Blackstone Chronicles is a ghost story, but it’s not a traditional one. While the spirits of the deceased patients of Blackstone Asylum still haunt its halls they are not phantasmagoric specters. Not even the asylum director, Malcolm Metcalf, who refuses to move on after his death due to his desire for his son, Oliver, to continue the work he did in life and is willing to commit more heinous deeds to fulfill it, is not a grinning ghoul who pops out of the shadows to shock and frighten. The ghosts of Blackstone are echoes bound to the places and items that they interacted with in life, unaware of how much time has gone on without them. They are lingering memories still trapped in death by the clinical cruelty of the man who had them imprisoned in life. The horror of Blackstone Asylum isn’t what bumps in the night, but the very real fates of those institutionalized in turn of the 20th century asylums.

Blackstone laid abandoned for decades after Malcolm’s death, but now the town council has decided to renovate it as a museum of psychiatric history. The museum crew have unwittingly uncovered more history than they could have imagined as their actions have roused Malcolm’s spirit and he is none too happy with what they are doing to his beloved asylum. He is also quite agitated that Oliver refused to follow in his footsteps, but perhaps his young grandson, Joshua, could be persuaded instead. Oliver returns to a past he wished stay buried as he ventures through his father’s asylum to rescue his son. He is surrounded by the past, not only the souls still trapped in its walls but the museum displays that cover what when on in the asylum with artifacts behind glass and computer screen descriptions. Electric shocks, vivisections, lobotomies, all violent, dehumanizing procedures that were genuinely believed by medical science of the time to remedy maladies of the mind. Malcolm had performed them all in his quest for finding the cures for mental afflictions. He sought to make a name for himself in the annals of medical science, like Hippocrates, Paracelsus, and Freud, men who he admired so much that he adorned the entrance of the asylum with their visages. Malcolm is a near omnipresent force as Oliver explores the asylum, the first thing you will most likely see is his portrait which looms over the foyer, his voice a constant source of cool condescension towards his disappointment of a son. Examine items outside of the patients’ room and Malcolm will make some comment about it, such as reminiscing about the past, extolling his perceived past successes in his work, and grumbling about the gall of these museum workers who dare mess with his domain. Malcolm’s VA just does a fantastic job with all this and makes Malcolm one of the most memorable villains I’ve experienced in a video game; a loathsome, conceited abuser who is fully convinced that he never did anything wrong in life and continues to never err in death. The plebeians just refused to see his genius and Oliver is no different, but he’ll prove them all wrong.

To save his son Oliver must free the patients and Malcolm’s control over them. Malcolm has bound them to important items that Malcolm utilizes to manifest his power in the land of the living. Oliver must collect these relics, but each time he does the cursed energies from within them forcibly compel Oliver to become trapped in one of the asylum’s means of “treatment” which he must escape before they kill him. This is the primary form of puzzle solving aside from some light inventory puzzling, but the game is quite lenient about them, especially for a 90’s adventure game. Each death trap is completely solvable by everything you have at hand by that point and if you do die an autosave will take you right back at the start of the trap to try again. Overall the game is not very puzzle heavy but honestly that it works in its favor as the game lets exploration and character interaction to be the forefront.

Oliver’s journey is rather limited in a sense as outside the main lobby, day rooms, chapel, and Malcolm’s office, he mainly explores the patient rooms of the women’s low security ward before exploring the basement levels of the asylum, but focusing on these specific patients helps build a thematic core. Medicine is not a field that is free of patriarchal biases, far from it. Even to this day women aren’t trusted to even communicate their own bodily issues and that’s not going into topics such as reproductive autonomy. Turn of the 20th century mental asylums were even worse about this. Woman acting assertively or embarrassing her well to-do family in some way? She is clearly hysterical and must be institutionalized. The first patient Oliver meets is a young woman named Marilyn who Malcolm tells you she got committed for “hysterical pregnancy”, that she believes that she had a baby that didn’t actually exist. Considering it’s pretty clear from the outset of the game that Malcolm’s overall perspective on things isn’t very reliable and what from you can glean from talking to Marilyn and exploring her room the situation becomes much less clear cut than Malcolm claims. Malcolm already dismisses any inconvenient truth he doesn’t like, especially anything that would impact his medical research, so of course women aren’t going to fare much better in his asylum even in the well-furnished rooms of the women’s low security ward. You never do see what the more secure wards were like but the picture the game paints with the references it gives you and with the context of how even the women in the well-off ward suffer is not a pretty one. A man not so far removed of his time, Malcolm considered any slight social deviation as a disease. Anxiety, gender non-conformity, women just being uppity? All of these must be purged by any means and if he can find the solution to them he will become one of the greats. The most chilling thing about Malcolm, in his delusions of grandeur and his callousness, is that he genuinely believed he was helping these people. Oliver rejected that cruelty and through his compassion for the patients and the love for his son he can finally end his father’s decades-long nightmare.

Blackstone Chronicles is an underrated gem of a horror adventure game, one that entirely eschews jump scares and haunted house shenanigans for a creeping dread over very real situations. It’s not the easiest game to stomach because of that, but because of its restraint in not actually showing much aside from what still remains decades later, it addresses the subject matter with a rather mature and deft hand instead of cheap shock value. Blackstone Chronicles is a favorite of mine that still sticks with me several years after completing it.

Blackstone’s doors lie open and I recommend taking a visit.