So you’ve completed an investigation in Question’s The Blackout Club. You get back to the train car and finally take a well-earned nap. But before you awaken, you fall into REM sleep and experience a dream.
Strange voices communicate with one another. Before you can start to distinguish what’s really going on, you wake up. Just like that, your dream is over, and now you stand in the rear train car with nothing but a mirror on the wall and a square drawn onto the floor.
Confused? We were, too. But thanks to some investigating of our own (and a little help from the developers), we were able to piece together this mystery. Be warned, there are spoilers in this guide that you may be better off avoiding, so consider yourself warned.
We’ll explain everything below.
The Blackout Club Lore
If you only want to know how these elaborate systems fit into the story of The Blackout Club, let’s start there.
Voices
The Voices you sometimes hear, be it in dreams or in missions, are considered the gods or “daimons” of the game, and their intentions are clouded in the many metaphors they speak. There are currently eight known Voices:
- DANCE-FOR-US
- LAUGH-LAST
- IN-HER-TEETH
- THEE-I-DARE
- SPEAK-AS-ONE
- DIE-FOR-YOU
- THE-MEASURE-CUTS
- Eighth Daimon’s name not yet revealed
There are a number of ways players can communicate with these Voices, including:
- Performing rituals proactively
- Seeking their response
- Having the Voices observe you during missions
- Communicate with voice or messages when you close your eyes.
Currently only two Voices, THEE-I-DARE and SPEAK-AS-ONE, communicate exclusively with closed-eye written messages. The other six may come to you with voice or text or both.
When you see a large image of an eye on your screen, it means you should close your eyes in-game to read the message from one of these Voices. They speak to you directly, often by name, and may even recall your previous experiences in The Blackout Club.
They also seem to prefer players who stay in-universe with their inquiries. Fourth wall-breaking has not been a very successful means of reaching out, though not totally unsuccessful.
Rituals
Rituals are performed in the second train car at the club’s hideout. It’s the same one you spawn into after finishing a mission and listening to a dream (more on those in a moment). You can perform a ritual by offering a tribute to the mirror.
A tribute is performed with a ritual item, which sometimes appears in the hideout inside a small glowing box next to the map. These gifts are more likely to appear when you collect a lot of bonus evidence on a mission, but sometimes they will be cosmetic items as rewards unrelated to rituals.
The ritual item you want to receive if you’re looking to perform a tribute is the Light of Rebellion. Offering these ritual items to the mirror, you must then stand back and close your eyes while standing inside the white square painted on the ground.
While doing this, you have 30 seconds to record your message to the Voices. You can say whatever you want and they may reply hours or even months later, or never at all.
Players can also sacrifice their character and start anew at this same mirror. Doing this puts you on the leaderboard for XP Sacrificed, though in-universe, it’s not yet known if sacrificing to the Voices like this has any longterm effects.
Dreams
Dreams can be really confusing at first, but over time, you may figure out what’s really going on. When you listen to a dream after a mission, what you’re hearing is another player’s ritual. You first hear their recorded message to the Voices, then you hear the reply from the Voice with whom they communicated.
If you’re waiting to hear your own ritual replied to, you’ll be notified by a glowing sleeping bag in the ritual area. Interact with it to listen to the response from a Voice you spoke to.
What Does Enhanced Horror Do?
At the beginning of The Blackout Club, you’re asked to opt into the Enhanced Horror feature. While this is optional and in this era of Big Data you may be taken aback by a game requesting to snoop in on your experiences, we nonetheless highly recommend opting in.
It’s rare the game’s Enhanced Horror features will come to fruition in any particular mission, but when they do, it’s unforgettable. We experienced this firsthand when SPEAK-AS-ONE spoke to us and seemingly tried to get us to go over to its side and abandon the club.
In our opinion, which you can read here in our full review, The Blackout Club is a great game even when these special features are manifesting in all their confusing glory, but when they do, they elevate the game to a new level of immersive horror. It’s unlike anything else we’ve experienced in games.
While you don’t have to enable Enhanced Horror to listen to and submit dreams, you do need to opt in to have the Voices speak to you during missions and to perform rituals.
Now that you’ve got a better grasp on some of The Blackout Club‘s strangest features, be sure to get a good head start on missions with our beginner’s guide.
