That’s exactly it!
2 Likes
i realize blue prince chat happened in the GYPT part infinite but with like 500 unread posts decided i was too lazy to try to hunt them all down (this is why i don’t like megathreads for this sort of thing btw but don’t let me stop y’all. in fact i started this post in that thread but realize that i should , ‘Be The Change’ in case anyone is still interested in talking about it (no spoilies)
but yeah we’re only about… 10 days in and so far finding it pretty engaging still primarily as a vessel for Lore Delivery. i am starting to see how the puzzles that require multiple rooms/items with a low chance of appearance can get kind of frustrating, but i feel like there is still New Content every day regardless of what i hope/feel i need to get, which seems like a good balance to me.
it has not felt at all like gambling to me yet, i think mainly because we only really get through one session at a time. the longest amount of time per day i can justify devoting to Gaming is about one hour. i mean, come on, i am a busy man. i have Posts to make. but this works perfectly for how slowly we are taking each day, doing one round or maybe 2 if the first one is a wash. (which is rare)
it is kind of fun to just obsessively document every trivial detail, not knowing what actually matters and what doesn’t, and maybe it’s just me, but for me, the ratio of random discovery / successful deduction / plausible red herring feels pretty fine tuned. like i said, i do anticipate that will change at some point. i have heard there is lots of ‘post game’ content and i have a hard time believing i’ll have the energy to care about that tho.
7 Likes
oh the other thing i want to say about this is that while i enjoy the aesthetic in general the sound design/music i feel aggravates my Depression in ways i can’t really define
3 Likes
oh dude i’ll scrape the thread for ya
6 Likes
He’ll yeah
3 Likes
I’m addicted to green room runs, I just can’t stop synergizing. Probably to my own detriment.
2 Likes
I just hit day 40, which was a heart-breaking run because I thought I’d get to finally collect the (achievement-related spoiler) Trophy of Wealth, but it turned out to be much more expensive than anticipated. The effort might not be wasted, necessarily; I ended the day with (item-related spoilers) an emerald bracelet in the coat-check, plus whichever goodies the moon pendant lets me keep for tomorrow. I’m just a little bit sore about this because I (permanent house change-related spoiler) broke into my piggy bank to get the gold for the last purchase from the showroom, and I might have saved a resource like that for another day, if I knew I was still going to come up short.
My biggest struggle right now is with (post-Room 46 objective-related spoiler) the Realm Sigils, of which I’ve encountered two. I thought that I knew what I was supposed to do with these: (puzzle-solution related spoilers) I’ve got the Orinda Aries and Fenn Aries sigil doors opened, and between purchasing an intact copy of Realm & Rune and examining the candle chamber/geography lessons, I thought I knew how to put these together, but I must be getting some of the details wrong or using information that’s out-of-date. Also, the sigil devices don’t bother to portray all the information that the sigils contained, apparently? Do I need to be worried about the fact that I can’t differentiate different kinds of rays? I guess I need to just buy that history book next.
Regardless, I’m still having a blast.
2 Likes
Your first paragraph happened to me verbatim
There are indirect clues to the sigils but you have to be a philatelist to figure them out
the sigil devices do contain all the info in the book, you might want to examine the interface again
2 Likes
I confess that after defending this, seeing the good in it, legitimately having a good time…
I…started to get more and more runs that just…didn’t have anything going on. No new info, no new routes forward. And it slowly started to click together that I could do the roguelike part well, I adjusted all the hard to get mechanical rooms to common, I was getting sets of items reasonably consistently…
And it had eaten every other thing in my life. I had stalled on blender progress for a few weeks, I had to actively fight the part of my brain that wanted to keep playing. I was pretty sure I’d figured out the story and all the new details just…proved me correct.
Part of me still thinks this game is really cool, but it crossed an important threshold: is this taking bandwidth I could use elsewhere, and is this actually giving me anything in return?
And I couldn’t say yes anymore.
I started compulsively spoiling myself.
(MAJOR spoilers)
And all the things I thought were hinting at major new areas definitely were not, they were just more puzzle clues. When I found out that basically you just kept laying the tiles down but it just had you do an extremely pain in the ass series of moves to finish it, just like Outer Wilds, except even worse because this was RNG centric…
…it went from my thought of maybe returning someday to just…deciding to wash my hands of it and leave. Probably for good.
