Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.

So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.

The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.

People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.

I was enjoying right up to the point where I stopped making progress and started getting frustrated at the random aspects of it. Even some of the self contained puzzles were taking a bit of trial and error.

The last puzzles are likely going to take a lot more hours than I’m willing to give it, not because they’re hard but because they require the stars to align before it’ll let you even try them. I stopped playing a while ago now, and I haven’t felt the urge to go back.

For those interested. The game is actually based on a book from the 80’s called Maze. It was a contest offering a reward for the first to solve it. It’s only a maze in the same in the same sense Blue Prince is

By random coincidence, my wife has the book. You can definitely see the resemblance.

I don’t really have time for extensive puzzle games anymore, so I watch a YouTuber named Aliensrock. He’s still playing it, and I’m so invested! It’s insane that a puzzle rougelite can work so well and be so engaging with the story and mysteries. There are multiple ways to figure out each puzzle (except one so far), which is fascinating.

I found it to be a beautifully frustrating experience. There clearly are a ton of layers and puzzles can help you solve other puzzles. I appreciate the effort it took to make it, but it doesn’t feel like it respects the effort it takes to play it. Here’s some of my frustrations:

• At a certain point you should get a magic vacuum upgrade to pick up all common items in rooms. Hunting for gems and coins in rooms on my 25th day sucks and adds nothing
• I should be able to move at least three times faster. Fuck, navigating the house is slow
• It really sucks that the first time you “solve” the primary puzzle you actually can’t progress until you solve a separate other puzzle that is dependent on finding one room and then another, and that is not clearly indicated at all
• While footsteps eventually become trivial it’s an annoying resource when you don’t have full control over the layout of the house. So you can build a maze through no fault of your own and then you don’t get the steps to explore them
• Eventually there’s a special room you can pick every run. Why do you make me actually traverse to that room? It burns useless steps and again, is slow as fuck
• Additionally, the only “permanent” room you can place (to my knowledge) you can get way too early. So if you put that in a crappy spot you just kinda fuck yourself for the rest of the game
• Sometimes you will think you have solved a puzzle but need to assemble the rooms to implement the solution. So you can: spam runs and rooms to get lucky and find it, do normal runs and just hope you find it, try to manipulate RNG to maximize the chance of solving that puzzle. None of those are fun when you have a couple of solutions to try and you spend multiple in game days manufacturing that opportunity
• The items are kind of crazy. There is a puzzle that requires you to assemble three items in a specific room, then discover a separate other room, then get to that room to use that item. There’s like 15+ items in the game, how are you ever supposed to organically put that together? Also finding a metal detector in my first 5 days made me paranoid that every room was hiding keys and coins on the floor even when I didn’t have it
• Some of the puzzles are so obtuse and have so many layers that if you ever happen to solve one that you suddenly think all puzzles could be that crazy. I solved the chess puzzle before the periodic table puzzle and was building this wildly complicated solution to that puzzle when it was actually really simple

Despite my gripes I do think it’s a good game with incredible puzzles and a very unique design. I just think it doesn’t account for people actually playing it. I would bet there’s a really intriguing story under this but eventually I got so hung up on performing solutions I had already discovered I couldn’t be bothered to also discover the plot. I did read a summary after that helped contextualize things. Honestly what I’m looking forward to is when someone else takes these mechanics and refines it into a really cool rogue-like

I played it obsessively for a solid month or so following its release. One of the best puzzle games ever and still a GOTY contender for me.

I know some people didn’t like the RNG, but for me it never became a real big problem. You get some control over the randomness eventually, and I also just found the drafting part of the game enjoyable in itself.

Piecing together the story and the world building bit by bit and uncovering the mystery was also super enjoyable. It’s one of the most rewarding games ever for note-takers. So much so that keeping physical notes in a journal was like half my enjoyment.

I think it’s a master piece. I played a lot of it.

