Starker on 21/4/2025 at 07:05
I managed to get to the credits as well and while I have some mixed opinions about the game it has been a fairly enjoyable experience overall. The world in the game has some intriguing history and mythology to serve as a backdrop to the mysteries you are solving, and the worldbuilding is aided by Gone Home-esque environmental storytelling and the occasional pieces of writing you come across. The personality of the characters really comes through in the writing and nothing ever feels like a simple lore dump. In no small part this is due to the prose being consistently good with some notable peaks. In particular, you owe it to yourself to not put the game down until you have at least read Swim Bird.
The gameplay loop of building out the mansion was also quite enjoyable for me. It starts out RNG-heavy at first, but it becomes way less so as the mansion evolves and as you learn more and more about how to manipulate it. Kind of feels like you are gaining more and more control over the mansion as your resources and knowledge grows. I never found the RNG to be all that bothersome, but it might just be that I have a very high tolerance for RNG, as my cupboards are full of Ameritrash like Arkham Horror and Last Night on Earth.
However, there are a number of negatives that keep me from giving the game a wholehearted endorsement...
One of my major complaints about this game is actually something I have not heard mentioned elsewhere, and that's the interface and overall game feel. For a 3D game, it feels incredibly basic. You have only limited ways of interacting with the objects and it just feels clunky in multiple ways.
For example, if you log into one of the terminals, there is no other way to use it than to navigate nested menus with the arrow keys. Even if there are numbered lists of items, you can't just press the number or the first letter of the menu item to select it faster. Moreover, every interaction in the menus feels sluggish, as the text takes time to display and there is a significant delay when logging into the network, which might be authentic to the old-timey look of the terminals, but just plain feels bad -- even if you don't give me a mouse based GUI and want to force me through nested menus, I want them to be at least fast responsive menus. It takes ages to browse something like the glossary of terms that has multiple pages (which you can't just flip between using arrow keys but have to select as a menu item) and 20 items on each page.
Another example, in the shops you purchase things just by clicking on the name of the listed item. If you happen to misclick, you have wasted your resources, because there's no confirm button. The first thing I did in a shop was to click on the item name to see whether it presented me with additional options or perhaps displayed a description of the item, but instead it just bought the item.
Interacting with items in the world is similarly clunky. The mouse cursor is incredibly small and hard to see and it's often just not clear whether an object is frobbable or not unless you get pretty close to it and point the cursor right at it. It's also sometimes easy to miss pick-up items among all the objects in a room. Keys especially tend to blend in with the surfaces they are placed on.
The movement in this game is floaty, sometimes reminding me of old school games like Tex Murphy where you just slide across the rooms. And you can't crouch or jump either, which detracts from the immersion of the game a fair bit considering it's a 3D game heavily based on observing things and moving around the environment. I had a similar complaint about The Witness, but at least it made a modicum of effort of trying to make the player model feel real, such as having a shadow and footsteps sound different not just based on the walking surface, but also acoustics of the surrounding space. The footstep sounds in Blue Prince feel slightly off and are barely audible at times.
My opinion on the puzzles has improved a bit as I've encountered some that are more complex and demand a bit more of the player than just assembling all the pieces, but I still don't really feel like they stretch my brain in the way a good puzzle can. And it's not even that puzzles are particularly my thing -- I'm quite average at solving them at best of times and something like Stephen's Sausage Roll just makes my brain explode in frustration. Blue Prince's puzzles sometimes barely feel like puzzles at all and the two recurring ones start to feel a bit like a chore after a while even as they keep evolving in complexity.
Sulphur on 21/4/2025 at 14:24
Quote Posted by Starker
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.
Yeah, kind of on point. Few people use the term roguelike to literally describe 'an experience like Rogue' today, because I doubt they've even played it. Roguelike's mostly used as shorthand for 'randomised level iteration and repetition over several runs' with BP, because there isn't anything else in video gaming vocabulary that's closer to parts of what Blue Prince is. Functionally, while there's no procedural generation, the effect is similar because of the randomised palette of rooms you get at the outset of each run. Granted that changes over time mechanically, which is a smart mechanism to stave off the feeling of being fucked over by the RNG once you've invested a lot of time into the over-arching goal.
demagogue on 21/4/2025 at 18:03
I've seen people use the term Rogue-lite to distinguish it from a more proper Rogue-like for just the minimal features of iterated randomized runs. That's what we have here. I caved in and got it just to have an opinion to add, but it may still be a bit before I get to it.
