Blue Prince

Too repetitive, grindy and boring to play.

Easily one of my favorite games. I am sure, that this game is not for everyone, matter of taste, but if you like puzzles, where you need to have either fully written blocknote, either 100+ screenshots to solve something - I can't recommend you this game enough. Atmosphere, music, puzzles, story. Everything made so good, that I watched [spoiler]scene after reaching room 46[/spoiler] every time to the end. Also, I get the frustration of some people about rng about reaching some rooms to progress the story, but it happens. There are elements of roguelite in this game. GGs, now it's time to do some bingo runs.

unengaging rng simulator. I'm not failing to solve the puzzle because it's difficult or complex, I'm failing the puzzle because I'm drafting dead ends or rooms with 2-3 locked doors that force me to restart. definitely not worth $30

This is a difficult game to review. The first half is 10/10, no notes. The second half quickly becomes an exercise in soul crushing frustration if you don't have the exact brain of the puzzle designer. In the beginning, the game presents you with problems, and those problems have an immediately apparent path to the solution. You don't know the [i]answer[/i], but if you consider what you [i]do[/i] know, you have a pretty good idea where to look to find what you need. For example, you find a blocked path. From the blocked path, you can see another entrance to the area. By the time you've gotten there you've probably already found a few likely candidates that could logically hide an entrance. Investigating those will in turn point you toward their own solutions. If you're struggling, there are hints throughout the house that might nudge you toward something you might have missed. Those puzzle feel immensely satisfying to solve. Exploring the house is [i]fun[/i] and every run presents you with new information, new threads to pull. In the second half, the design flips. The game stops presenting you with puzzles. It presents you with coded hints and tasks you to [i]find[/i] the puzzles. These hints could mean any number of things. They often mean [i]different[/i] things for different puzzles. Some puzzles have multiple hints, and the quantity of hints available seems to have no correlation to how difficult the puzzle is. After hours and hours of trying to roll the correct RNG to open a hidden area you'll find your 7th hint for a puzzle that you solved 20 hours ago simply by seeing a breakable wall and thinking 'hey maybe i can break that wall'. Conversely, some hints apply to multiple puzzles. Sometimes only part of a hint applies. That means you can never, at any point in the game, delete a hint you've already used, because you don't know for sure that it won't [i]also[/i] be critical to solving another puzzle. By the end of the game you're staring at a stump and running line by line through your notebook trying to invent ways that the hundreds of vagueposts might obliquely refer to said stump, with no idea if you have all the information you need to solve the puzzle, or if the stump is even really part of a puzzle to begin with. The inputs for some puzzles are intentionally obscured so you don't find them by accident, meaning you can [i]know the answer to the puzzle[/i], sweep your cursor over the interactable and be convinced you misinterpreted something because no interaction point popped up. In the most egregious example, and I'm not going to spoiler this because the devs deserve to be tried at the Hague for designing it: one puzzle implies that you maybe have to solve a riddle and find a particular object. There's a place right next to the riddle where a specific object could go to accomplish something. There's no interaction point, but interaction points don't appear unless you have the necessary item in hand, so that's nothing unusual. You can search for hours for this object and find nothing, because the [i]actual[/i] solution involves waiting [b]40 real-world minutes[/b] of the only life you have on this earth staring at a concrete wall. That's it. You just have to throw out any preconceived notion that the devs don't actively hate the player and try it. Maybe it will work, maybe you're hallucinating, the only way to know is to try [i]e v e r y t h i n g.[/i] When you finally do stumble on the answers, you don't feel smart, you don't feel satisfied, you just feel like you finally guessed the number the dev was thinking of. In terms of mechanical design, the tight resource balance also falls apart in the latter half. You can gain piles and piles of allowance giving you near infinite money to spend on food you don't need, while you always have to fight tooth and nail to find gems and keys. The house doesn't get meaningfully easier to navigate even after you've solved 90% of it. You end up having to spend one whole day hoping you find rooms that let you start the next day with resources, then hope you get the specific RNG you need on the [i]next[/i] day to do what you actually need to do to test a theory. For a mid-game example, to get all the [spoiler]classrooms[/spoiler], you need to roll a certain room in the [spoiler]outside room[/spoiler]. Each of these requires a gem so you most likely have to start the day with a whole pile of gems or else you'll run out of gas. So you spend a whole day trying to accumulate gems and hoping to find the rare [spoiler]freezer[/spoiler] to bank them for the next day. When the next day comes, you have a choice. Do you hope to randomly roll the room you need in the one shot you have? Or do you explore the house a little first and try to find some dice? Enough dice would guarantee you could get the room you need, but you're using up space, gems, keys and steps in the process, meaning you're less likely to be able to finish out the house once you do pull it. And once you finally, actually do it, [spoiler]surprise timed pop quiz, hope you have your notes in order or else you have to do it aaaaaall over again.[/spoiler]. This is a dance you'll have to do over and over and over again even after you conclusively know what to do just to execute the solution. If Blue Prince stayed even remotely consistent throughout it would have easily been my game of the year, but the unraveling second half just left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Which is probably an oblique reference to the number of almonds in a recipe in the kitchen when it's drafted in a corner at 2:15 on a Tuesday that contains a hint if you read every second letter converted through a rot-8 cipher.