Like…so much of this game is legitimately genius. Like the format is really clever, it’s deeply compelling, and I think there’s something good there. But I think the mistake it makes is it tuned the roguelike elements too hard. So many aspects of this game would better if you could have more control over your upgrades, if you didn’t have to repeat math and logic puzzles, and have the multi room requirements be less rigid.
I wish it trusted the complexity and obscurity of the puzzles to make interacting with them easier. I wish tiles were less static after placing them. I wish the game could square the circle it created with its own premise better. Because I do think so much here is good.
To top it off, I do feel weird about how much it’s calibrated to seep into my exact form of autistic ADHD. How much this triggered the ‘one more pull’ aspects of my brain, and the ‘stay up until four to solve a problem’ brain. Working in unison to pull me in and never being quite sure if I was enjoying myself or if I was just enjoying the hit, turning sour when the hits ran dry.
…On the other hand, discussing it brought me closer to a cute girl, so who can say if it’s bad or not.
10 Likes
I haven’t played it but have been watching playthroughs just to stay abreast. The roguelike elements really put me off it (I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a roguelike since Abyss Odyssey) and I’ve been wondering if the game wouldn’t just be fine without so many of the random elements. I assume it would just be a lot shorter if the mansion had a fixed layout that you progress through in a relatively prescribed order. Or maybe access could change from day to day rather than layout? I guess I’m just wondering what is the drafting element really do for the game other than lengthen/prolong it and give a sense of surprise?
2 Likes
I might be a BP hater but I don’t think it’s a cynical kind of design where they set out to make a cheaply addictive loop or prolong a relatively short experience to offer VALUE. On paper, it’s a cute evolution of tile laying board games, holistically sensible, with a lot of potential for fun friction between the insanely layered puzzle part and the tile laying part (which might be realized, depending on your definition of fun). I do think they might have fallen for the Progression Design buzzword, with it being so omnipresent in the industry I’m not surprised, but it’s probably impossible to excise the good parts in a manner that would be satisfying to anti-roguelite folks. It’s a complete vision that would only be made weaker through design compromise. Everything in it comments on the other parts.
Ultimately, what kills the experience for me is that the central idea the whole meaning of the experience is derived from is rewarding your urge to second guess everything around you see, from false hints to false Big Narratives, but a) I don’t feel anything “real” revealed by second guessing is captivating by itself, it’s all sketch level of detail anyway, b) it pushes me to second guess the dubious design methods/goals even more, c) it’s the kind of message that seeks to pat your head for how clever you’ve been so far instead of touching on anything vital, in order to reach the moral that it’s good to second guess things you have to be primed to second guess things in the first place.
Plus it’s funny how easy it is to interpret the game as a very basic and thoroughly anticommunist “red is bad” kind of story. I’m eager to hear from someone who found the experience profound, though, I feel the pieces to deliver a compelling reading are there.
11 Likes
See, I have been thinking about this and I think it would be trivial to do so. Move the schoolhouse with 9 classrooms outside of the mansion and make them static. Make the clock tower a static piece (you can see it from the outside, it should be static)
Move the power generation puzzle to another building, along with the pump room and laboratory.
Make your whole inventory persistent across runs. What harm would it bring to the game? It would trivialize the busy work of tile laying? Good.
There are a million little ways to cut back on the most egregious bits of tedium. It would require cutting some pseudo-puzzles but I am willing to let go of the paired paintings (since theyre insipid busywork anyway) if it means people can do something actually interesting like working out the sigils
5 Likes
I never got around to reading the draft versions of the books before I got sick of the game but it is funny how the whole subplot of revolutionary relatives has no political content at all. It even has that reactionary undercurrent of restoring the correct bloodline to the throne. Truly something that feels like an afterthought in the game
3 Likes
But yeah, I don’t think the devs set out to make an evil game, they just ended up making one from the most innocent of origins: liking the aesthetics of tile laying games and puzzle books
I don’t think its an evolution of tile laying board games in any way, it just borrows the signifiers with no sense of game design
3 Likes
now that I repaired my controller, giving this a go
wow the developer does not respect my time. worked out the deal with the paintings and struggling to be bothered to finish the whole message
they made NetHack without any of the fun (self-inflicted punishment)
thought I was very clever by setting security level to HIGH and then powering off the doors, then never saw a security door
5 Likes
dear Blue Prince developers. thank you for the game. here are my notes and feedback to make it more fun:
- terrorists have taken over some rooms and you have to perform a breach and clear with planning and realtime action phases
- there should be a toilet you can flush
- if you flush too hard the house floods and you have to escape on by riding the waves in a surfing mini game back to the entrance
- when stuck you can drop breadcrumbs on the ground, which will attract birds and ducks. one of the ducks knows a useful hint. or is sleepy
- combo meter
11 Likes
It’s not actually but it might as well be
DO IT
CRACK
THESE
SAFES
USING
CLUES
an insultingly useless puzzle that isn’t even relevant by the time you get around to working out the whole message
4 Likes
I have wondered, given the relative popularity of the game, if some modder would take a shot at doing just this. I ain’t played more than the demo but from afar I ponder if just giving the player the ability to pick from any room available rather than just three options would spare how things work while lessing the most obnoxious elements.
