Starker on 17/4/2025 at 17:49
Blue Prince is a puzzle game I've been hearing a ridiculous amount of praise about for months. I've put about 12 hours into the game now and for a game bold enough to have a pun in its title it didn't exactly blow my socks off.
The comparisons I've heard before playing the game were with Obra Dinn, The Witness, and Outer Wilds, and while all of these games rely on observational deductions and getting information from disparate sources, I'd say the closest this game reminds me of is actually Gone Home. In its essence, it's a game with a chill atmosphere where you go around the different rooms of the house and try to piece together the history of the place and its inhabitants. And that's the one part of the game that really shines. The writing in this game is quite good by video game standards and the lore and worldbuilding is greatly enhanced by it. That is, once you actually progress far enough in the game to see any substantial amount of it.
Where it differs from all of those games is the strategy layer of placing the rooms in the mansion each day, not entirely dissimilar to a board game mechanic. That's where the gameplay loop comes from -- each run you have a limited amount of resources to either find something new in the house or try to accomplish some objective. All the while you have to lay out your tiles in a way that keeps open a way to progress, gives you enough resources to keep you going, and allows you to use certain rooms to manipulate others. The biggest issue I see people having with it is the RNG aspect of it, as you only get to choose from 3 different rooms each time and you can't fully control what you are going to get, only being able to manipulate the odds to be more in your favour. Over time, though, you will get a feeling of what kinds of rooms are available, so you will get better at building out the mansion and later in the game you will be aided by permanent perks that you either find during your exploration or earn by solving major puzzles.
Speaking of which, the puzzles in the game are perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the game for me. I think I got a bit too excited when I heard the Witness and Obra Dinn comparisons and I expected the puzzles to be of a similar calibre. However, quite a few of the puzzles are either incredibly trivial or have explicit instructions on how to solve them hidden somewhere in the mansion. Thus the most important part is in finding all the pieces of the puzzle, except you don't necessarily even know what pieces are missing or where to find them. This makes finding new rooms in the house an absolute priority and you sometimes have to cut off a good path just because you can't pass over the opportunity to draft a never before seen room, because you don't know when you are going to see it again. Also while the majority of the puzzles you only solve once, there are two that keep repeating each new day and, while they are procedurally generated and get more complex over time, they are still so simple that solving them does not feel rewarding and after a while you are just going through the motions.
All that said, though, it has been an enjoyable experience overall and the game is starting to slowly grow on me. There are larger mysteries in the game that have piqued my interest and the atmosphere itself is quite nice and relaxing.
henke on 18/4/2025 at 15:38
Yeah.
Reposting my impressions at 9 hours in:
Quote:
It certainly does keep ya hooked by dripfeeding you a steady stream of revelations and aha moments, but mostly I feel like the game just shows me these things rather than me having to figure stuff out. Running out of stuff to do in a day and having to reset progress for the next day is kinda a bummer and leads to me playing this at a rate of one day per playsession. Over time you learn exactly where loot is located in rooms and what to do to unlock certain things and it starts feeling like a bit of a chore doing these procedures over and over.
I think in general I like my puzzle games more focused on one puzzle at a time. Like Portal, Obra Dinn, or The Witness. Outer Wilds I thought was more "impressive" than "fun" and the way it split off into a million lil strands to follow eventually was too exhausting for me. I kinda worry if I let up on the gas with Blue Prince and take a break from it for a day or two I'll loose the thread, so for now I keep playing, hoping to eventually get to a point where I see what the big whoop is.
I'm now 14 hours in and feel like the game finally
clicked with me. Several big puzzle pieces fell into place one after another and I had a hard time putting it down. From where I'm standing now, I'd say Blue Prince is
aaaaaalright.
henke on 19/4/2025 at 19:22
20 hours in, day 38.
Is this game any good? I dunno, man. At this point I'm just kinda a guy who plays Blue Prince. This is what I do now. Yeah it's pretty good.
henke on 20/4/2025 at 12:08
22 hours in... I AM THE BLUE PRINCE!
I think?
I beat the game, but there's still about a million mysteries hiding in the Mt. Holly manor. Guess it's kinda like last year's surprise indie darling Animal Well in that regard. But whereas I was glad to keep playing Animal Well once the credits rolled, just to find more secrets and because it was fun to play, I'm more than ready to leave Blue Prince here. Overall, yeah, it was good!
Sulphur on 20/4/2025 at 12:16
Sounds like voluntary Stockholm Syndrome.
Thirith on 20/4/2025 at 12:19
Some of my favourite video game experiences were voluntary Stockholm Syndrome.
Sulphur on 20/4/2025 at 12:24
Well, that explains Arma then.
Snark aside, I feel the genre synthesis of roguelike, meta-strategy, and puzzle game is like making a sandwich with marmite, strawberry jam, and lutefisk. Some people probably love the shit out of it; I'm a bit more in the camp of 'I'll wait to see what sort of wonderful mold growths sprout out of it if I leave it lying around for a month'.
Okay, maybe that's not snark quite aside, but snark a little left of centre. Honestly, what I played of it was interesting, but the mechanics pushed me to view it from a detached and clinical point of view simply because roguelikes need something special to hook me, and the randomised floor plans were never going to be it. BP's a pretty unique blend, and I'm happy it exists even if it doesn't spark much within me; I might even try it out for real at some point, but not before I have other games higher on my priority list visited first.
henke on 20/4/2025 at 12:29
Naaah, no Stockholm Syndrome. I played this via PS+ so I didn't feel compelled to get my money's worth, and I wouldn't have any hang ups about dropping it if I got bored. In fact there were moments during today's sessions where I wondered if that moment had finally arrived, but then a few lucky turns lead me straight to the end. So Blue Prince avoided outstaying its welcome by a hair.
Come to think of it, the moments I was most annoyed with the game were today when I knew what I needed to do, but the right cards just didn't come up. For most of the game's runtime I was happy to just go with the flow, discovering what I could, when the goal felt like a distant object I might never reach. But once I knew what I wanted, the randomness got quite annoying.
Sulphur on 20/4/2025 at 12:37
Playing a game for 20+ hours and only having it click for me after the 14 hour mark isn't something I'd classify as a nominally good time, because I'd have dropped it well before that. But - horses for courses.
Starker on 20/4/2025 at 21:48
Just a nitpick, since I've seen it mentioned a few times here and other places -- this game is nothing like Rogue. It does not have Rogue-like mechanics. It's also not similar to Nethack or Angband or even modern roguelikes such as Caves of Qud or Hades or Spelunky. Blue Prince has a number of board game like mechanics similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill or Mansions of Madness, but there are no procedurally generated dungeons, for example. Even though there is some RNG involved, you are in fact in control of the board and choose how to build the house. There's also no significant complexity of interactions, emergent gameplay, or any other characteristics that are typical of roguelikes.
Pretty much the only Rogue-like thing is that some of the rooms and the majority of your inventory get reset each day, but a significant amount of the things you do in the house are permanent changes and the house evolves as you explore it. Most of the bigger puzzles, once you solve them, remain solved, the areas that you unlock remain unlocked, any books you bought remain bought and so on.
