Blue Prince

There's never been a puzzle game like this before. It's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I love this game in theory, but in practice I think it could be a lot better. Overall I think it's good enough to buy on sale and most of my complaints are overall minor. On the positive side, I love the graphics and the overall atmosphere. The estate is beautiful and every room is filled with detail. The drafting mechanic (at the beginning) is unique and fun to master as you discover and unlock more rooms, and the puzzles you encounter at the start are well put-together and satisfying to solve. Overall it's a very solid puzzle game. The main objective took me around 15 hours, and even after another 30 there are still many puzzles I haven't yet solved or even discovered. The worldbuilding is incredible intricate and deep, and I still have so much left to uncover. However, I have some issues with the minute-to-minute gameplay as well as the later puzzles. As you get further into the game drafting begins to feel like a chore. Especially when aiming to solve a puzzle which requires specific rooms it can be incredibly frustrating to keep missing the rooms you need. At the start, this is fine because you have so many trails to chase that every run you find something new, but each puzzle you solve reduces the pool of rooms which could be useful in each run and this pool is diluted by unlocking rooms as you progress. This results in burning days just drafting with no new discoveries. The game also plays slowly in some parts. For example, many interactions have unskippable animations which can take many seconds which dramatically slows gameplay for no reason other than style. These were fun at the start but have gradually become grating. Also you can't save within a single run. I've had runs takes upwards of an hour and a half. If you don't have that kind of time you can't really play this game. My one major complaint is how obscure some of the later puzzles are. It is entirely possible you can miss a clue and go about not knowing of an entire multi-stage puzzle. It is also unclear whether or not you're at the point where you can actually progress a puzzle. I find myself asking whether or not I just need to sit and think through a puzzle longer or if I'm simply missing the key clue or some upgrade I'm yet to discover. This makes it very difficult to find and complete the more complicated later puzzles. Additionally, some are hinted at only via something called the Blue Tents upgrade (which places additional notes around the mansion providing hints for the late-game puzzles), which is 400 gold. This is a huge amount of money to have at once, so I'm stuck without these vital hints until I work up the motivation to get the requisite gold. Despite my lengthy complaints, at least for the early to mid game (first 30-35 hours) I was enthralled. This is still a great game (which is why I'm leaving it a positive review), I just think it could be much better.

Everything is a clue.. Looks like a clue, it is. Looks like it isnt a clue... It also is?

[h1]A blue game[/h1] Blue prince es un rogue-like en primera persona de puzzles y misterio. Exploramos como Simon P. Jones, el protagonista de esta historia, y sobrino de Herbert S. Sinclair, quien nos va a heredar su casa, bajo la condición de encontrar la habitación 46 en su casa de 45 habitaciones. Esa es la premisa inicial, pero el juego tiene muchisimo más que eso y no voy a dar ningún spoiler. Honestamente, este es uno de los mejores juegos que haya jugado. Punto. La forma en la que va construyendo la tensión alrededor de la trama es sublime, y los puzzles son impecables, no tienen falla alguna. Me he tomado unas 100 horas más o menos para hacer todo lo que hay para hacer en este juego, y si tengo que darles un consejo es lo siguiente: NO GOOGLEEN NADA y TOMEN NOTAS . En este sentido es como Outer Wilds, el juego está profundamente basado en tu conocimiento. Tras completar el juego, mis notas han llegado a alcanzar las 800 lineas. Ahora si, tenemos un problema: para jugar el juego, SI O SI TIENEN QUE SABER INGLÉS. Y es un dealbreaker, el juego no tiene traducción y honestamente creo que traducirlo a la perfección seria imposible. Varios puzzles dependen de cómo las palabras se escriben, cómo suenan en inglés, etc. Si no tienen fluidez con el inglés se les puede dificultar, y un diccionario a mano siempre viene bien. Este juego es TAN especial, que tras haber 'completado' la historia, sentia que extrañaba el juego, que me hacia falta, a pesar de haberlo dejado de jugar 5 minutos para descansar del achievement hunting. El mundo es espectacular, y los personajes están muy bien escritos, se sienten como personas reales. No puedo creer que este juego no haya ganado el GOTY, porque realmente se lo merece. SIgo esperando la siguiente actualización (falta una). Y aún hay un par de puzzles que la comunidad no ha logrado solucionar. Este juego se ha ganado un lugar muy especial en mi corazón y no lo voy a olvidar jamás. De vez en cuando volveré a jugarlo exclusivamente por diversion. Nota: Ojo, que este juego no es para cualquiera tampoco. A veces los puzzles se vuelven muy complejos, con muchas capas, y eso a veces requiere tiempo para sentarse exclusivamente a leer tus notas. Y además, siempre está el elemento roguelike del juego, lo cuál hace que la progresión no sea lineal ni estable. La casa cambia en cada run, por lo que un dia puede que avances mucho, otros nada, y otros puede que avances en otros puzzles, y no en el que te estabas concentrando. Yo le doy un 10/10 . Es efectivamente una obra maestra de game design, de writing, y de banda sonora. Yours truly. Ovinn nevarei.

