I naively hoped all the effusive praise for Blue Prince in media would mean the roguelite elements are very much secondary to the puzzle-solving and then I got hit with a game about determining which very literal build order has the smallest chance of permanently ruining your run, the kind of RNG mitigation I hate the most combined with the kind of progression I’m always most naturally suspicious about since I never feel particularly good about my last run but am always hoping the next one will be The One, the worst kind of “addictive” gameplay. How many more times will they force me to solve elementary school-level math problems on this dartboard. The vibe is neat and the detailed rooms with a lot of mysterious props suggest there are rewarding discoveries to be made but if you’re particularly sensitive towards the ways Balatro or Vampire Survivors gets you to keep playing, caveat emptor
I’m chewing on Blue Prince since I made peace with how much I wanted to play this since I literally played the demo until it stopped me. I continue to be conflicted!
See, I can tell part of how it’s got it’s hooks in me is the just one more time roguelike loop. How the gambling aspect is why I keep wanting to go again, to try another time. But what is incredibly frustrating is that mixed in with that is an increasingly satisfyingly complex set of interlinking logic puzzles the full shape of which I still haven’t managed to suss out.
There’s multiple areas I thought I understood that I definitely did not understand. There’s a series of wordplay puzzles that seem really important but I don’t understand yet. The deeper I go, the more context I get, and the more context I get, the more the euro-game-esque nature of the tile laying becomes apparent.
I also suspect that the game is designed to start seeding you some better tiles as you go, since I’ve noticed that as I go longer better runs seem to be more frequent as I’m playing it.
I’m engrossed but it does feel extremely weird to be trying to figure out how much of it is the puzzle and how much of it is the gambling.
Sleeping on this: I think the recurring puzzle rooms are a super weird misstep in this? They feel out of place. Most other mechanisms are persistent across runs so you do have to decide “yeah I’ll just be ok with this” for a while, which fits the spirit of the game, but it always does strategically make sense to take some of the recurring puzzle rooms every game. It’s annoying and takes away from the more fun parts.
EDIT: ESPECIALLY THE MATH ONES, there is no fail state, no cleverness, and the rewards seem larger comparatively to the logic ones.
Roguelite + mystery puzzle game doesn’t seem like the best synergy. The thing most players dislike about roguelikes/lites is being on the wrong side of RNG and rolling bad run after bad run, you feel like the game is just antagonizing you and wasting your time. Bad runs can still be OK though if the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun and visceral. However, mystery puzzle games aren’t “moment-to-moment gameplay” games, most of the game happens in your head and with repeated experimentation, so any RNG is just a massive roadblock. I suppose RNG can be used to force players to explore new things, but a developer can only control players’ motivations so much, a developer also needs to account for when players will just keep re-rolling to get the “right” RNG to test something out. When I think I made a discovery in a puzzle game, I don’t want to write the idea down and test it out later, I want to test it out ASAP - that is the visceral aspect of puzzle gameplay. Puzzle games have to be very careful about friction.
I’m reading a lot about this game as I’m on the fence on getting it. Elements could be interesting, but I’m hesitant to commit to a game may waste hours of my time.
I think if I was to explain the reason the mechanics are keeping me going on the adventure side: I think it’s better to approach everything as a holistic puzzle rather than one singular thing. I’ve got at least half a dozen different independent puzzles that I know of at once. There’s several puzzles with information that you can almost certainly gather over the course of nearly any run. And since I’m working on so many sub-puzzles at once, it’s compelling even if the one that’s at the forefront of my mind isn’t coming together.
There’s a lot of clues and information you can suss out that don’t necessarily need explanation that you can start to suss out by examining recurring imagery and such too.
And like I said if there’s a big complicated mechanism, it stays how you left it and doesn’t reset. This is necessary to progress in several cases.
In the meantime, as I’ve gotten deeper into the game, I have also started getting chances to gain more leverage over the RNG, and learning strategies to maximize my exploration time, as well as permanent upgrades. And exactly what approach makes the most sense at any given time is constantly changing because exactly what I want is changing too. I like how the context of everything together is constantly shifting, both on the board game side, and the adventure side.
I dunno like I said, I feel mixed about it but the pieces are falling into place a little more as I go. It’s at least…cool? Interesting? I’m still going strong especially now that I’m seeing more and more pieces and taking notes on everything. But I’m almost twenty runs in and I played a lot of the demo.
Re: Blue Prince, I have given it a few more hours, and by the time I understood the metapuzzle Jason Schreier was particularly giddy about (the paintings) I decided I’m done. (Speaking of, it’s worth noting that the press people who champion the game the most were seemingly solving it as a part of one Discord server whose members kept hyping each other up.) Barely any of the discoveries felt evocative to me, most of them are cute at best, nearly all of them base their strength in making the mechanisms of the large-scale puzzle box more elaborate, and what the puzzle box is primarily good at is making you waste your time. The slow walk speed, the long animations related to computers or item acquisitions, the repetitive dart puzzle, most hints being offered to you in about six different (increasingly patronizing) variations, the RNG frustrations getting more pronounced with time despite the player getting better at controlling the baseline randomization problems, and so on. Ugh.
