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.
