the bloop rinse

King of Posters
81

Blue Prince’s puzzles are getting a lot meatier after the credits. Finally starting to feel like an adventure game instead of a casual adventure game themed roguelite.

Of course, there’s still a hideous amount of RNG that makes the game a real chore to play at times but now I have done enough grinding to mitigate most of the consequences of RNG (my allowance is in the 30s, I’ve got a power hammer in my coat check) and got back to back lucky runs which let me knock out both of the puzzles that needed extra power. Working on doing a full 45-room manor, I think I need to draft a few more non dead-end rooms to make this practical. As it stands, I haven’t been lucky enough to go past 44 rooms in a single run.

Frankly, the game would be much easier to recommend if I started the game with all the resources I have after 20-something hours of play. I don’t know who came up with the idea of marrying roguelite permanent unlocks to a puzzle adventure game but I hope they never have an idea again.

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82

just to be safe let’s get rid of roguelite meta progression in all genres

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83

I’m almost more frustrated by the parts of Blue Prince I like because they’re so obviously compromised by the atrocious padding of the ‘gameplay loop’

If it was merely a bad adventure game I would’ve stopped playing but it frequently surprises me with pleasant, complex puzzles, opportunities for deductive and abductive reasoning, and overall good design. But all of those things are constantly hampered by the nagging annoyance of doing the time consuming, repetitive, and boring chore of mechanized “exploration”. It took until I had the right combination of gems, outer room, and layout to finish the classroom “quest” and find out there’s a whole damn conlang with a uniquely goofy system of grammar and its got me excited to figure out the meaning of some documents I found elsewhere.

Similarly, there’s a really good multi-stage puzzle involving one of the books in the bookstore but its gated behind: the bookstore spawning, having a lot of money, buying the book, waiting a day, having access to the library and the magnifying glass in the same day. I had an entire 15 day streak where the magnifying glass never spawned in any rooms. It’s horrendous trend-chasing design by committee nearly ruining what would be a pretty impressive adventure game otherwise.

16 Likes
84

Blue Prince’s RNG is too much and the ways you can mitigate it aren’t really fun or interesting. The room drafting & randomness were fun in smaller proportions. Should have either siloed them off into their own thing, like quarantining the drafting to its own, kinda self-contained stretch of the game, or given you tools to just pin down rooms where you want them to stay and change how items are used and distributed.

6 Likes
85

Personally I very much enjoy manipulating the draft and I’m getting quite consistent results if I decide to focus a run on one or two things. But I also appreciate that I always have like a dozen open leads big and small, even pretty far into the postgame, so if one plan doesn’t pan out I can switch to another one, or some simple objective that’ll contribute in the long run.

But also evidently at this stage (day 66, roughly one quarter through what seems to be the mother of all puzzles and with a clear roadmap to all but one of the missing elements) the game is starting to give some very powerful tools if you don’t want to deal with the draft.

Anyway, I’m loving everything about this game, it was made for me. It’s exactly the king of sprawling multi-layer puzzle box I wanted, and I find the setting very interesting.

8 Likes
86

I’ve reached this point myself. Nearly every time I ‘fail’ a run now it’s because I got too pulled into a weird tangent instead of staying on mission.

1 Like
87

I regularly make 45 room mansions and still don’t find the item I need to solve a particular puzzle. I dont think my issue with the rng is a skill issue. Similarly, I found all red letters hours ago, have found and used 5 of the 8 sanctum keys, all the microchips, opened every destructible wall, lit every candle, unlocked the diary, etc. Most days where I fail to do anything related to puzzle solving, I still try to mitigate drafting randomness by changing the odds in the conservatory. It still results in 80% of my playtime being dedicated to rote chores instead of puzzle solving.

I am surprised you have so many open leads because I feel like I am missing something big if that’s the case. Is there any big metapuzzle I haven’t mentioned above? I just found the throne room and figure thats the start of another large puzzle but otherwise it seems all I have left is the last 3 sanctum keys and their associated sigils, and to use the results there in room 46.

1 Like
88

I just finished Resident Evil 1 Remake for the first time in 20+ years and knowing nothing about Blue Prince it’s fun to read all these descriptions of it and feel an uncanny sort of sense memory of RE.

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89

Well, there’s two phases to the answer.