I have 100%'d Void Stranger, a similarly complicated puzzle game with similarly long runs, without ever hating it, and a huge part of why was that it never was a chore to interact with: the incredibly fast movement, brilliant data manipulation mechanics, very meaningful upgrades, even when I was redoing levels I knew by heart I knew I could be optimizing a lot of my routes better. Same with Outer Wilds: the looming immediacy of the threat, the majestic evolving world, fun movement, discoveries that worked as payoffs on a visceral level. Blue Prince is positively austere in comparison, and since a lot of it absolutely is gambling/manipulative mechanics, it never makes you feel in control.
The Alzara cutscenes I’ve seen were surprisingly compelling in their imagery and they were the closest the game has gotten to a hook that made me go, I want to know what it all means, but all the answers I’ve gotten so far were along the lines of “oh it’s wordplay”. The game’s name is very fitting in how it might intially seem evocative but is actually just a pun related to the mechanics. I saw a review that waxed poetic about how the author “luxuriates in language” and all the possible ways one can toy with it (the game -is- basically impossible to localize), but reading all these dry notes I can think of at least a few ways more. If there’s some satisfying lore/storyline hidden here that I’ve seen the reviewers allude to they’ve hidden it really well. I’ll be looking into some breakdowns of the game’s entire design with interest whenever these come out but this thing is really desperate to waste ten or twenty more hours of your life than what I’m comfortable with.
OK it’s hard to know exactly how deep I’m in to Blue Prince but I have enough information at this point to be getting new info every time. The roguelike part has started to feel less like an obstacle and more like…punctuation? I think I get what it’s doing, and I don’t think this game would work without it, because I think it’s less “This is here to make this take longer to waste your time” and more just like how JRPGs have random battles? It’s like, you’re playing a game to get access to more stuff, and the better you get at the game the more stuff you get. I do think this is slightly compulsive stuff, but it’s well designed and I really do feel like I’m getting better at it mostly through knowledge. There’s a lot of luck involved, but I’m understanding how to mitigate that better and better as I’m going.
And also, genuinely, I got to a point where literally every run has new stuff I’m digging up. I’m starting to piece together the lore, the personalities, and the significance of various rooms and objects.
Maybe it’s just a puzzlebox but fuck, it’s a really really really good puzzlebox right now. This is not to say I don’t know a few people who would absolutely hate this game. Hell, a lot of people maybe. But I think the praise is warranted if this is a game that connects with you.
based on my first couple hours I’m inclined to agree with this. the most interesting thing about it is that it might be the only game I’ve played that’s particularly interested in being in a dialog with the witness, which otherwise seemed like kind of a dead end design-wise
neat game, one of the better uses of tabletop mechanics in a videogame I’ve seen since those were strip mined a few years ago, but a little heavy on being an iceberg for an iceberg’s sake
And one of the major questions I had about the game’s reception is somewhat resolved.
I will note that while Steam reviews are… let’s say imperfect for various reasons, Blue Prince’s have been stuck around 78-81% positive since release seemingly without any noteworthy outside impetus (i.e. being “woke” or boosted by some noteworthy content creator) affecting it one way or the other. The main thing I get from that is that the wildly positive reviews have gotten people who otherwise wouldn’t have been interested in a game like this to give it a shot, and predictably many of them aren’t won over, but the contrast between the almost orgasmic reviewer response and the larger playing community being “yeah it’s alright if you are into that sort of thing” was so pronounced even by gaming levels to make me wonder why and all the reviewers being part of a massive co-op play along (which makes any game better) would be a believable explanation.
I think a lot of people are very invested in the idea of there being another Unity-scoped perfect marriage of form and function the way we had with Baba and Disco and Outer Wilds in 2019 and it’s just not quite happening, most of the really impressive games right now are much heavier & more simulationist like KCD2 or Alan Wake
I think it’s a mixture of this, savvy marketing work, what Felix is saying (+general appeal of a polished, moody experience that’s ostensibly for sophisticated adults), reviewers still being in their honeymoon phase with deckbuilder roguelites, and the fact that the interconnected design ambition is really bewildering in the vacuum. And RNG?
The fact I’ve seen like 20 comments scoffing at the detractors for being “too stupid” to get despite there being not much to get probably also plays the role. I’m confused by the “bring your notebook and pen” meme considering that a) you should probably just screenshot unique looking things instead, b) there’s nothing here that really needs a notebook to plan out if you just want to beat the game. Maybe in the postgame, idk.
People who have beaten it claim that solving the side puzzles that interested me the most mostly just results in permanent buffs, which, yeah I think I’m good. “It’s skill-based, you will totally learn to control the randomness better”, insists a person who has six gems, three keys, two perks and ten improved room drafts more than me at the beginning of each run.
