There are signs that you have played too much Blue Prince. Mine is starting up Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room and wondering if, through a form of muscle memory, I accidentally booted Blue Prince instead. I genuinely had a kind of double-take when the camera zoomed in to the front of the titular manor and the narrator started chiming in about a lost fortune and a house-sized escape room that contained it.
Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room gets a little bit of the blame here. Its opening five minutes are incredibly reminiscent of Blue Prince, from the art style to the control scheme. But we’re being a little glib, as Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room finds its voice after those five minutes. This is something more conventional, yet very much distinct from the 2025 indie hit.
Escape To The Country
Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room is, to all intents and purposes, eight escape rooms connected to each other by secret doors. If you wandered into your local escape room, paid to do every room, and then worked through them in sequence then you’d have an experience much like this. Which, when you put it like that, makes Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room a bit of a bargain. This is, after all, £8.39, when my local Escape Room would probably charge about £160.
The story pits you as a private investigator, hired by a distant family member to find the lost Blackrock family treasure. The head of the family, Augustus Blackrock, was a bit of a misanthrope who stashed his cash behind Mensa-like puzzles within the Manor. To be fair, his excuse for being a misanthrope is – at least initially – justified: his three heirs and wife all died sudden and horrible deaths.
So, you’re exploring the mansion in first-person, opening drawers, scanning newspapers for clues and generally fiddling with puzzles in various sizes and shapes. We’ll keep the examples to the opening room to avoid spoilers: you might be switching parts of a shield’s heraldry so that no piece matches the heraldry of other shields in the room. Or you might be flicking lights on a scale model of the room, so that they correspond to the lights in the actual room.
The controls are reassuringly intuitive. In the initial wave of escape rooms on the Xbox One and Series X|S, games like Mystic Academy: Escape Room, this wasn’t always the case. These were games that felt ported from PC and were janky and finicky as a result. It’s heartening to see this hews to better examples, games like Escape Academy, Botany Manor and – hey – Blue Prince. Movement is slick, interacting with elements feels precise, and the components of the room are chunky and tactile.
There are a couple of counter examples, but they shouldn’t put you off. We accidentally triggered our hint button multiple times, as the button was a little too close to the puzzles we were manipulating. And a couple of puzzles feel inexact: one had us opening a host of tiny drawers, and we would have preferred an interface widget to do that for us. Another had us slotting books onto a shelf, but the simple process was weirdly ungraceful.
Brain Training
This ‘good but with exceptions’ story is much the same with the puzzles. In 90% of instances they were positioned superbly. Barely any were obvious. I can count on one hand the number that fit a familiar archetype or made me go “well, I know what you’re about”. I’d have taken slightly more than that, if I’m being honest: having the odd break and a throwaway puzzle might have been nice, because these range from devious to demonic.
Oh boy, they really push you on occasion. I’m still trying to unwrap how I solved one puzzle with a graph on one side of a whiteboard, and another graph on the other, corresponding to each other and melting my brain. In 90% of cases there’s a path to a solution. You just need to understand what element in the room is offering you the hint/information that is relevant to a mechanism on the other side of the room. Ah, the rug isn’t just dressing, it’s a clue! Nearly everything in Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room is puzzle fair-game.
We keep mentioning 90% because at least one puzzle per room is dubious. There’s something off about how clear it is, the size of the logical leap from the clue to the solution, or simply a component that no human could possibly have seen or found (looking at you, tiny stencil on a boudoir chair). Perhaps you know exactly what is needed, but the puzzle wants a strange execution of that answer. We’re not entirely sure that, if you had given us a whole week to solve certain rooms, we would have been capable of it without some brute-forcing. Because solutions can be willfully obtuse.
Which is to say that you’re probably going to play Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room with a walkthrough to hand. And they exist, both in video and text format, so you don’t really need to worry. Plus the hint system is wonderfully pictorial, meaning that you get what’s on the tin: a hint, not a solution. But we’re hard-headed puzzlers, and we like to solve things ourselves. It’s just there’s not always enough art in the puzzle design to quite let that happen.
Solid As A (Black)Rock
Saying that, having played a dozen or so Xbox escape rooms, this is one of the good ones. The art is undeniably clear and rather lovely. The story isn’t there for a bit of wrapping: it’s got some twists to offer by its slightly maudlin end. The music is fine if a little insistent. And there’s substance to the offering. Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room is three or so hours long (several more if you raw-dog it without a guide), which might not seem like much, but you’re always switched on, playing this intensively and with puzzles that you may not have seen before. Someone needs to come up with a ‘high-quality-puzzles-per-minute ratio’, because we’d say that Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room hits high on that scale.
If you’re like us and you have a hunger for something Blue Prince-shaped, then Secrets of Blackrock Manor – Escape Room fits the bill. Escape room fans can be reassured too: this is eight rooms teeming with puzzles, and they’re all a 4 or a 5 on the challenge scale. Some veer into ‘unsolvable’ territory, but that’s what hints and walkthroughs are for.
So, don the deerstalker – there’s a fortune to find.
Important Links
Eight Escape Rooms, One Hidden Fortune – Secrets of Blackrock Manor is OUT NOW! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/eight-escape-rooms-one-hidden-fortune-secrets-of-blackrock-manor-is-out-now/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Secrets-of-Blackrock-Manor–Escape-Room/9NG2DSNQ5HH5
