Blue Prince

I originally refunded this game and re-bought it after friends explained how great it was, I tried again with an open mind and I just couldn't do it. The game is like: if you were given 50 novels to read and a man in the corner randomly yanked them out of your hands every 5 minutes and gave you another one. You might eventually be given tools to distract the man or convince him to give you certain books, but he's still there ruining your day, always. I tried to like this, im sure it's good, but over and over after hitting a locked door or drawing 2 dead ends and a South facing L bend just ruined all drive to go on, I think a lot of people probably have a tolerance for starting over and over but It just feels like time wasting busywork to me. The puzzles and mysteries are pretty spaced out, you'll find a date hidden in a photo, a letter here and there, a picture of an important object but there is nothing tying any of these things together (yet) im sure these evolve into deep and complex mysteries but man I played for 4 hours have a notebook full of unconnected raw information and no mysteries. people compare this to Outer Wilds but they're so different, in that game every clue points to something fresh, it forms a web leading you to the ultimate solution, you have an idea and you can GO AND TEST IT, 4 hours in Outer Wilds I'd have multiple theories/ideas/mysteries fresh in mind and could pursue one within a run. 4 hours in Blue prince I have a bunch of dates, letters, photos, and mechanical puzzles which dont really do anything, I spent 5 minutes "solving" the boiler room only for nothing to happen when I did, yes im sure it's part of something bigger, but I just dont care.

