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Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - Printable Version

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RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - LeftHandedGuitarist - 09-28-2025

Hi, Bob!

You know one thing which I do like about this game? The cheesy little grin Rosa does when she's trying to be funny or charming. It makes me chuckle every time.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - Joe - 09-28-2025

I didn't think I would be taking part in this CPT since I've been playing Hollow Knight this past week. But I managed to finish it today, so here I am.

I've never played the last game (Epiphany) so I hope this becomes the CPT for the whole series.

My first impression after replaying the tutorial is that it's definitely more "choppy" than I remembered, and I'm not a big fan of the music. However, the dog puzzle was fun. I hope there are more puzzles later on.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - MenhirMike - 09-28-2025

The graphics and voice acting are definitely still very rough around the edges. I think it's a step up from a lot of the homebrew AGS titles at the time (and the fact that it even HAS voice acting is already notable). The Blackwell series would massively improve in production values (and everything else) with every future game.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - BobVP - 09-28-2025

Some of it's actually good, basic, but it's properly applied. I like how it evokes its homebrew AGS roots.

(09-28-2025, 02:00 PM)LeftHandedGuitarist Wrote: You know one thing which I do like about this game? The cheesy little grin Rosa does when she's trying to be funny or charming. It makes me chuckle every time.

lol 100% agree.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - MenhirMike - 09-28-2025

Home Sweet Home! Rosa has a photo of her with her aunt, a teddy bear, a desktop PC that can be used to do research later on, and a landline telephone because this game came out a year before the iPhone and about three months after the BlackBerry Pearl. Sure, phones and mobile internet were a thing (Nokia's Communicator 9000 came out in 1996, and the Nokia 7110 introduced WAP in 1999, but there's a reason we called it "Wait and Pay"), but no one in Dave Gilbert's New York seems to own a cell phone yet.

   

Dr. Quentin kept his word, and we find an envelope with some documents from our Aunt, outlining a timeline of family events:
  • Patricia Blackwell and her unnamed husband have two children, Lauren and Jack in their hometown of Troy
  • About two weeks before September 3, 1960, Lauren moved away to New York to become a student at NYU
  • On September 16, 1961, Jack writes to Lauren that their mother has been acting odd, screaming and pointing at nothing
  • Jack writes again on February 23, 1962 that their mother has mentioned a name: Joey
  • March 16, 1962: Patricia has been committed into a mental ward
  • October 16, 1967: Jack met his girlfriend Maria
  • December 19, 1970: Patricia has passed away about 6 months ago
  • December 28, 1970: Jack overheard Lauren talking to somebody named Joey
  • Sometime before April 15, 1973, Lauren tells Jack to stay away, and that their mother was not crazy after all
  • Shortly before November 24, 1973, Jack and Maria got married
  • March 31, 1976: Maria gave birth to their child (which would be our protagonist, Rosangela)
  • April 21, 1981: Jack and Maria have died, and a law firm is writing to Lauren to arrange custody of Rosangela

Okay, so that is quite an info dump in the form of 25 pages of documents. I like the way the letters are written and it's certainly one way to add a lot of flavor, but one can also argue that this is all this is, flavor. We learn that both Patricia and Lauren were talking with or about someone named Joey, but we already knew that from Dr. Quentin. It's nice for lore reasons to have a timeline established, but right now, there's nothing that we can really do with any of this. Maybe it's a bit... clumsy?

Anyway, after we've read the letters (and looked at two photographs that were part of the envelope), the phone rings. It's Bob from the Village Eye, a small newspaper that Rosa writes book reviews for. He has an assignment for us: A college girl named JoAnn Sherman has committed suicide, and Bob wants us to write up an article about her. Here, we unlock a new game mechanic: The Notebook, which contains a list of terms that we can ask people about, and where we can try combining any two terms in order to form new conclusions.