I do kind of have a problem with the RNG because at some point I already know what I need to do to solve a puzzle, but I just need to get the right rooms to be able to actual make the puzzle. I don’t have a lot of time to play games, so I gravitate away from it due to this.

But aside from that, I think this is one of the most amazing games I’ve played. The lore, the design, the puzzles themselves. I’ve had quite a few moments where I was completely mind blown with things.

Fair warning: the rest of this post has mild player character capability spoilers and a judgemental tone. No mention of puzzles or solutions, just observations about how people are playing the game and some talk about my own experience with it.

Like Outer Wilds, this game involves a lot of reading and connecting the dots on one’s own. Unlike Outer Wilds, a lot of the puzzling happens outside the game entirely, providing you no in-game method of remembering things or solving some puzzles. Very early on, the game tells you to keep a notepad for it, and it quickly becomes more than a suggestion. In my hubris, I didn’t take any notes until a fair way into the game, and had to basically repeat some of my earlier forays to get information I had thought to be extraneous.

Anyway I’m approaching 120 hours spent and having a blast with it still. I feel like I’m approaching or in the late game, as some of the things I need to do involve having already solved and re-used info from previous puzzles, sometimes more than once.

I abandoned it.

I found some cool stuff. I even coincidentally solved a puzzle involving an ice box on my first go. But it was taking waaaaayyyy too long to find anything interesting, and I had multiple runs where it felt like there was no chance to build anything other than a straight path of rooms leading to a dead end, either from lack of doors, or lack of keys.

I actually like the dice roll of getting different encounters and adapting to what comes up; but only when the goal is generally to do well, eg dealing lots of damage or exploring new directions. But often there’s very particular objectives in BP and the UI doesn’t do a lot to help you track them.

I played a ton of it, and it basically consumed everything I did, but after a while I just dropped it. I technically beat the game, but I think it’s probably the worst-kept spoiler that finding the 46th room isn’t finding more than a fraction of the puzzles the game has to offer.

At this point, it’s less of a fun payoff and more of just a feeling of “finally” for the puzzles. There’s a room that allows multiples of another room whose puzzle I never managed to figure out after multiple tries, even with heavy RNG manipulation. I have another puzzle that I have to have specific rooms to place as well, which means more RNG. When it’s giving good puzzles, the game is a wonderful onion. When you’re stuck on a bad one, you’re either cursing the RNG required for it, or wondering how the hell the devs could ever have expected that to be solved (looking at you, Room 8’s predecessor).

I’ve got what feels like a ton left to find, but it kind of feels like I’m at the point where the satisfaction is outweighed by the tedium or the sheer confusion the puzzles have. All that to say that this game has totally been worth it, even if I couldn’t find myself finishing it.

My SO and I have been obsessed with this game for the past few weeks now. Unlike any other game I’ve played, this one makes you feel smart for remembering small details about things you spotted earlier, or when you look back on a note you took that is suddenly relevant.

That said, we are at a point now where we know roughly what we have to do, but we still need to slog through multiple days to get the rooms we want to appear.

We’ve built enough starting bonuses that reaching 46 isn’t really a challenge, so now the drafting just feels like a slog.

I think from here on out we’re going to be looking up hints just to get to the finish line. [Edit: spoiler tags aren’t working for me, removing them for now]

I’m switching between Blue Prince and some other games, but it’s still such a good time whenever I play it. But then again, I’m a fan of both roguelikes and puzzle games. Just didn’t expect these two genres to mesh so well.

To quote one of my favourite book series of all times (Mistborn): “There’s always another secret”.

I played Blue Prince and Clair Obscur back to back on Game pass and I’ve got to say that these were two of the best games I’ve ever played in their respective genre. Makes me want to go back and try Myst/Riven.

Was too much rng for my taste. I dropped it quite fast.

Im going to need to go back and try it again, I don’t think i gave it enough time. I failed (because of course I did) about 5 times before giving up. Its a neat concept but it didnt get its hooks in me like everyone else says.

Without fullt spoiling it, does it have some kind of twist in it that I didnt give it a chance to do?