Blue Prince

i can feel my brain cells growing

Fantastic game. Avoid spoilers at all cost before/while playing.

It's true! Blue Prince is a good game!!!! The number of times where I activated some new change or entered a new area and was like "Oh my God?????" — innumerable. In the best way possible, it just keeps going!!! I also really enjoyed how the game, despite not actually showing you a single other person outside of recordings or photos, manages to gradually grow out these other characters in Simon's family and show all the quirky interrelationships happening. There are def a few red herrings, which I suppose is to be expected, and a few minor things I personally felt weren't explained, but... that's not necessarily a bad thing? After all, what is a mystery without, well, mystery? Some unsolved details, a little mystique... It's good to have something to chew on. I also really, really enjoyed the art direction and visuals. Blue Prince as a game has a lot of really cool style and flair to it, with a fantastic soundtrack and a lot of atmosphere, and a lot of really neat worldbuilding development. I really, really liked the admittedly kind of sparse conlang elements in-game and how open-ended that was, the flexibility of not necessarily having to input a solution, even though I don't think I was able to fully translate the letter. (But I got most of it down, I'm just missing a couple of like, auxiliary suffixes afaict) As someone with an interest in linguistics and conlanging, I really had a fun time with that! It scratched an itch that even a lot of conlang-focused puzzle games don't always manage. Just a really cool game overall, and I'm glad I got to experience it! I took pretty extensive and organized notes, both typed and drawn, but there were still some times I felt lost as to what I needed to actually do next to progress the story and game. A lot of the time it was just because I had missed or forgotten some small detail that clinched a few other things together, and other times I was overthinking something or had the right idea but was going about it in the wrong way. Sometimes you really do just need a nudge in the right direction. There is a good hint guide in the steam community that's super handy for early game stuff. It's great about not being spoilery while still nudging you along. For mid to late game stuff, I *hugely* recommend the Blue Prince Hint System aka Blue Paths which is a simple little website to help you track what you have or have not done yet. It was an immense help for me in keeping my momentum going even 200 hours into the game. It is, as far as I can tell, exhaustive, and will get you through the entire thing with as few major spoilers as possible (though there are a few things that are difficult to get around mentioning, especially for a hint guide that tracks your progress actively). — Trying not to be too spoilery but maybe some vague half-spoilers re: the story/ending below I did find the ending (or lack thereof) both 1) a tiny bit disappointing, and 2) something that made sense in context for a game like this—how would you even make a concrete ending without inadvertently discouraging further exploration on the off-chance the player still has a few things left to do? I think just one extra cutscene might have helped with a greater sense of closure, but also, I can't bring myself to be too bothered about it. Blue Prince is just a really cool game that does a lot of really cool things, and after 240 hours I've got a pretty good idea of how everything went down, so even then—I can look at my hint guide and see, as far as anyone knows, I have nothing left to do, and I can think about everything I did, and go, oh yeah, okay, I get it! That's what happened, cool! But in the moment it does feel sort of disorientingly anticlimactic. And to be clear I don't think it would have been "better" to have some kind of victorious reunion or emails or whatever, that's not what I'm after, and I don't think it would have been "good writing," even if I did initially think maybe we would see some of the other locations mentioned throughout the game, like the... teahouse, or the boathouse you see in one of the cutscenes, or whatever. Spoilers: you don't ever leave the grounds (which, yeah, duh, but for a hot minute I was like, "what if????" lol) I did find it a little funny that the... blue... papers, let's say... (not the manuscript) didn't really activate any kind of cutscene or change, despite earlier similar findings usually popping some kind of cutscene. It's just kind of... there. Which is wild! Like, ma'am??? Hello?? Rlly funny move though. Lady Auravei, you are absolutely diabolical (complimentary). — On a technical level, I did get a couple of minor, transient bugs mostly related to the key/button mappings, but I was also using Moonlight to stream from my host PC to my laptop, so it's entirely possible that some of my controller support issues were caused by Moonlight itself. I also got the premature drafting trophy bug, which was very funny—apparently the devs are aware of it, and it's just not a priority compared to more impactful bugs, which is fair. Other than that, the game ran smoothly, and I didn't experience any soft locks or truly major bugs as far as I know of.

I wasn't sure I was gonna like this game because of the rogue-lite aspect, but the puzzle part drew me in anyway. It takes a few in-game days to really get into it, and past that point, I was hooked and kept playing to uncover all the secrets of the manor. It's really well made, and sure, the endgame puzzles can be stupidly hard, but I guess if you made it this far,, then it's logical that the difficulty goes way up. I had a lot of fun playing this game, it's well worth giving it a try.

One of my favorite games.

I am not a big fan of gambling and rogue-likes. The Blue Prince felt immensely exhausting from the day one because of that. Puzzles are scattered between the rooms and only RNG controls your access to those rooms. Yes, you decide if you need the room with a key/gem and a dead end, which will spend 2 of your movement points or an empty room which leads in the right direction, but your hand is mostly always random(except the cases when you RANDOMLY got a room which increases PROBABILITY of certain type of rooms, what a pleasure). You encounter keys or gems or whatever in very random order, so your run might end up with a locked door and no keys in 20 previous rooms(which means 60 options to choose). Which dims the initial curiosity severely and left only disappointment and frustration. I mean I think "ok game, I'll try it the next run", but the next run provides the completely new set of rooms to choose and I don't care much about the previous experience anymore. Most of the time it feels empty. The time spent in one room in most of the cases is 15 seconds and yes, you find some clues for puzzles located in other rooms, yes, you take notes, but it doesn't give you any sense of discovery at all. It appears I like more dense puzzles or they should be less dynamic so the exploration would make any sense. It didn't felt like exercising ability of making connections and puzzle-solving, it felt like waiting painfully for stars to align in the correct order to get the rooms I am curious about. I know it might start to shine after certain amount of hours, when you unlock most of the room types and learn a bit about them, but the vibe is already brutally murdered. Might be some day the stars will align right and I will back to the game, but for now it goes to the farthest shelf in the puzzle game library.

Recomendacion de teogamer_21, juego que me ha sorprendido muy gratamente debido a que un juego de puzzles que funciona por rng es una cambinación que en un principio puede sonar destinada al fracaso, sin embargo, este simulador de encontrar la cama al volver de fabrik utiliza los conocimientos que adquiere el jugador entre partidas como una propia mecanica, resultando en una experiencia que crea la sensación en el jugador de que es el nuevo einstain. Después de unas cuantas horas, la exploración se convierte en estrategia, pasando más a un juego de gestión de recursos y valoración de riesgo/recompensa, casi siempre encontrando algo nuevo en cada run que te ayuda a acercarte a tu objetivo. Pero evidentemente esta propuesta tan original viene con un precio. Y es que, una vez que consigues llegar a la habitación esta secreta y consigues la llave al sotano, resulta que tienes que volver a conseguir la hazaña para seguir avanzando con la historia. Lo que parecia el climax no es mas que otro paso más para adentrarte en algo que àrece estar simplemente comenzando. Esta nueva tarea ya no es tan divertida, ya que se ve muy dañada por la repetición y la sensación de que tienes que tener una run con buen rng para poder volver a llegar a donde ya llegaste, desmontando la ilusión de que llegaste hasta ahí unicamente con tu conocimiento. En conclusión, muy buen juego que se anima con un diseño atrevido y rompedor que le sale bien, pero que le saldría aún mejor si optasen por una experiencia más breve y única.