The first is I was behind you, at the time of writing I had only two sanctum keys, not yet all microchips (versus 5 keys, 4 sigils and all chips now) and hadn’t even thought of revisiting room 46 to get the definitive list of keys. So I had the general shape of that big puzzle of puzzles but a lot less certainty of what lead might be part of it and what might not.

Among the simple objectives that I can still accomplish when my main objectives failed, revisiting old notes was interesting because there’s a lot of redundant catch-up clues, outer wilds-style, that gave me new insight for ongoing puzzles, there also were some like:

  • solving the chessboard
  • ramping up the allowance which is a real boon in the long run, especially when combined with the washing machines and freezer
  • Also a gigantic buff: Accumulating stars

  • finding out there were more than one destructible wall

  • unlocking extra rooms and upgrades
  • buying books and solving “a new clue”
  • hunting for sigil clues
  • one of them was literally “whelp nothing more I can do with this run, just gonna gonna go through here to look at the skybox before calling it hey wait a second didn’t see that note the other day, wow a new area just opened up”
  • Finding 7 red envelopes

Of course now I’ve done all that it should be a lot more boring because I have a lot less leads and a very clear idea of what I’m trying to accomplish, but I get pulled to ancillary stuff like trying to find a good way to make preposterous amounts of money or, in the latest run, it took a surprising turn towards needing to spawn and excavate as many dirt piles as possible over all else, and that’s actually contributing to my solving something.

And, well, I still have a couple oddities I just can’t necessarily connect to the current big end puzzle so far. They might fit once once I progress further through them though. Gonna list my current open leads although it’s not an invitation to clue me in of course. Gonna do a spoiler-in-spoiler thing for the stuff I think you might not have reached based on your own progress report, although generally you seemed ahead of me.

Ongoing ruminations, likely incomplete as I don't have my notes right now

The easy ones, that I think are related to either upgrades or items for the sanctum quests (of which I am missing the vault, the clock and the final one) or sigils:

  • I’ve got a torch stashed in coat check to go and light my presumably final candles in the tomb, which I still haven’t done. At first I was assuming it’d open the tomb passage to the underground (which I also need to figure out even though it seems kinda useless right now) but based on one of Alzara’s predictions I’m leaning toward the diary key.
  • The new gardener’s log: What’s up with that one spot on the garden map where nothing grows? I keep forgetting to check but it looks just like a treasure map with the X and all so I might need to spawn a green room there and have a look
  • Gotta unfreeze that freezer, came close but not quite close enough
  • I suspect a fully opened mechanarium will be interesting.
  • I see you, statue on the side of the house. Maybe i’m imagining things, but maybe I’m not. Can I have a clearer look with the right green room?

The ones that right now feel too weird to fit with the sigils or sanctum keys:

  • Whatever’s going on with the gallery, that one might just be a trophy
  • The hand sculptures in several rooms are kinda suspicious but since there was similar imagery in the blackbridge book and around the cursed lockbox maybe it’s for curse mode? Haven’t tried it yet
  • Is there even an eighth red envelope? Alzara said I wouldn’t find it but I thought he was wrong about me not finding the room 46 door in that first vision so he’s not infaillible except…
  • That wasn’t door 46! Not saying that because it was shown in the wrong place, which I can easily attribute to the allegory aspect of the vision, but the moon’s the wrong way! And I know that’s not an oversight because it was in the chart for three moon phases in the classroom. Might just be whatever room the room 46 map puzzle will open (likely through the fireplace) but we’ll see.
  • Speaking of rooms, what’s up with room 8? Outside of found prints I’m only missing that in my directory and at this stage it feels really odd the specific room with the number associated with a lot of in-game imagery is missing. Of course between the classrooms, Alzara and the gallery I’m kinda expecting the infinity sign to come up.
  • So there was those servers in cold storage in the freezer, right? Although that seemed like a clue towards Blackbridge, given the accompanying note, looking at them it suddenly hit me that the lights spell out something in code, likely to do with both the locker room note and the server sticky note and extend to the whole server room.
  • Figuring out A New Clue was great and seemed like a very clear reward for all of five minutes, but I’m not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet.
  • Wow those patterns in the computer chip sockets sure look like patterns for some puzzle I don’t know about.
  • Same for the dark spots on that vertical conveyor thing in the boiler room that doesn’t serve any purpose but can be powered. I remember very well the previous time I thought a doodad in that room had no purpose.
  • I guess it’ll maybe be clearer with the diary, but her Ladyship drew a star map for some reason.
  • CASTLE CLOAK COURT, what’s that for? I’ve seen it twice already.
  • Lots of numbers on display in that coat check.

