Spirit Seekers Ireland: The Clare Abbey is a point-and-click game created by Online Escape Rooms Ireland in Ennis, County, Clare, Ireland.
Format
Style of Play:
- Online native experience (can NOT be played IRL)
- Play on demand
- Point-and-click
- Web-based inventory system
Required Equipment: computer with internet connection, pen and paper
Pen and paper are useful to keep track of what you find in each area, since you will need to revisit areas throughout the game.
Recommended Team Size: 2-4
Play Time: 60 minutes
Price: €24.00 per game
Booking: purchase and play at your leisure
Description
Spirit Seekers Ireland: The Clare Abbey is a point-and-click game with 360-degree views of a real place in Ireland. Non-linear gameplay allows players to search independently, find items, and interact with the environment to solve puzzles. Items are automatically added to an inventory page. The game is creepy but not scary.
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Andrew Reynolds’ Reaction
Spirit Seekers Ireland: The Clare Abbey earns itself some points by taking place in one of the most picturesque locations I’ve seen. Taking place fully in Telescape, Clare Abbey’s visuals are entirely of…well…Clare Abbey, a real ruin in Ireland. Players click around a set of 360-degree views of the abbey grounds, spending a lot of time collecting what you’ll need for later. And I mean a lot of time – a good chunk of this game is collecting. Because the whole grounds are open from the beginning, there is a lot of exploring and collecting (read: clicking and clicking) right from the outset. Everything eventually gets used, but we spent a good amount of time wondering what to do with everything we had collected until the solution for the first puzzle clicked. From there, it became an easy-to-medium set of escape-style puzzles. Each major solve resulted in a cutscene that every player saw, but that sometimes resulted in audible confusion from other players who were not aware that a major solve was taking place. All in all, a game worth checking out if you don’t plan on heading to Ireland anytime soon to do your ghost hunting in person.
Brett Kuehner’s Reaction
- + Uses attractive photos of an interesting real-life location
- ? Majority of gameplay is searching, with a bit of decoding and logic
- + Most puzzling was in parallel, so it was fun for multiple players to explore different locations simultaneously
- + Puzzle graphics were clear and matched the setting (with a few minor exceptions)
- + I enjoyed meeting the birds and startling my teammates with the sound effects
- – Other than the scenery, there was nothing particularly special about the game. There are better options out there for this style of game
Cindi S’ Reaction
In Spirit Seekers Ireland: The Clare Abbey, you are a team of paranormal investigators exploring the creepy ruins of the Clare Abbey in County Clare, Ireland and looking for evidence of ghostly activity. Your search involves actual 360-degree scenes of the abbey, creating a highly immersive experience as you wander the grounds looking at crumbling walls and reading tombstones. The game is non-linear, allowing players to explore areas independently; our team was busy the entire time as there were many places to search. Unfortunately, this means it’s unlikely you’ll see every puzzle, and I often heard other people interacting with items and solving puzzles when I was in a completely different area. The puzzles I did see were unique and creative and at times involved real artifacts in the environment. Play this game if you want to try your hand at ghost-hunting and puzzling in a realistic, spooky setting.
Tammy McLeod’s Reaction
I rarely enjoy search-heavy games. Particularly in an online game, it means a lot of clicking. This game had numerous hidden objects that needed to be found, and they did not stand out from the background. Many times, my team would only locate items after most of us had already click-searched an area, which meant much more play time was spent aimlessly clicking than solving puzzles. There were even some objects that appeared only randomly, which we were unlucky and never stumbled across. The puzzles themselves were of average difficulty. Despite that, I thought that it was neat that this was set in a real location with an interesting history, which may be enough of a draw for history buffs to play this.
Matthew Stein’s Reaction
I thoroughly enjoyed our virtual investigation of the real-life Clare Abbey through Telescape-embedded 360-degree views of the monastery. The puzzles were very search-heavy, but disappointingly not really in a way which enhanced or transformed our perception of the surroundings. It was also sometimes difficult to tell which parts of the panoramas were clickable. The story, a fairly standard paranormal investigation, was pleasant, but lacked direction or site specificity. That is to say, the gameplay could have taken place in almost any setting, and thus the story/ puzzles and real-life “set” felt disjointed. This format has a lot of potential, and I’d love to see future games from these creators dive deeper into local history and lore, whether real or fictional, of the specific location(s) being explored.