This is masochistic nonsense. I was under the mistaken impression that this game as about COLLECTING room blueprints and making runs with the limited deck of blueprints, gaining new blueprints and abilities each run. Ya know: roguelite stuff. Three hours in: no advancement. Everything resets every run. This wouldn't even be fun if you converted it to a tile-based "board" game and removed all of the painfully slow animation and godawful walk speed (yes, I know where the "run" button is). Literal waste of time. Very disappointing, and not nearly as clever at its developers and professional reviewers think it is.

I loved the premise of this game and first 10-15 runs while I was slowly discovering the mechanics of the rooms and little bits of lore. But eventually it grew stale. It's just pure RNG and there is very little skill involved. It's like flip the coin "tails" 50 times in a row and start over each time it goes "heads" and also the flipping is in slow motion with no ability to make it quicker. Considering how much this game is statistics and luck reliant I wish there was an "easy mode" that gives you more gems/coins/keys and maybe some hints for the puzzles. When I got to some that I couldn't even understand what I am supposed to do, I kind of checked out. I don't want to grind the same run for a month. I think the game like this should be solvable in 10 hours. When I found out from other reviews that finding the room is not even the end of it, I can't in good consciousness recommend this game to anyone but hardcore puzzle fans who have A LOT of free time.

A combinação perfeita de puzzles com roguelite acompanhados de uma história incrivelmente fascinante em que, a cada novo quarto que você descobre, novas informações aparentemente modestas se conectam com as já recebidas e compõem uma trama complexa e cativante que vão muito além do seu objetivo inicial de encontrar o quarto 46. Fazia tempo que não jogava um jogo que me deixava com essa sensação agridoce ao terminar, se ao menos eu pudesse esquecer tudo sobre Blue Prince e ter o prazer de jogar de novo pela primeira vez...

as a puzzle game with drafting mechanics, I love it. But a combination of getting robbed on a great run. (not much of a spoiler, more a recomendation:[spoiler] opening the door to room 46 ends the game the 1st time. spend your steps/keys/items before you do! [/spoiler]) And then there's a bug or two that will make you sit and wait and do nothing for 20 minutes, multiple times. (appearently this is a bug, if your system is in US time zone this should be better?...) [spoiler] The time lock safe in the shelter is b.s. I'm typing this as I'm waiting for am/pm guess number 3.. just make me enter the date and lock me out for 5 minutes if it's wrong.... [/spoiler] It's a lovely game, fun puzzles, great feeling of progress. But this game does not respect your time.