Every game needs a setting, and for The Secret of Langton Manor, I wanted a chilling, gothic feel. To give the place a solid foundation, I started with a real-world location: Coleshill House. This magnificent 17th-century English mansion in Berkshire was an architectural masterpiece by Sir Roger Pratt. Though a fire destroyed it in 1952, I found its original floor plan in an architectural book from 1901 and used it as a direct basis for the layout of Langton Manor:
But Coleshill House gave me more than just a floor plan. It gave me the inspiration for the story itself, specifically for one of the central mysteries you uncover in Episode 2. In an old article from the Swindon Advertiser, I found a strange piece of local folklore tied to the house: the legend of a walking doll.
The article revealed a bizarre discovery after the 1952 fire. A large wooden box, sealed in a cupboard for over 60 years, fell into the light when a chimney collapsed. While local gossip hinted the box contained the coffin of a child, a former resident offered a different, equally unsettling explanation: it held a doll that belonged to her great-great-grandmother. She explained that her father had locked the doll away decades earlier after servants claimed it would walk at night, believing the doll was tied to the house's luck. This detail, a feared object hidden away, inspired me to create the central plot of the headless doll. It became a core part of the second episode's narrative.
Today, if you visit the site of Coleshill House, there isn't much to see, just the original gate piers and the grassy footprint where the magnificent house once stood. It's a quiet reminder of a place that now exists only in pictures, books, and, in a way, in the rooms and puzzles of Langton Manor.
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