Played Blue Prince most of the weekend and reached end credits on day 40. Not saying “finished”, of course, I’ve still got a bunch of open leads and missing rooms. And it was really great! Love just about everything about it!
Maybe my only gripe is that while I wasn’t affected by colorblindness much it did become a problem in the billiard room puzzle after maybe day 30.
The notebook’s not for stuff you’re seeing, the notebook’s for stuff you’re not seeing. Hypotheses and comparisons and all that, that I could then put to the test. Like (mostly imaginary example) if I visit a room with 4 semi-concealed trumpets of different colors and not one more, and write them down and then later I read a description and it mentions the five famed trumpets of Apocalypso, that’s when I know something’s amiss. Writing or drawing it committed the observation to the mind in a way taking a screenshot doesn’t. There’s a bunch of hidden draft rules I did deduce like 20 days before they were formally presented in-game thanks to that, and more things left unsaid.
Also a notebook or text file is tremendously easier to search than a screenshot collection, so when suddenly it becomes important to know something like all rooms that contained trumpets, it’s pretty easy.
I approached my screenshot collection like an organized documentation where upon entering any room, I photographed and archived anything that looks remotely handcrafted (including windows and so on) and it has served me perfectly well (solving puzzles came automatically), but yeah, I can see why someone would want to organize their thoughts like this, especially when planning to draft interconnected rooms with specific mechanisms.
Glad you liked it, I’m down on the parts that REALLY didn’t work for me but I see how there’s enough craft there for someone to fall in love with it.
I’ve been playing Blue Prince too. My thoughts are basically the same now as they were when I posted about the demo – I like the board game influence, exploration, and puzzle solving, but wish the aesthetics were less bland.
Having played up to Day 8, I can add that I like how totally chill this game is. The puzzles are fun to solve but generally fairly easy. No Cyan style mind melters. The aesthetics are pretty relaxed. Moment to moment decisions aren’t too complex. It’s a good weed smoking chillout game, more than I expected.
I was also surprised how much I liked some of the music in the rare moments you get it to kick in. Some nice mid century jazzy stuff.
also playing Blue Prince and enjoying it. the setting is dull as dirt. it makes sense it was influenced by 80s-90s puzzle books and puzzly board games but it also copied their sensibilities with regard to flavor and theme, so you get this early 20th c pastiche with a big rich people manor with servants and colonial undertones… which was totally unnecessary, kinda unfortunate, kinda dweeby, and you could have skinned this gameplay with any theme. so it is unfortunately Fun but Uncool. people who like Mystery as a genre tend to have taste in fiction I would describe as “embalmed.”
all that aside, it’s fun. it’s really not a roguelike, it’s using the deck of draftable rooms and their placements as a way both to mix up the kind of backtracking you would do in one of these laid out more like Myst while also facilitating puzzles which complement the aspect of exploring a house as you’re building it / finding what specific placements for specific rooms on the grid can do, synergies between rooms, etc. it’s my kind of bullshit and I have a lil notebook full of scribbles about it, which is a mode of playing I kinda wish more games leaned into.
i think giving you free movement control in myst-likes / click adventures was a huge mistake. just point my camera at the interactable shit and we can move on. why am i wandering around largely empty rooms in blue prince idgi?
I just started looking up what Blue Prince is and all I have to say is that I’m not interested unless it takes the “plucky child heir explores infinite shifting mansion” concept in wilder directions than the webcomic A House Divided did
blue prince isn’t hitting. The absolutely rancid theme/writing are doing a lot to sour the experience but none of the puzzles have impressed me so far. The best it manages is on par with a mediocre puzzle in a myst-like. I was engaged by the room coordinate letter codes puzzle but gradually lost interest when I realized it was mostly busy work after the initial realization of what was going on, and the solution I received was just a clue I didn’t need for another puzzle I was already halfway through solving.
The game feels like its spoonfeeding me the solutions to puzzles that are frankly not worth the effort. I am frequently in the position of knowing the solutions to a bunch of puzzles but having to wait to implement them until I get the right array of items and blueprints in a run. Nothing is worse in an adventure game than knowing the solution to a puzzle and the game not letting you implement it for arbitrary reasons. I’m working on the laboratory puzzle and its really obvious what I’m supposed to do but I haven’t yet had a run where the power room got drafted next to the laboratory so I’m just twiddling my thumbs
I kind of hate that the game’s name is a pun. Doesn’t seem like a very humorous game, so the name just feels sort of random.
I’m playing Flower, Sun, and Rain. It’s amazing how art and theming can lift a whole work into something masterful. Sometimes the puzzles in this game aren’t even puzzles. “Count the candles in this room.” “What’s the setting for this that is referenced in the guidebook?” But it doesn’t matter. In fact, the lethargic busywork adds to the whole experience because I am ostensibly on vacation.