Our next stop is the Brittany hall form at NYU, which is where JoAnn resided. The music is... interesting. The somber piano part is wonderful and fits well with the tragedy that we're investigating right now, and wouldn't be out of place in something like 2013's Divinity: Dragon Commander. But the electronic arrangement on top feels oddly desolate and out of place. It's something I'd expect when exploring the human ruins in 1994's Inherit the Earth. Mind you, it's not bad, it just seems a bit out of place. Then again, maybe that's a metaphor for how many college kids feel out of place until they acclimate to the new environment. Probably not though.


There are many doors in the hallway, but only two that we can interact with: The door of Adrian Tucker, Resident Assistant, and the door of Kelly Hawthorne and JoAnn Sherman. Adrian tells us a bit more about JoAnn, who jumped off the roof during the night, dying instantly. She was always surrounded by her friends, never had any trouble that Adrian is aware of, and that it was a complete surprise. On a side note, Rosa remarks that Adrian is the RA of a girl's floor despite not being a girl. Apparently he got assigned because someone thought Adrian is a girl's name and didn't double check. Fun fact, I saw that happen in a previous workplace of mine and it's apparently not all that uncommon. So if you're ever in charge of assigning personell and that stuff matters, double check!

   

After talking to Adrian, we'll talk to JoAnn's roommate, Kelly. She is... well, unfriendly. And flippant. She doesn't seem too fazed by her roommate killing herself, but she tells us that JoAnn studied all day and slept all night. This adds a few more entries to our notebook, but doesn't help us a lot yet. So, let's put on our best smile and talk to Adrian again.

   

We can use the new statements that Kelly added to our notebook, and Adrian tells us that Kelly rarely spends the night in her room. Also, Kelly is apparently a straight-A student, so don't judge a book by its cover, or the coffee stains all over the pages. Speaking of books, let's talk about the notebook a bit more because we need it now. We've just used the terms in the notebook to talk to people, unlocking new terms for it, and then using the new terms to talk to someone else to unlock even more new terms. But now, we use it to reason about the information that we got.

   

If Kelly says that JoAnn always sleeps soundly all night, and Kelly usually sleeps elsewhere - how would Kelly know? Combining those two terms removes both and adds "Did Kelly lie?", which we can now use to confront her again. This makes Kelly finally willing to talk to us.

   

She just reiterates that JoAnn was a great and diligent student, and reveals that she spoke in her sleep, in some kind of gibberish that Kelly couldn't make out. Finally, she's willing to give us a photograph of JoAnn with two of her friends.

We got all that we came here for, so time to head home again and write up the article that Bob asked us to write and just want to desperately go to sleep. And that's when we learn the reason for the headache that Rosa has been dealing with all day. It's a g... gh.... gho.... GHOST! This is Joey Mallone, and even though he looks like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, his personality is like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. That is to say: He is a certified Asshole, with a capital A.

[Image: KRfYUac.png]

Unsurprisingly, Rosangela doesn't want to believe any of it and Joey isn't having any of it. Joey calls himself the family spirit guide, the Blackwell Legacy, a family heirloom that gets passed down throughout the generations. He does not know why he is connected to our family and what his purpose is either. But we're a Medium, and it's our job to "take care of business". Since the headaches started in the dog park, that's where we're going next. Right now. In the middle of the night.

We do learn that no one can see or hear Joey apart from Rosangela, and that Joey cannot travel far away from us. And that there's a ghost haunting the dog park, which scares away all the dogs (hence it's closed).

[Image: YasJ427.png]

Unfortunately, the other ghost is not very coherent or collaborative, even for a college student. She talks about "wanting to help them", that she is "poison", and tells us to "Run away, like all the others!". Joey gives up for now, and upon realizing that there's an unstable spirit haunting a dog park, Rosangela decides that she just can't with this right now and goes home to sleep, thus ending Day One, which seems like a good stopping point.

I liked this part of the game. The writing is a bit terse, but I enjoyed the idea of the notebook and combining items to form new conclusions. It's a bit reminiscent of The Colonel's Bequest, with a bit of detective work, and it keeps dialogue puzzles more varied. I will have more to say about that in a later post though, because it will be one of those ideas that has more potential than was utilized. We've also finally met Joey, and yeah, if this guy was haunting me I'd probably also choose insanity instead. But we're stuck with him for now, so we might as well see where this all leads us.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - Kota - 09-28-2025

I got to the apartment last night, but I've been too busy to do some write-ups and chime-ins. 