I am going to criticize this game not because I disliked it, but because I didn't. Blue Prince is a work of love, a game for game enthusiasts and game makers. If you like puzzle games, if you crave a worthy story, if you want a game that feels like it's exactly as the developer wanted it to be, if you are interested in how a game is designed, more than just how a game plays, Blue Prince is essential; I've not seen a thing like it. Fair warning, this review will contain light spoilers, but will intentionally be kept vague when possible and spoiler blocked when not. Fundamental to my central criticism of Blue Prince is the inescapable tension in its design. This is a roguelike puzzle game, there may be a reason you've not previously seen those two genres together. The game world you have before you for exploration varies by run (day), and the puzzles you have before you vary by game world. What determines the game world on a given day depends on a mix of factors: player choice, resources (some permanent) and randomness. Many objectives require the combination of items, areas or abilities, all of which take planning and an (often controllable) amount of luck to orchestrate. Consequently, you will not always have access to everything you need easily or all at once in order to make the progress you want. This is itself a kind of puzzle and constitutes a basis for gameplay especially since moving from one place to another costs resources. On balance, it works... but it's a hell of a tightrope walk, one which becomes ever more fraught as the game progresses. The biggest criticism I can wage against Blue Prince is that it does not respect your time enough. There are [i]so many[/i] small animations or little waits between picking up adjacent items or unskippable mini cutscenes and all of these things are endlessly repeated. Every. Single. Run. I have 200 hours played now and suspect the time waiting for these repetitive moments could be in a double digit order of hours. Thankfully, these issues are fixable; you could make all the mini cutscenes skippable and remove the delay between item pick ups for a start. Unfortunately, the most lamentable of Blue Prince's flaws is also innate to it: drafting. At the outset, drafting is the fun, rougelike half of the game. Every new room offered is something more to dissect; a promise of some secret or insight. However, once there is nothing left for this mechanic to show you that's new or interesting, and you have nothing to discover other than through solving puzzles, for which you already have the information to solve, I am unable to describe the process of drafting a new house as anything other than a chore, and one you must do. A lot. It's not quick and, while boring, does require some thought so as to actually achieve what you want. You can't turn your brain off and it's not fun. Monotonous, in a word. Want to return to [spoiler]room 46[/spoiler]? That's the better part of 30 minutes. To read a single document again. I don't actually think this game should have an in-built notetaking system, but I do believe it should feature a document collection, one you may read at any time, including all documents previously found. There may be a reason this can't exist, but I've not seen it. While I took a great many of my own screenshots to, partially, circumvent this issue, due to how often documents contain more than is ostensibly there, you may need certain items for a second reading, making the screenshots insufficient. Now that we've understood the meaning of the phrase "timely manor" (boo), lets get to the section I actually want to talk about: Why Blue Prince is important to me. The music is, for the most part, subtle. You may wander the halls of Holly in a trance-like state. Grand swells are reserved only for the most monumental of triumphs and, while I would've liked the game to punctuate some discoveries that bit more, when it is unleashed the glory is exquisite. The hairs on my arms are on holiday now, they've earned a break. This would be a terrifying game to play as a non-native English speaker, unless you wield fluency beyond those who are. This game features the most interwoven wordplay I've seen in media and too slim a vocabulary or imagination will disqualify you from even recognising some puzzles. Rarely a wasted word written; seemingly effortless are the constructions to crack. The more natural a pun or rhyme or poem appears, the harder it was to write, let not this genius be overlooked. Quickly you will notice motifs, the same ideas and icons appearing in disparate places and in novel, unexpected ways. Each part a house of cards, the whole... a castle of stone. Of all the clues to resolve in the game, none before the [spoiler]post game[/spoiler] felt unreasonable and only a single one other than the game's very last ask drew my ire. I needed help from the [spoiler]blue tents to crack the drawing room's safe[/spoiler]... just one too many leaps for me I suppose. Some input from friends helped me along my way too, a game well suited to collective interrogation. [spoiler]Room 46 as an end goal is chosen as a jumping off point for the more casual players. I understand why Ros did this, not everyone is up for what follows. I think the game would have benefitted from the bravery to make it immediately clear there was much more. The story is so unresolved upon reaching Room 46 that in the following 80 hours of discovery, I enjoyed myself far, far more than in the 20 before rolling credits. Perhaps I find it sad so many will have missed out on the beauty of what more was made, like I almost did.[/spoiler] A major key to me for media most meritorious is a judicious use of tonal mixing. Blue Prince is simultaneously sombre and silly, sensible and scandalous: it had my attention. Unlike the gameplay, and despite these adjectives, the story was never at odds with itself. This tightrope was walked flawlessly. There are few cutscenes, as with (and often in tandem to) musical crescendos, they are saved only for [i]the moments[/i]. Their absence gives space for the emotional weight of the game to stealthily grow, such that when it does payoff you're shocked by how touching it is, how connected you feel. A journey noteworthy indeed. Comparisons to Outer Wilds stirred in me while playing. I think direct comparison would be unfavourable to Blue Prince. Outer Wilds is my favourite and overall best game of all time, it's gameplay undoubtedly outshining Blue Prince, but the latter dances to its own tune. If you want folk don't listen to blues. Blue Prince is unashamedly itself and, like Outer Wilds, truly inspired. So you can point to specifics where Outer Wilds comes up trumps, and I could, and I have... but Blue Prince is the music of the moment; let it dance. A colour coded spreadsheet with many tables, 700 lines of notes, 800 screenshots. More than anything else I have experienced in my life, Blue Prince, by its true end, captures the experience of spiralling into insanity. I have seen that which is not there: sought patterns in the mundane, added up house numbers I've gone by, noticed [spoiler]the number 8[/spoiler] everywhere. I felt crazy; this game makes you feel crazy. Maybe there isn't something to that carpet, but those clocks? Definitely. So what keeps you searching? It's that time in twenty you [i]are[/i] right; the moment the skies part to reveal something new. Something special. Something blue.

I would love to recommend this game. It was genuinely fun for the first 20-30 hours, so well worth the price. But then it starts being puzzle after puzzle after puzzle each going deeper and revealing only more tasks that need to be done and places you need to find and exact times you need to be standing in one exact spot: it became exhausting. I was going to the internet way too often by hour 40 to count the game as "enjoyable" anymore. It turned into a bizarre endurance test and felt like the very definition of the sunk cost fallacy. Based on the internet I've read now, I was STILL 20+ hours of grinding out room drafts to build out the specific condions necessary for winning . . . and without the internet, I would have NEVER, NEVER, NEVER have been able to beat this game. Look I love puzzle games, and this one was super fun for many hours: happy with that part of the purchase. But I cannot recommend it. It's too long, and the mid-late game get so convoluted I couldn't figure out what to do on my own, and the specific drafting needs to proceed became so grindy: it just stopped being fun. That's too bad, but that's my experience.