Starker on 21/4/2025 at 18:07
Genres are useful because they convey a certain kind of experience, either in form or in content, that we can then use to discuss, compare, contrast, recommend, etc. I certainly get that 'roguelike' has steadily been getting more and more distanced from its namegiver, but at certain point the comparisons become incredibly stretched. It's kind of like saying that Portal is an FPS, because it's in first person and you have a gun or, to bring an even more tortured example, calling Gone Home a doomlike, because you collect keys and have a goal to get to the end of the level.
I think that describing Blue Prince as a roguelike can potentially lead people into having false expectations even if they are willing to consider a very broad interpretation of the term, because I think that the fundamental experience in Blue Prince is quite far removed from what you can expect with a roguelike. I'd argue that "puzzle game with roguelike elements" is less accurate in this case than, say, "Gone Home with puzzles".
First person exploration is a fundamental core of Blue Prince just as much as the strategy layer of building the house from the tileset and it's the primary mode of progression. You advance by gathering knowledge, making deductions based on observations, and opening up new areas -- all in service to finding pieces of the story. Even getting to room 46 is just one step in that process, although nominally it's the stated goal of the game. Your goals in the game all depend on the amount of story you are satisfied with.
demagogue on 21/4/2025 at 19:46
So ... are we okay with roguelite then?
WingedKagouti on 21/4/2025 at 19:51
Quote Posted by demagogue
So ... are we okay with roguelite then?
Roguelite is a better term for many of the games that are called Roguelikes these days.
Starker on 21/4/2025 at 23:27
Roguelite is something of a compromise name for the myriad of games with roguelike elements and it has stuck so far pretty much because of the lack of a better alternative. It's preferred because it doesn't have the implicit connotations of procedural dungeon crawling the way that "procedural death labyrinth" or, indeed, "roguelike" does. Another term I've seen that I thought had some potential but failed to gain any traction has been "hybrid roguelike".
Though, to be fair, roguelike itself was a name that was coined as "(
https://blog.slashie.net/on-the-historical-origin-of-the-roguelike-term/) the least of all available evils" and chosen largely because Rogue was thought to be the oldest of these kinds of games at the time.
I'd say that "roguelite", while it comes with a number of downsides, nevertheless has utility as a genre moniker, as a lot of these roguelikelike games that burst on the scene in the 2010s still have a number of common elements, such as permadeath, procedural levels, random enemy and item placement, etc. But the lines are getting blurrier and blurrier every year.
Tomi on 28/4/2025 at 18:26
I'm also trying to figure out the mystery of Blue Prince. After about 15 in-game days my verdict is: pretty good.
Blue Prince didn't seem particularly interesting to me at first - seeing the same few rooms and solving the same puzzles over and over again gets a bit tedious, but the more I play it the more fascinating it gets, as the pieces of the puzzle finally start clicking together. I still have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing, but every day in the manor brings me closer to solving... something.
I think Blue Prince would make a great board game.
Tomi on 2/5/2025 at 09:13
Approaching day 20 and I feel kinda stuck at the moment. Yes, I know a few things that I could try to progress a bit further, but for that I need a little bit of help from the RNG gods. I must have upset the RNG gods somehow though, because for the last few days I've been getting the same old rooms and bad luck with the items and pretty much everything. I did finally manage to get to the Antechamber, and I even figured out how to get to the Basement by drying the fountain in front of the manor, but that was another dead end because my way there is blocked by a mine cart.
Some of the puzzles are starting to feel a bit more far-fetched, and I always seem to be missing that one special room or item that is required for the solution, which is a bit frustrating.
Starker on 2/5/2025 at 11:21
Yeah, this is why it's generally better to have multiple goals to work towards, so that you can accomplish something every run. Otherwise it can easily feel like you're just rolling the dice over and over again without nothing to show for it. Also, the game has usually multiple ways of solving the bigger puzzles, so by working on something else for a while, you might actually get to your original objective without realizing it.