The brief part is that I did already play this series out of order a few years ago. 

I fell in love with Rosangela as a character. She reminds me of people I know in real life, and even myself when I was younger when I knew what people expected, but didn't have the social skills to communicate it effectively (like Rosangela with her precious, forced smile). Rosa and Nishanti feel really real as characters to me. The doorman is a scab and he can get absolutely bent BAHAHA XD

The portraits in this game are my least favorite in the whole series, but they are still pretty good. The pixel art, I absolutely love, and the music is super vibey and cool. The puzzle design in the beginning frustrated me a little. I only spent maybe 90 seconds on it, but my issue is that it doesn't train the player to think in terms of inventory-object puzzles. However, there are a lot of movement and placement etc puzzles throughout the blackwell series, so it's successful in getting the player to think that way

I'm gonna follow along, and I'll try to pitch in when I'm less busy.

Is the pace expected to be a little bit of the game everyday?

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - MenhirMike - 09-28-2025

The puzzle design is definitely more on the simple side in this. It’s a very short game that sets the stage and then bows out for the remaining games to really run with the concept.

I plan on finishing this up in the next day or two. I had already finished the game, but real life commitments this weekend didn’t allow me to write up as much as I wanted to. I’m also figuring out the amount of detail, prose, trivia, and personal opinion. Blackwell Legacy is short enough where I can go overboard a bit, but on a longer game we’d end up with something like 60 posts over weeks, which I don’t think would be a good pace. Still trying to learn how to write these to be engaging, quick paced, but not just a walkthrough.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - Joe - 09-28-2025

I appreciate the effort, but to be fair, I don't really care about this detailed summary.

I think community playthroughs should be more about users sharing their experiences and engaging with each other. It shouldn't be about us reading what is basically a walkthrough with the plot explained in full detail.

Do as you think is the best, but if I were you, I would just give my general impression, what I liked, what I didn't like, and what stood out to me. Then I would ask the community some questions to make it easier for others to engage.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - kamineko - 09-29-2025

(09-28-2025, 04:15 AM)MenhirMike Wrote: ...I notice a dog that's leashed to a trash can, and that seems to want to follow us around. Eventually I figure that if I walk around the light pole, the leash stretches to it's full length and the dog barks. That's right, rope physics!

Obviously a courteous nod to The Goat Puzzle. Probably that's how most players were able to solve this puzzle.

(09-28-2025, 02:00 PM)LeftHandedGuitarist Wrote: You know one thing which I do like about this game? The cheesy little grin Rosa does when she's trying to be funny or charming. It makes me chuckle every time.

Yes, otherwise gloomy Rosangela trying to smile to pretend being "social" is the funniest moment of the game.

RE: Community Playthrough: The Blackwell Legacy (2006) - LeftHandedGuitarist - 09-29-2025

I'm up to day 2 now. This game does quite a few things right: the simple graphics (simple, at least, compared to how much they would improve with each entry) have quite a lot of charm. Rosa makes for a good protagonist who has a compelling backstory. And I really like the notebook mechanic where you can combine thoughts to make new ideas.

I actually think the early Blackwell games may be my favourites of the series. At the same time, I noticing some things which I don't love about it. The music is kind of overbearing and I really am not a fan of Joey's voice acting. He appears in just about every Wadjet Eye game and I always notice him, and for whatever reason his voice just doesn't work for me. There's no particular reason and by all accounts he does a good job, but I just cant' get on with it.

Also, this game REALLY does the infodump thing. After reading through 25 pages of letters (ugh), I feel like I've had all control taken away from me for quite a while since Joey appeared. Fortunately Dave Gilbert is aware of this design choice and mentions that he could have done better in the commentary tracks.

Still, for an early game from a solo-ish dev, this is all very impressive.