This game makes me feel simultaneously like a genius and like the stupidest person alive.

the initial puzzle are amazing, and i genuinely had a great time on the first 3rd of the game. Unfortunately, late game puzzles require hours of grinding to get the item that will unlock the rest of the story, turning the game into a chore. It's become one of those game find myself playing because i miss the initial feeling but end up hating every session

I don't NOT recommend this... But I also don't recommend it to everyone. Because like I do think it was fun to play. Many of the puzzles are very interesting. As someone who grew up on Nancy Drew games, I loved having to physically take notes. I have about 4 pages in my notebook now of this game. Really interesting mechanic, and it's cool to see how much you learn about strategy as you go. Before I say the rest, I did genuinely have a good time for the majority of my playing. But today I finally got to the credits, I still have seemingly endless puzzles to figure out, and the ending was pretty anticlimactic. I don't actually feel a sense of resolution, and I love an ambiguous ending so it's not that. But getting to room 46 didn't really feel like accomplishing anything grand or spectacular. Towards the end, it just felt pretty tedious. There are runs where you make so much progress and then there are runs where through no fault of your own you will end it in 3 minutes. And certain puzzles really rely on good luck (I cannot get past classroom 3..). Kind of feels like gambling. For every good run, there were three mediocre ones, but the good run was thrilling enough to make me want to keep playing. But those mediocre runs get FRUSTRATING. Item RNG is just kind of a pain. And many of the ways to get more items are small, repetitive puzzles that you'll have done dozens of times by the end and hate to see pop up. But if you want another key or gem, you have to. And because of the frequent unlucky RNG, even though yes, this is a game that encourages taking notes, often times you have to hope you get the specific room with the specific information at a specific time to see the thing you already saw ages ago but didn't think was important enough to write down until you see a specific thing in a specific other room that you may not get again for days. So... man I don't know what my overall takeaway is. It's a puzzle game, and a hefty one at that. If you're only kind of into puzzles, not for you. If you love puzzles, I think it is actually worth it, despite my criticisms. Like I said I got 40 hours out of this, and I enjoyed most of that. Just know that once you reach a certain point, a lot of puzzles get convoluted and hyper specific. It's not a 100% kind of game. It's a play till it stops being fun kind of game.

As many other reviews say, the game is 100% randomized and can be very frustrating at times. I understand the intricacy of the puzzles and the rooms, I just don't have the patience to grind until I finally find the perfect setup. Most of the time, when you get a crucial piece of a puzzle, you're not lucky enough to reach the room you need to go for the next part and everything resets right after. I got frustrated many times and am not patient enough to finish this game. Good luck!

Good puzzles, good story and a cozy atmosphere. A real shame then that the game is artificially and maliciously time padded. If it weren't for this cowardly design the game would probably be a fifth of most people's play time And there are too many redundancies. An example for instace is while playing you can pick "Call it a Day" or "Save & Quit". Both of these options does the same thing and has the same number of steps to exit the game

I cannot describe how complicated this game is, it may be the biggest puzzle box ever made I'm 60 hours in I still haven't done all the puzzles

Наконец-то смог совладать с рандомом и пройти игру, ну или "пройти". Насколько можно пройти рогалик вообще. Но жанр этот я терпеть не могу, по этому субтитры один раз увидел значит прошел. Осталось куча неразгаданных тайн и прочего, но дальше без меня. В любой другой игре я бы зачистил все на 100%, но не в рогалике, ибо скрещивать рогалик и пазлы - это самая идиотская идя за всю историю видео игр. Оценка положительная, потому что ставить отрицательную будет несправедливо, плюсы у игры тоже есть.