the thing is, the game knows how bad my draws are. it tracks them! puts them in the scrapbook, “wow you always draft the Billiard Room given the chance, desperate much? how much you wanna give for another taste”
it would be so easy for the game to put its finger on the scale and swap the Billiard Room for the Parlor or Nook
I suspect: it’s random. there’s no priming or fudging to make the game more enjoyable. and that feels like a mistake in a game that’s very interested in you seeing its narrative
I’m a fan of roguelikes, but it baffles me to include its shape in this game. the step, keys, rubies all exist as health/hunger analogues, so you get stuck at resource management instead of puzzle solving. which feels weird in a ‘puzzle’ game
use coins/keys/rubies remaining at the end of a day to buy upgrade disks, freeze a tile in place, purchase an item to start with, coat check more items, train lockpicking, buy books
have ‘rest’ days where the manor is fixed, and you just explore. or starting with a key to unlock a specific draftable room with an important plot beat
saving the letters/books you read instead of making you use screenshots/a journal
plus stickers (letters, chess pieces, grumpy prince) you can put on a day’s plan or the tiles in the directory
alright i played more of this game. def more interesting bits have revealed themselves that helped me navigate the mansion a bit more but the grind is definitely still very real. like god the parlor rooms and pool room really wear on me after awhile. also i looked up some hints to make the process go quicker. i’m def torn because there are more interesting and creative bits and puzzles that are quite cool and i do like the general premise a lot and it feels unique but it’s so padded out and the aesthetics are so bland. honestly it’s a similar sort of feeling to Tears of the Kingdom in a different way, just in how it’s creative in a lot of ways but also really wastes your time. would be interesting to see if there’s a way to like speedrun this game the more you understand it or if it’s all too dependent on RNG and just the amount of time spend playing for that.
was pissed off when i finally reached a certain room and found out i had to do a lot more cryptic shit and i couldn’t keep the certain item from the certain room because i hadn’t drafted a certain other room lol. trying to be as spoiler free here as i can.
right now it’s like a four star game out of five for me with caveats but we’ll see how much longer i get through playing it.
one of the achievements is “Reach Room 46 on Day 1”, so I thought there’s some secret way to manipulate the draft pool if you know enough about the game. no, you just reroll new games and hope the RNG gods smile on you
i saw someone say they beat the game in like 5 hours on backloggd which is crazy to me… but i could also believe it if you just managed to stumble into all the right things. i was reading online on a guide that it took people an average of 30 days to reach a certain room i have not reached yet which doesn’t make me feel great because i’m at 40+ now and definitely not there yet. tho i fucked up several times. sometimes it’s just hard to tell what the game wants out of you or if it is truly just kinda random.
the only thing that seems to speed up the process to me is esp at the beginning consistently trying to draft new rooms as much as you can, which i think i avoided to my detriment. tho that’s less of a helpful strategy after a certain point
it took me 15 1/2 hours and double the amount of days that i read was the “average” amount of days to reach the end. so either i just suck or i restart days a lot more willingly. tho howlongtobeat says the average to complete the game is 16.5 hours which seems more correct esp considering i used a guide for one or two things.
was it worth it? i’m not sure. i liked some of the late game stuff but i was so exhausted from navigating those dang rooms that i felt more relief than anything else. honestly glad i got there on only a handful of attempts after unlocking all the late game stuff. i know there’s more to the game i could explore but i’m pretty satisfied with leaving it be.
i might try and pull together some thoughts on a backloggd because i’m still kind of not sure how i felt about the whole thing. there were a lot of elements of the game i liked but i really got tired of going through so many of those rooms after a certain point.
i did get to a point where my strategy just ended up being “accumulate as many gems and keys as possible” which felt less of a realization and more just a brute force tactic
that is the pro strat, along with “try to avoid dead-ends in ranks 5+”. equally obvious and trite as how card advantage works in deck games: draw more cards? what kind of insight is that? (answer: more options & can get to best cards faster)
I rolled credits on day 23. never so frustrated to finish a game, I wanted to use the Basement key again on another door I found. that cutscene drove me up the wall, I’d already read the book it was (mostly) narrating. at the very least I can skim read the books (had bought The Curse of Black Bridge)
incensed that I had to start another day to get the ‘complete the game’ achievement, by touching a very large trophy in the Foyer. and the Gift Shop is too expensive and full of tat
I’d found a couple of vault keys and the high costs at the shops are an effective nudge towards “you should go to the Vault”. a pity these soft gentle signals are both rare and frustratingly difficult to follow, and have no payoff (sorry, probably have letters or such)
think I will try a few more runs to get to the puzzles Tulpa mentioned but not sure how much more time I can spend checking everything again to see what/if I missed anything
I’m still playing, intermittently, and still having fun. I’m at day 50-something. A recent highlight came on day 49, which is noteworthy because this is Christmas, and there are presents in the boudoir, as the photo foreshadows.