Better than Myst - the best puzzle game I've ever played with the best backstory. So much care and detail in this game it is hard not to love. Just prepare to be frustrated with the randomization of the game, but that's the point.

Blue Prince is delightful. It’s sort of a mashup of Slay the Spire and Myst. And it has a moving story. (It’s the second puzzle game that actually made me teary eyed at the end–the first being Outer Wilds.) Reaching the credits made me feel like I achieved something. (And for those that played, I reached there on Day 12 with exactly one step remaining! Wow!) And then I watched the story I’d been reading come to life in a wonderful cutscene with a moving score and voice over, and just felt that they’d made a perfect little game. – The premise of Blue Prince is simple enough: You begin in a room with three doors. Opening one reveals a slate of three rooms to choose from. Explore/build the house room-by-room, find the final door, and win. It starts there, but hidden behind that straightforward premise is an expansive Myst-like world explorer game, and a rich, mysterious, emotional story. The story in particular surprised me. – Again, the basic goal of the game is to make your way to the far end of the manor. And it’s totally possible (and in fact almost certain) that you will make a home with no path to that room. Your job is to strategize and gamble a bit to make a path anyway. What sorts of rooms can you draft? All sorts. Bedrooms, hallways, dining rooms, kitchens, and all sorts of esoteric rooms you’d expect to see in a lavish mansion. Grand halls, aquariums, pump rooms, and more. Rooms with better connections cost more. Rooms with fewer connections tend to have more resources, and dead ends have the best resources. And there are special reasons you’ll want to draft rooms beyond just resources, so when drafting there’s this fun “push your luck” quality to it. How much do you spend, and when and on what, to get to that final room? Perhaps I just cut my losses, focus on rooms that advance the meta-progression or puzzles I’m working on and ignore the final room? There’s a push and pull decisionmaking to it that’s classic Rougelike stuff and works very well. – Rooms contain puzzles, many more puzzles than first meets the eye. To beat the game, you’ll need to play through a Myst-like world exploration game, and complete large-scale environment puzzles to open secret passageways and elevators and other things you’d expect from such a game. You’ll also need to solve lots of smaller puzzles. To take one simple example, one of the rooms you can draft is the Parlor, which asks you to solve a logic puzzle. The puzzle is different every time you draft the room, and increases with difficulty every time you draft it. Successfully solving it rewards a decent amount of resources. Beyond that there are combination-safes to find, and larger meta puzzles to figure out, and puzzles that don’t even look like puzzles to solve. The difficulty to make it to the credits was, for me, a fair bit easier than Outer Wilds, but I am not complaining–and probably just got lucky. I did not need to look up a guide for this game, but I did for Outer Wilds a couple times. – The story is excellent. Unlike many other games which drown the player in text, Blue Prince doesn’t. Text, where it exists, is pithy. There are a couple longer letters, but for the most part, the story is told in post-its and clippings and short messages and images, and the very occasional cutscene. You’ll discover that some… bad things happened in the past, in this mansion and the land it's set in. You’ll uncover a disappearance mystery, and a political thriller. And weirdly, a children’s book sits in the middle of it all… A delightfully written children’s book, I might add. The writing in the game as a whole has the pithiness of a child’s book. Every line seems to rhyme, or have a double meaning; every word seems to be particularly placed, just like the name of the game itself (Blue Prince, blueprints, get it?) and its chief mechanic (drafting, see?). Words are not wasted here, and you are rewarded for paying attention. (Other games, particularly RPGs, should take note. More words is not better.) Also, Blue Prince's story also takes swings on a couple deep, challenging topics. There's an undercurrent of discussion of fascism and censorship and leadership that, while it isn't resolved (at least so far; not before the credits rolled), I appreciate that the author seems to have something to say. – I loved this game and was surprised at how it sucked me in and compelled me to keep playing. I was surprised by the rich story and the mystery under it, and the overall sheer quality of everything I’m seeing and hearing. (I should have said how good the music is!) Few games are made with this attention to the player’s experience, with this level of polish and quality in every frame. Also, like any good Roguelike there’s an entire endgame on top of it, including a challenge mode. There’s a deeper story too, or so I hope! I’m very interested in playing on and discovering more! I think I’ll do that… right now. Blue Prince is recommended.

This game is amazing. There's a lot of content here and reaching it requires a lot of lateral thinking. Many puzzles are not required to finish the game so you don't really need to complete the hardest ones if you're not into it (some of them are hard as hell). Music, story and atmosphere are great too. This should be above 95% recommended rate. I can't seem to grasp why it's where it is right now.

A Board Gamer’s Dream The spatial mechanics, drafting decisions, and tile-placement logic feel so tactile that Blue Prince practically screams for an official tabletop board game adaptation. It already possesses the DNA of an all-time great strategy board game. An essential purchase for anyone who loves deduction, architectural puzzles, and real mystery-solving.

Interesting story line with new puzzles constantly