I finally got around to starting the Blackwell miniseries of adventure games this evening. These are some games that I’ve had in my GOG.com library for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to playing before.

So far as I’m concerned, the Blackwell games have a good pedigree, as they come from Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games, who produced the subject of the very first Squadron of Shame SquadCast, The Shivah. While The Shivah was a little lacking in production values (as, too, is Blackwell — at least, its first episode is, anyway; I can’t yet speak for the subsequent ones) it told an interesting story and was a good adventure game to boot.

The Blackwell series centres around protagonist Rosangela Blackwell, last of her family line. Both her aunt and her grandmother succumbed to a mysterious mental illness, and Rosa discovers that she may be at risk too. What the psychiatrists didn’t know, however, is that the Blackwell family has a legacy: a ghost named Joey, who has been stuck in between this life and the next for the last forty years, and who has found himself “attached” to each generation of Blackwell women to fulfil some sort of greater purpose. Rosa is the latest to discover the existence of Joey, and is determined to get to the bottom of who he is and why he has been haunting her family.

The Blackwell Legacy, the first installment in the series, is largely concerned with establishing the characters and the setting. Joey isn’t present until a good halfway through the storyline; prior to that, we simply see life through Rosa’s eyes as she learns what little there is to know of her family’s mysterious apparent mental illness. Once Joey shows up, however, the story becomes much more supernatural in nature: he and Rosa team up to help restless spirits move on to the next world.

The Blackwell Legacy opens with Rosa investigating the suicide of an NYU student. It gradually comes to light that she and two of her friends had been meddling in the occult — did these people not pay any attention to horror movies? — and consequently, two out of the group of three had ended up dead. The girl Rosa was originally sent to investigate passed on with no regrets, it seems, but one of her friends finds herself stuck between realities, unable to accept that she is dead, while the third attempted suicide and failed, ending up in the same psychiatric hospital where Rosa’s aunt spent her twilight years.

The story strikes a good balance between “real world” investigation and the supernatural; in order to help the restless spirit move on, Rosa has to research the people involved and what they were up to. The game features a cool “clues” system where Rosa makes notes of important people, places and things in her notebook, and these can then all be brought up as topics of conversation when questioning witnesses. There’s also an Ace Attorney Investigations-style system whereby Rosa can “connect” pairs of these clues to produce a third clue based on her conclusion, and indeed most of the puzzles in the game revolve around doing this, then asking someone about it.

The Blackwell Legacy was a short but enjoyable adventure that I enjoyed a lot — it certainly made me curious to see where the story goes in its subsequent installments. Its low-res pixel art with jerky scrolling brings to mind the old LucasArts games, it had some good, atmospheric music throughout and the voice acting was decent — albeit done with poor equipment and software, a criticism which could also be levelled at The Shivah. Joey is particularly prone to shouting into the mic and performing with particularly plosive plosives, for example, while other voiceovers have a great deal of background noise, presumably as a result of boosting quieter voices up in volume a bit too much.

The game was also a bit prone to crashing to desktop — I’m not sure what it is about adventure games that make them some of the most crashy games on the planet, but I swear, of all the games that have crashed on my PC in the last few years, most of them have been adventure games — but fortunately there’s an autosave system that prevents losing too much progress.

Overall, I enjoyed The Blackwell Legacy a lot and I’m looking forward to playing its sequels. If you’re a fan of classic late ’90s-era point-and-clickers, you could do far worse than check it out.