Is an absolutely top drawer series of pointy clicky graphic adventure games by indie dev Wadjet Eye consisting of 5 games released from 2006 to 2014. They are, in order:
The games centre on a red haired journalist living in New York City called Rosangela Blackwell, who, at the outset, works for a paper called The Village Eye and lived in an apartment in Manhatten. This is clearly wish fulfilment on the part of the designer, a lifetime New Yorker called Dave Gilbert, because there's no way anyone her age can afford to live in Manhattan on a writer's salary in the 2000s, but I'll let that slide. I mean, millions of people were prepared to believe that Friends was realistic, weren't they. (They were also willing to believe it was funny; it was not; this is not up for debate). Either way, it starts with her aunt Lauren having just died and been cremated, and we learn that Lauren (who also brought up Rosangela) died after spending the last twenty years in a persistent vegetative state, and it turned out Rosangela's grandmother suffered likewise, so her doctor calls her in to discuss the prospect of some sort of hereditary dementia. This thrills Rosangela not, especially when she starts having throbbing headaches and confused spells.
Only to discover all of a sudden that these headaches and such are her spirit guide, a snarky and faintly misogynistic refugee from a hard boiled detective story called Joey Mallone, manifesting for the first time, that ghosts are real, and that unless she gets into a routine of tracking down unquiet spirits and laying them to rest, she will go nuts like her aunt and grandmother.
The games then revolve around Rosa and Joey finding ghosts and laying them to rest, with the adventure game mainstays of kleptomania, breaking and entering, con artistry, and jamming strange and disparate items together in weird ways. And, given that they are set in the period when smartphones and social media boomed, more than a little online stalking. All the while there are greater and more dangerous things out in the spirit world than merely spooky ghosts, but also poltergeists, astral vampires, murderous former mediums, and rogue spirit guides.
The first game, The Blackwell Legacy, is very much a proof of concept and sort of an introduction. The second and third were intended to be one single game with alternating segments between Rosa in the then present day of 2009 and her aunt Lauren back in her ghost-hunting glory days of 1973, but the developer ran super short of cash and put out the Lauren segments as Blackwell Unbound as its own game in its own right. Game four, The Blackwell Deception, is set in 2011 and features Rosa stumbling across the trail of something much, much more dangerous. While the fifth game, The Blackwell Epiphany, is set in 2014 and is the longest and with the highest production values. It also comes full circle and features a recurring character from the previous games as the big bad, and a conspiracy which is not just murdering people but physically destroying their souls. The ending is also very emotional even for a cynical old boot like me. As the games move on you can also see the production values and art standards of the developers increasing. The Blackwell Legacy looks functional and a bit sparse and the voice acting is kind of wonky, but by Epiphany there are gorgeous painted backdrops and animations that are up there with the standards of classic Lucasarts or Sierra. The writing however remains top drawer throughout. Rosa goes from being a grudging ghost hunter to not only enjoying it but finding a way to get paid for it (turns out the ability to speak with the dead really helps your friendly local homicide detective with their cold case files), while Joey has his own backstory as to how he became a spirit guide and also provides a lot of the humour as his attitudes and inability to understand the 21st century given he died during the Great Depression collide with current year. His voice actor, one Abe Goldfarb, does an absolutely brilliant job as well. There's also a Dev Team Thinks Of Everything factor as well. Joey, for instance, being a ghost, can't touch things, but if you ask him to he might say appropriate or inappropriate things like "does it want a hug?" or making vaguely obscene comments about living women when asked to do likewise. Or towards the end of the last game, Rosa is arrested for breaking and entering and the officer questioning her reels off all the naughty things she did over the past five games to find clues and evidence to lay the dead to rest much like the wanted poster in Monkey Island 2.
Musically? Well, it's mostly sexy sax music, though arguably the best track on it is the soundtrack to the haunted nightclub, or "Epileptic Fish" as it's called.
I won't spoil much more, but the combination of humour, bittersweet endings, and ghost hunting, together with some interesting dives into NYC's more colourful characters (Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell both make appearances), make it a definite must play. It also is mostly devoid of moon logic or WTF puzzles, though sometimes having Rosa or Joey look at something specific to unlock the key conversation option to catch the suspect out to find out exactly how the ghost she's trying to dispel died can be a bit annoying.
There was a sort of follow up to the Blackwell series in 2018 called Unavowed in the same setting, which tries to expand the spirit world of Blackwell with a classic World of Darkness "all the monsters are real" conceit, and that there's secret societies of supernatural detectives trying to preserve the masquerade. I was not as enthralled by it as by Blackwell in all honesty. Unavowed by comparison was kind of a bit easy and playing itself (a common failing of pointy clicky adventures in current year a lot of the time) and it kind of felt a bit too much like generic urban fantasy though the plot was quite clever.
Anyhow. Blackwell series. It's on GOG.com for little money. Get it. Play it. Enjoy it. I did.
(IRON NODER 2023 #19)