share

Following layoffs at Condé Nast and the news that Teen Vogue would be folded into Vogue, the company has kicked up a fight with unionized staff. Four employees, including journalists at The New Yorker, Wired, and Bon Appétit were fired after approaching management on Wednesday about the recent changes at the company. As you might imagine, the company and the union have very different perspectives on the situation.

In a statement, Condé United and the NewsGuild of New York characterized the move as “illegal firings,” saying that the company immediately terminated the four employees “for engaging in the protected concerted activity of gathering in their 1 World Trade Center office to demand answers on this week’s abrupt layoffs at multiple brands including Wired and the consolidation at Teen Vogue.” (The company has denied that there were layoffs at Wired this week, per Variety.) According to reporting from Semafor, more than a dozen employees gathered outside the office of the company’s head of human resources, but the four who were fired appear to have interacted with the HR head most directly. 

The union statement calls this a “flagrant breach of the Just Cause terms of our contract” and an attempt “to intimidate and and silence our members’ advocacy for the courageous cultural and political journalism of Teen Vogue.” Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, added, “Management’s attempt at union-busting, using intimidation and grossly illegal tactics to try to suppress protected union activity, will not stand.”

Condé Nast, meanwhile, has filed an Unfair Labor Practice Charge with the National Labor Relations Board against the NewsGuild of New York “for their repeated and egregious disregard of our collective bargaining agreement,” per the company’s own statement. The media org claims the four firings were “due to conduct that violated company policies, following an internal review.” Condé Nast described these employees’ behavior as “extreme misconduct,” which includes “aggressive, disruptive, and threatening behavior of any kind.” 

Bon Appétit’s Alma Avalle, one of the four fired employees who helped organize the union there, posted about the situation on Bluesky. “I am, to my knowledge, the only trans woman in our union and the only trans woman on editorial who doesn’t work at Them. I was acting as a union member and concerned employee when I questioned Stan Duncan, well within my legal rights. I don’t love pointing to my identity, but the company saying that I was behaving ‘aggressively’ when I was calmly asking questions feels like a clear transphobic dog whistle,” she wrote. Noting that she loved her job, coworkers, and union, she went on to say, “More important to me than my identity, I am also the Vice President of the NewsGuild of New York, and targeting me with a blatantly retaliatory termination like this feels like an egregious shot against our union and against media workers as a whole.”

“We have a responsibility to provide a workplace where every employee feels respected and able to do their job without harassment or intimidation. We also cannot ignore behavior that crosses the line into targeted harassment and disruption of business operations,” Condé Nast said in its statement. “We remain committed to working constructively with the union and all of our employees.”

Read the whole story
InShaneee
2 days ago
reply
Chicago, IL
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories