Part 66: Summary - The Blackwell Convergence

Convergence Theme



Blackwell Convergence was originally supposed to be the second game in the series, and had a somewhat different slice of the story planned, but with Unbound coming out in the middle of its creation cycle, things switched up pretty quickly. The decision was made to spend considerably more money on graphics and marketing, and what was initially slated to be a 4 month project ended up taking well over two years to complete. Gilbert immediately realised that his initial plan of having around ten games in the series was unrealistic with that kind of time frame for each game, and changed things around a bit, introducing some characters earlier than planned, and shelving a few loose threads that weren't worth picking up on.

Another major change that occurred in Convergence was the replacing of Rosa's original voice actress, Sande Chen, who was busy winning awards for being the head writer of The Witcher among other things. Rebecca Whittaker took over the role, and it has to be said, absolutely made it her own, to the point where Gilbert eventually had Whittaker re-voice the first game because he saw her as the "true" voice of Rosa. Yet another major change was the complete removal of the "combining clues" puzzle mechanic, a change that Gilbert preferred, but which was reintroduced for the final two games after fan outcry.

In the end, the extra money spent on making the game as pretty as possible didn't translate to any extra profit, and so the decision was made to keep future Blackwell games low-budget in a graphical sense. Consequently, purely from a screenshot point of view, Convergence is the prettiest the series ever looked, though the later games do some nice things with animation and lighting effects.

Allen Reiken



Convergence introduced what would become a series staple by opening with a short, playable case which would serve as an introduction to all of the puzzle mechanics in the game.



Investigating a condemned building, Rosa and Joey discovered a suicidal ghost, Allen Reiken, who sadly wasn't aware that he had already jumped.



It turned out that Allen had lost his business in a warehouse fire, and his wife had left him shortly afterwards.



In a cruel choice, Joey could convince the guy that he really should jump...



...but the better option was to trick him into thinking Rosa was his wife, and let him vent his spleen.



Either way, our intrepid heroes saved the day again!

Rosa's Theme



In the time between Legacy and Convergence, Rosa had been trying to juggle the saving of ghosts with the development of her flagging social life.



Despite Joey's best attempts to distract her, Rosa finally remembered that she had agreed to meet up with Nishanthi at a local art gallery opening.

The Park Gallery



The Park Gallery, owned by the hyperactive Josie Park, has the somewhat dubious honour of having the most re-used theme in the entire Blackwell series! The gallery opening was displaying the artwork of Claude Urdin, a frustratingly stereotypical artist type.



Despite Joey's notable objections to having to attend, the evening's entertainment proved fruitful as Nishanthi introduced Rosa to a friend of hers, film company executive producer Monique Stahlman, who Nishanthi claimed had a ghost story to tell.



The Park Gallery is also the place where Rosa's apparent predisposition to binge drinking was first revealed to the player!



While sleeping off the booze, Rosa found herself dreaming of a old ghost lady, who she would later learn was named Madeline. Unfortunately, she wouldn't remember the dreams in the morning.

Monique's Theme



The next morning, Rosa and Joey followed up on the lead.



Well actually, Joey mostly just wanted to ogle Monique, but Rosa followed up on the lead anyway.



Monique told Rosa that an actor under her employ, Frank Lyons, had died during the filming of one of their movies, and that the movie had become wildly successful, mostly on account of interest created by his death. She said that she felt like she could hear him calling her every time she jogged past the film location where he died.

The Gothic Bridge



Sure enough, the ghost of Frank Lyons was stuck at the Gothic Bridge, believing himself to still be filming his final scene.



Rosa tried to talk to him, but he mistook her for the scene's actress and kept trying to recite his lines.



On the other hand, he mistook Joey for a stagehand and was more willing to talk.



Talking to him, however, provoked a strange, almost schitzophrenic response in which Frank would talk about a bar, The Minetta, in a whacked out voice before returning to normal seconds later.

The Minetta



Strangely, The Minetta, based on an actual tavern in Manhattan where Gilbert wrote much of the story for Blackwell, turned out to have nothing to do with Frank Lyons.