In terms of post-46 mid-game challenges, here’s my current progress:
I’ve collected seven red letters, three s. keys, and three trophies, including filling the house and solving the 8/8/8 puzzle. My main current objectives include solving the damn chess puzzle, assembling the last two contraptions, draining the reservoir, getting all the school rooms in one house, and continuing to accrue allowance and stars. I should probably set up proper access to the Room of Mirrors one of these days. I think I’m missing three rooms total: two found floorplans and a shop. One of these has to be the throne room.
A discovery I made on day 50: my favorite amount of gold to spend on blessings is 45, for a five-day blessing of the monk. This is a great opportunity for future investment by guaranteeing access to rooms like the conservatory or the treasure hoard. Feels like I’m finally able to take concrete action to improve my quality of life for future runs.
we just got to room 46 as well, i think similarly on day 22 or 23. i am a little miffed there are not really major sign posts motivating you to continue other than introducing like more diegetic gamefication via the shop room or w/e it’s called. no game needs to diminish its atmosphere with cheevos and this one least of all. as far as how to proceed, i do have some ideas about what i’m supposed to be doing but it feels somewhat aimless. i still haven’t managed to get the boiler room connected to the laboratory, and i assume some kind of contraption i create will be able to bust through the very obviously discolored bricks in the secret garden and the basement (and maybe elsewhere?). there are a few other leads i am aware of at this point but those two seem to be the clearest. i just don’t really know what i’m trying to do at this point! even a one line prompt as simple as ‘find room 46’ would help. oh also i assume if you reenter room 46 … something happens? kind of similarly irritating that they don’t just let you look around in there the first time you get there.
I tried a few more runs, got the 45 room & first sanctum key. was all set to deduce the sigil from clues but realised I had seen that exact one already. found another sigil just sitting around (locked tight in a rare room) in the open
what is the point of the book near the chess puzzle if the game just hands out answers, am guessing I’m supposed to cross-reference later with the worksheets
worked out how to solve Mora Jai boxes, again a piece of paper next to one tells you what to do
I feel a bit more relaxed now? I’d read somewhere that reaching Room 46 was “completing the tutorial” and that both makes sense and makes me wish there was a bypass
Yeah I felt like I just finished a tutorial when I first got to 46.
The sigil puzzles are poorly introduced and mostly gated behind purchasing a non burnt version of the book you found near the chess puzzle, but I enjoyed the lateral thinking of working out what most of the sigils were through a combo of the logic puzzle of figuring out an answer key from multiple imperfect worksheets, and the ways that the game doesn’t just give you the answer to a puzzle for some of those sigils
The layer analysis is a popular one. One of the guys on Ryan Veeder’s discord broke down the layers that Blue Prince (and Animal Well) use as follows:
The first layer comprises the stuff that players can solve themselves through determination and trial-and-error. (Get into the Antechamber. Find a place to use the item you found. Do the back-and-forth required to reach Room 46.)
The puzzles of the second layer are much more oblique; the solo player may be able to solve individual puzzles through insight or luck, but most people will need at least a few hints to make real progress. (Red Letters; the Gallery/Room 8; traversing the Tunnel.)
Third-layer objectives pretty much require an organized community effort to achieve. (I haven’t reached this point yet, but I know it involves a maze and an atelier.)
Finally, the fourth layer is made up of puzzles and mysteries that are designed with the expectation that they may never actually be solved by players. (The parts people are still working on.)
In the same way that Mario games are designed to be trivial to complete—see by way of example Odyssey’s inclusion of moons in the stores, so even the clumsiest players can reach the necessary moon thresholds—BP and AW want everyone to be able to see the ending and get the credits, and even feel like they’ve played a full game, despite that representing less than a tenth of the effort the games will encourage you to expend on their deeper mysteries.
90% of the assets go toward the first 10% of the game, which is designed for 90% of the players. It’s extremely obvious that there’s lots more game to follow that first ten percent, but it very quickly stops being the same kind of game because the first layer has mostly peeled away at this point.
All of this flies in the face of conventional design wisdom, of course: “Quit when you’re ahead. Leave 'em wanting more.”
I think those are better called as difficulties: the Red Letters are pretty trivial since you know the format of the solutions (and get a very obvious hidden message about them), and can find a specific hint for each one nearby, but the hints get cryptic/obtuse. there’s nothing stopping the determined player from experimenting or trial-and-erroring to get them, they just have a little more friction.
I think about the puzzles as
what could be solved on Day 1 (or 2), if you had unlimited resources and free placement of any room, by a determined player devoid of insight
what requires some insight & curiosity, or extreme busywork
most of the puzzles fall into the first category, since there’s explicit solutions placed around the manor.
you might wonder what the difference between determination and insight is, and I think of the Garage/Secret Garden interaction as an example of insight (and wish there was a puzzle there)
for me, the layers are more like:
what is the game trying to tell me, what message is saying when I spend time with it?
why did the creator make certain design decisions? what are the effects of those decisions?
what would a better game in this style look like?
the last one is easy, an homage to The Fool’s Errand