3 Likes
I think there was an assumption that the sheet music puzzle would be so easy that it would be solved by most players relatively early. It only requires you to find the pages in, what, four rooms? And like the billiard room puzzle, it requires no knowledge of its ostensible subject matter, musical notation, to solve. I solved the first puzzle, the solution of which tells you how to solve the “real” puzzle, which then directs you to look in a certain place for your prize. The prize is significant, and it is significantly more effective the earlier you receive it in your time playing Blue Prince.
For reasons which I now find rather puzzling, I had convinced myself that the location I had been given referred to a place that I cannot access yet. Maybe it was a consequence of paying too much attention to the visions granted by Alzara (and seeing landscapes that have not yet otherwise been portrayed in-game); maybe my imagination was just too vivid. (Picturing white-leaved trees rather than white trunks, rather inexplicably.) I was certain that it was only a matter of time before I would have cause to wander in areas to the east or north of the house, or perhaps at the bottom of the valley. I don’t know why I persisted in these expectations so long after I’d clearly accessed all the house exterior locations, but I did eventually find what I’d been missing, on day 40 or 41.
Let’s consider the implications of this new resource: I know of 8 bedrooms, 8 hallways, 8 green rooms, 8 red rooms, 8 shops, 8 rooms added from the drafting studio, 8 outside rooms, 8 room plans found in various locations, plus the original 46-rooms with blue borders: that would be 110, but we can’t change the rarity of room 46, or the antechamber, entrance hall, foundation, secret garden, or room 8. For no reason whatsoever, I’m going to assume there are probably two more rooms with fixed rarity which will never show up in the conservatory. That would leave 102 rooms, and since we can adjust rarity three rooms at a time, that would mean you can adjust the rarity of every room over a cycle of 34 days, assuming that you draw the conservatory every day, and further assuming that the conservatory doesn’t present any repeated rooms during that process.
This still doesn’t solve the problem of randomized outcomes. It is a tool to reduce your reliance on good fortune, but not to eliminate that reliance. But considering how much displeasure this reliance is causing players who’ve spent a lot of time with this game, I have to wonder if the degree to which players will have a good time with this game might in some ways correlate with how soon they happen to solve this particular puzzle? I could see an argument that players who gain access to these tools “too early” might unwittingly make things harder on themselves by making an unappealing-looking room like the weight room especially rare before they come to appreciate its value, but in general, I am betting that getting the sheet music reward earlier rather than later is an overall positive.
So, if by some chance you are reading this and you have not played Blue Prince to the point that you have solved this puzzle (and you would still like to play further despite the conflicted feelings this game can cause), I would encourage you to make your first priority locating all 8 pages of sheet music in the house. If you’re having trouble locating those pages, I seem to recall seeing at least one page in the music room, obviously, and the ballroom, and the room where you build contraptions, and probably at least one other room that I’m now forgetting. Once you’ve taken a screenshot of each page of music, take the time to look at them in sequence. Do you see the message? The rather obvious trick is that you need to read the bolded words, and the message says that the “true” message is made up of the first word on each sheet. If you follow those instructions, you’ll instead learn that there’s treasure hidden among the white trees under two rocks. And on the off-chance that, like me, you’ve forgotten that this is describing a place you’ve probably already been: you need to get a shovel and bring it to the white-barked trees behind your campsite, not far from the apple orchard. The two rocks are pretty obvious, once you’re looking for them.
3 Likes
There are 110 total rooms
2 Likes