Press Start: July 22nd, 2015

Title: Blackwell Deception
Released: 2011

Story: Continuing with the present team of Rosa and Joey, we start knee-deep in one of their cases. It is introduced through a letter asking for Rosa's help to investigate a yacht supposedly possessed. While the introduction doesn't serve any real purpose for the later part of the story. When you get past the credits and Rosa gets a phone call from a former colleague of hers, a reporter by the name of Jeremy Sams, this is when we actually get into the focus of the game. Jeremy asks for her assistance in a story he's working on, and it is through this line of work that Rosa starts to uncover something much deeper than she initially thought, involving her abilities as the medium connected to Joey.

Honestly, while the story of the previous two games were nice, I do wish they would've touched more on this topic back then as well. In a way, I guess they did, as you start to understand what happened to the Countess to make her the way she was, but it isn't properly noticed until you get to the end of this game. In this game, we also see some story starting to develop about Joey's background, but again, it's only hinted at lightly and doesn't satisfy entirely.

Graphics: Another game, another change in sprites and character portraits. Rosangela has resorted to a smart phone now, which seems interesting enough, but when you come to realize that it's nothing more than her computer and notepad in one, it does lose some novelty. She does acquire some numbers to call, but their use is very limited. More than anything, the change in character portraits really threw me off, as you continue to see this as a trend with the games, not in a positive way either. The features previously displayed for the characters get modified or twisted about, making it seem less like it was a proper sequel developed by the same people.

Music: One thing that the Blackwell series does is try to make the music memorable. For some instances, this is true, as there is one song in particular that does stand out to me, the theme that now stands out more. There is a dance club within the game, Munray's, that turns this theme into a techno dance song, and that's when it really started to stand out for me. Other areas, such as visiting Jamie's room at Columbia U really had a strange "suspicious" theme playing despite it not necessarily needing such. Some of the choices of music were questionable, but not too bad.

Overall: Coming close to the end is indeed not something I want, but at the same time I'm excited for. At the time of writing this, I have only started Blackwell Epiphany, but it is coming out to be quite gripping and is definitely expanding the story quite a bit from what the previous games have set up. More than anything, this is setting up the story for Epiphany and is establishing reasons for what happened before, while setting something new up.