When pushed on the issue, Frank mentioned the name "Joe Gould", someone who did have links to The Minetta.



In fact, a portrait of Joe Gould took pride of place in the tavern. However, this didn't go any way to helping Rosa and Joey to figure out how he was related to Frank.



Unsure of what to do next, Rosa tried to find out Frank's address in the hopes of learning more about him.



With Monique not willing to give the address, Rosa turned to Frank's cat, who was now being cared for by Monique, for answers.



A quick distraction from Joey was all it took for Rosa to read the collar, and they were on their way!

The Windy City



Although Rosa was unable to break into Frank's apartment...



...Joey was able to snoop around long enough to find the movie script for Lyons' scene.



All Rosa had to do was learn the lines, and she'd be able to help Frank to "finish" the scene and, hopefully, be ready to move on.



Despite the scene continuing beyond the page Joey had read, Rosa was able to adlib well enough (or perhaps she just remembered the scene from seeing the movie herself?) to make it to the end.



With the scene completed, Frank finally noticed that none of his fellow actors or the stagehands were around, and the realisation of his own death hit him soon afterwards.

Between Worlds



As Frank was set to move on, he revealed one piece of information that meant a lot to us, the player, but not so much to Rosa.



Specifically, that he had died by being choked to death by an old woman.



At this point, the original plan was to have Joey tell Rosa about The Countess, via a flashback scene.

The Countess Returns



However, since Unbound already existed, a much more dramatic scene occurred instead where a ghostly Countess confronted Joey while Rosa was in the void with Frank.



Despite being a ghost, The Countess was arguably more powerful than when she was alive.



Upon seeing Rosa, however, she quickly fled, leaving Joey furious and Rosa with lots of questions.

Rosa's Theme



Although Rosa and Joey weren't great at communicating when the pressure got high, Rosa eventually dragged the story of Unbound out of Joey.



As she slept, Rosa had another dream of Madeline, who indicated that Joe Gould would be important, but nothing more.



The following day, Joey told Rosa that he'd seen a painting of a lady that looked just like The Countess at the art gallery opening, giving them their next lead.



Sure enough, a very accurate representation of The Countess was in one of Claude's paintings.



For some reason, she was shown next to the Roosevelt Island lighthouse...



...but an initial visit there revealed nothing.

The Meltzer Brothers



An investment company, the Meltzer Foundation, was revealed as having funded both the Park Gallery, and Monique's film company.



Rosa noted that they had only received a return on their investment once Frank Lyons was dead, which seemed a bit of a suspicious attitude for Rosa to have, but it proved prophetic.



Meeting up with Claude at the public opening of the Park Gallery, Rosa spent the evening awkwardly discussing art...



...until Claude finally invited her outside to talk.

Claude's Swansong



It turned out that Claude had painted his painting because he wanted The Countess to find him, believing that she needed him to save her.



Instead, she materialised just long enough to snap his neck...



...and unceremoniously deposit him to the road below.



A third dream had Madeline praising Rosa for showing a spine and wanting to chase down The Countess and finish what Lauren was unable to.

The Lighthouse



The new day brought a new clue, with an old man grieving at the Roosevelt Island lighthouse.



The man, Marty Goldwater, said that his son, John, had made a medical breakthrough, but had been murdered shortly before he could release it - and then a rival company, Lazarus Technology, released their own version only weeks later.



Lazarus was also sponsored by the Meltzer Foundation, making Rosa even more suspicious.



She confronted them about her suspicions, but with no proof she didn't have much to go on.

The Park Gallery



A third example of strong returns for Meltzer coming on the back of a dead man was finally too much for Rosa to accept.



She stormed in to the Meltzer Foundation and made it very clear that she believed they were responsible for their deaths.



Eventually, Rosa and Joey hacked into Charlie Meltzer's emails, where it was revealed that he had somehow inherited the same terrible power that Joseph Mitchell had in Unbound - he could sentence people to Death By Countess simply by writing their name down.

Prelude to Tragedy



Obviously fearing she was getting too close to the truth, Charlie decided to silence Rosa once and for all.



Despite Rosa and Joey hoping for some time to formulate a plan, The Countess appeared almost immediately.