Not a lead, but on the lore side, related to the blackprints, I find fascinating the concept that the manor’s actually the original Orindia castle but they swapped all the original rooms out of the pool to keep it hidden from the redguard

Wow that’s actually a lot still!

5 Likes
90

And so, as it was foretold, I found the diary key where I expected it to be. I also solved the Clock tower, half by accident, but the trick to it was one of the leads I forgot to post last time so yay.

More ruminations
  • So clearly the diary’s expecting me to use the bedroom mechanic to find Simon’s grave. That shadow has been looming over the story for quite a while so I’m pretty curious
  • When I read about that mechanic it made me wonder how I’d never noticed because I felt I’d written down something similar before. But I remembered it this morning, it isn’t the same, just a blessing that works kinda like- waaaait, does that mean that last bit of the diary is really telling me to draft a second antechamber in the shed using that blessing? Amazing if that works, and here I am, really wanting to check that out but I won’t have time to play today!
  • An obvious one but the boiler and power conduits also have a thing that looks like a code when you power them on
2 Likes
91

Using the shrine blessing to draft outside rooms becomes increasingly relevant the closer you get to the end of the currently extant collection of puzzles

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92

Blue Prince kvetching: I think some of my frustrations with the game come from how I will frequently solve 3-4 major puzzles in a single run, and then go a dozen runs with no progress because the conditions to solve the next set of puzzles just never line up. The pacing feels off. I can’t tell if this is just my playstyle, but I wish my experience was more along the lines of the vaunted “learn something new every run” that others have talked about

6 Likes
93

Going ever deeper into Blue Prince. 7 keys and 7 sigils

Summary
  • Running theory is the final sanctum key (“the last door of eight”)is in the mechanarium’s eighth door. Which would be just a little bit crazy a requirement since you only get 7 mech rooms in the first place. I have 9, but because I have a room copy and an upgrade that counts as a mech room. It’s still gonna be a challenge, although I have a way to better the odds through a lab experiment I’m still likely only get it during a run where I have tons of redraws thanks to the observatory or maybe classrooms?
  • That would be better than the alternative, because I’ve got another door that kinda fits the description, which is a type of door I’ve never seen before? How tricky it was to find and the way it looks makes me think it’s rather something for after the sanctum is finished or a different trail altogether.
  • Somehow I saw one of the power conduit cylinders in the boiler room stop rotating. Was it a bug? Gonna have to expriment with those sooner or later anyway.
  • Nearing the end of the New Clue rabbit hole, maybe? Current stopping point is a doozy
  • No progress on the other leads yet. And I’m abroad next weekend!
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94

I solved “the last door of eight” by accident and your first instinct is correct

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95

After making this post the other day, I realized that continuing to play Blue Prince was a form of self harm and uninstalled it. I’m not immune to dark patterns if you bait me with puzzles.

Evil game.

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96

On the other hand if this is your kind of puzzle…

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97

everything you do seems to take … much, MUCH longer than it should

is the secret that the main character is addicted to Twitter. jk this sounds like an interesting game altho i don’t know if i will play it, i support it. i’ve obviously been thinking a lot about Time recently.

2 Likes
98

Was the puzzle in question the time-lock safe in the shelter or something to do with the clock tower? Because I solved the former 15 hours ago, and I’m trying to figure out if the latter works similarly. Or is it something else altogether?

1 Like
99

something else altogether, and much later in the game than either of those

the clock tower does work like that but it is at least mitigated by your having the option to wander around and do other puzzles, draft other rooms while you wait for the right time to near

the clock tower’s other saving grace was the actual puzzle, which required a good bit of thought on my part. It’s a shame that its locked out by a real-time wait and even more of a shame that they repeat this particular gimmick because it is a defining example of how most of the game is tedious but not hard

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100

Blue Prince is like if you had to get hazed to play Riven

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