Blue Prince

bupins

A fun and atmospheric puzzle/mystery roguelike game. Cool music and presentation. Solid 8/10.

If this were real life and I inherited this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ manor I would burn it to the ground...

Fantastic puzzle game. Surprised at how much content there is in the game. It just keeps going.

This game is like if Myst was a dungeon crawler, so it's precisely my kinda game. The biggest issue for me is that luck plays an extreme element in each attempt through the mansion, and I don't like that. If the game just increased the chance of finding a key by 8%, I wouldn't mind so much, but as it stands the number of times I've had to cut a run abruptly short because all the doors were locked feels cheap to me. I get that it's all about strategy, but between the high dependency on rare rooms to solve anything, the low chance of drawing rare rooms in the draft pool until late in the run, the low chance of finding enough keys to reach late enough in a run to get the rare rooms, and the not-infrequent chance of never finding the key card that becomes essential later in runs, the deck is too stacked against the player for my liking. It's too frustrating at times to be enjoyable. That being said, I'm still giving this game a positive review, because it's a lot of fun and I *do* like mystery puzzle games like this. Hopefully I just haven't been playing smart enough yet to overcome these hurtles. I'm going to keep playing because the mystery keeps me coming back.

Seems kinda overpriced for what is essentially a walking simulator with extra steps (eh, get it?). Comparisons to Outer Wilds are way overblown, the gameplay loop relies less on uncovering lore and making informed connections and more on luck of the draw and basic note-taking. If it's more than this, which some reviews allude to, it's certainly taking its sweet time to play its hand. The gameplay is like House on the Hill, except there's no haunt and all you do is go around hoping you don't draw dead ends, the main difference being that House on the Hill felt like it had a good balance of room layouts, whereas this game has way too many dead ends and L-bends relative to 3- and 4- door rooms (assuming you can even afford to build the latter ones). It's fine so far, but wandering around with no particular goal gets boring pretty quickly, and the "lore" has been basically nonexistent.

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unusual and intriguing, Blue Prince sucks you in with layers of mystery, a lot of challenges, and a rogue-lite style that gives you a little more hope after each successful run... but only a little.