Joey put on a brave face, but was very quickly shown to be outmatched.

Ghost Battle



With Joey struggling to hold on, Rosa quickly ducked out to find a place to hide.



While Joey continued to distract her, Rosa double-backed to her apartment...



...where, almost like a premonition, Rosa's photo of Lauren fell off the wall. Rosa showed it to The Countess in a last act of defiance...



...but it only served to incense her, and she somehow tapped into Rosa's link to the next world.

In The Wrong Place



Although The Countess intended for Rosa to move on...



...Madeline interrupted proceedings, revealing herself as having been The Countess' former spirit guide, who had been banished by The Countess, severing the link. That severed link had allowed the Universe to flow inside The Countess' head, driving her insane and leaving her as the broken old lady she was when she met Lauren.



With Rosa's help, Madeline shot off to try to repair the link and put an end to the killing, while Joey sat around and glared at The Countess.

A Strange Diner



The broken link, for whatever reason, was inside some kind of metaphorical diner floating in the eternal void. Yep.



Inside, Rosa found the echoes of Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell, who had both played unwitting guide to The Countess. Joe Gould, based on a real life nutcase, was an academic who claimed to be writing a treatise that would explain how every human being was linked, but who never actually produced his work. This was explained in-game, as he was unable to put names down on paper without dooming them to death. Unlike Charlie Meltzer, both Joe and Joseph refused to use their power once they discovered it.



In the next room, Rosa found a fragment of The Countess' soul hiding in an oven.



Retrieving the soul caused the diner to fade away, giving the echoes of Joe Gould and Joseph Mitchell peace at last.



Before disappearing altogether, however, Madeline revealed that she had known Lauren, and that Rosa was emotionally quite different from her.



With the restaurant fading away, the bond was broken and The Countess was no longer bound to false guides.

Ghost Battle



Rather than moving on, however, The Countess was primarily interested in revenge, and quickly shot back to reality to extract it.



By the time Rosa and Joey arrived, The Countess had already ransacked the room, taking Charlie Meltzer to the roof while a shaken Paul Meltzer could do nothing but watch in horror.



In yet another multiple ending choice, Rosa could either convince The Countess to spare Charlie's life, or let her kill him.



But either way, The Countess was next interested in seeking revenge for Joey being responsible for her death back in the 1970s.



Although she was much stronger than Joey, The Countess was defeated when Rosa was able to use Joey's tie to drag her into the void.

See Into Forever



As usual, being brought into the void by Rosa had a calming effect, and The Countess was finally ready to move on from her tortured existence.



And, at last, the story started with Lauren almost 40 years earlier was brought to a close.



The game's epilogue had Rosa wanting to change the way they did business - by advertising her services as a "spiritual consultant" on the Internet, much to Joey's disgust.



And last of all, a second epilogue showed Madeline still trapped in the void, speaking out loud to herself about hoping that Rosa would be able to one day help her.



Convergence was a really interesting game, tying together the open threads started in Unbound in a fairly satisfying way. However, it opened many more and left any kind of satisfying conclusions to future games, as well as entirely avoiding any kind of development in Joey's backstory.

The biggest single change in Convergence was the introduction of the series' first "evil" bad guy in Charlie Meltzer, as opposed to the tortured souls that featured in Legacy and Unbound. Convergence definitely marked the point at which the Blackwell series started to become a little darker, a theme which the next game would continue.

Graphically, it's hard to deny just how pretty Convergence was. They drew the entire game in their usual pixellated manner, and then sent the backgrounds off to a professional studio to add gradients and textures, and the result was absolutely stunning, in my opinion up there with the best any pixel-art adventure game has ever looked. Sadly, this is gone for the next two games, but they are pretty enough in their own right.

Although Convergence shared only one song with Unbound, the soundtrack from Convergence would go on to be used and re-used in both Deception and Epiphany, with composer Thomas Regin just adding new tunes for major events and areas when the old ones would no longer suffice.


Tomorrow I'll take a look at Deception, and then we'll be all set up to get our teeth stuck into a new game! Love to hear your thoughts, as always.