Blue Prince

You will be only just intrigued enough by this game to go past the point where you can't refund it anymore, and then it forces you to slowly walk through the same rooms over and over and over again. In a twist of cruel irony, the RNG gimmick that makes it more than just another exploration puzzle game is also the gimmick that prevents it from being fun to play. Strip the gimmick away or speed it all up to improve it and it is still just an utterly mediocre, dull puzzle game. I don't understand how this got so overrated in the first place. I will give credit to world building and atmosphere, though even there the game falters in many aspects with immersion-breaking anachronisms and oddities. I suppose it might all be explained in-universe if you can be bothered to torture yourself until RNG solves the puzzle for you but i tapped out after only 5h. Judging by other negative reviews, it seems like some end game puzzles were not even possible to solve without brute forcing / data mining. I'm glad i didnt waste more of my time on this.

I really tried but I wasn't very happy with the game. I figured out what I needed to do but the RNG never gave me the rooms I needed so you restart the day. Minimum of 15 minutes into a run to know you're blocked again so start the day again and try. I push through to the first big revelation and then turned it off. Really not satisfying and don't get the payoff from games like Roottrees where skill matters more than the rooms you pull

There is no true ending to this game, and it took me over 95 hours to realise. This has compelled me to give the game a negative review. While there is a lot of good in this game, here be dragons. If you want to stop reading now, I would strongly recommend to only play up until the credits run. If I had taken that advice, this might be a positive review. This game is primarily a poor example of a 'deckbuilder' which is pretending to be a puzzle game. There are many puzzles within it which are enjoyable and worth solving, and many 'puzzles' which are glorified keycard setups which just require drafting the correct rooms in the correct order. This primary mechanic does not have enough flesh to it to allow for easily setting up the puzzles, which leads to spending hours testing theories or failing to carry out a puzzle solution you have understood but requires some setup. Many puzzles rely on the player having screenshot some important information previously - there is no in game log for this information, so if you miss it you need to go back and find it - sometimes you need to have an item which is only accessible on some runs to be able to see the information at all (so even if you did screenshot it, time to go get it again). This adds to the mystery of the setting, but undermines the puzzle aspect. Some of the late game puzzles are hidden behind extremely obscure steps. One of these I realised was going to be impossible so I read the wiki for the solution - and to even successfully carry out the next step of the puzzle was going to take so long that I decided to stop playing. One of the late game puzzles hints the player down a path [spoiler]the spiral of stars..[/spoiler], which if you follow it through requires you to repeat the same trivial action in the game over a hundred times to then find nothing. You could argue this is a tie in with one of the games themes being that 'not all mysteries need a solution' - but I think this is an interesting idea from the developer which backfired into what comes across as a cruel joke. Story spoilers below, but basically more 'cruel joke' feeling stuff from the game at what might be considered the second ending. [spoiler]blue door Tunnel 'reward'[/spoiler][spoiler] You get the 3 boxes at the end of the tunnel - one says 'this is the end' and one says 'there is no end'. The there is no end box pushes the player toward the spiral of stars, which I have already discussed. The 'this is the end' box therefore should be the 'correct' ending - but the book's text suggests that Simon has accepted to become a shut-in ruler of his manor (and no more), never to take back the throne as the rest of the plot has been building towards. As far as I can tell, there is nothing further to this plot thread. So, in either case, Simon's fate is to endlessly roam Mount Holly's halls, repeatedly drafting new rooms - which is exactly what we've been doing as the player for the last 90 hours. My interpretation of this is basically that the game is saying 'what you're doing is wasting your time'. So why would it be made like this then? There is so much intrigue and build up for what becomes a nothing story - the stealing of the crown, the unearthing of the Orindian castle and associated blackprints, the police state and Bon Margles' investigation - all of this ultimately leads nowhere. This would have been, for me, forgivable - maybe after you close the game Simon continues and becomes king of the realm. This is the implication when credits roll after initially opening room 46 and seeing the crown. But the text of the Blue Prince book tells us that Simon is to stay in the castle and look at blue only at home.. undoing the entirety of the intrigue up to this point. [/spoiler] I am aware there is another 'ending', but it doesn't develop Simon's story in any way. Having read the wiki, it is unfortunate that these final few more interesting puzzles would be preceded by more hours of busywork puzzles. Ultimately, all of these quibbles would have been fine, but fundamentally I think the amount of time that this game's design asks of any player is substantially too high for the actual content.

The concept of Blue Prince seems very cool, but the practise of it is unfortunately just frustrating and boring. I love the atmosphere, the puzzles are intriguing and I want to see more, the art is very pretty; everything about the game that isn't the gameplay itself seems great from what little I've seen. The problem comes when you've spent 20 minutes walking around, waiting for tiny pickup cutscenes over and over, drafting no rooms with keys and then all your available doors require keys, or you don't have any gems, so you can't draft a room with open doors in your only remaining door, or anything similar. This sort of soft lock would be fine if there was actual gameplay in the rooms other than the occasional environmental puzzle and so you were actually doing something while building your floorplan, but as it is the average room has little to nothing to do in it other than watch an unskippable 3 second cutscene of picking up a key or a coin or other item. The end result is that of the three and a half hours I played somewhere between half and three quarters of it felt like it was spent walking around doing nothing until I arbitrarily ran out of resources or doors to draft new rooms on (or both at the same time), at which point I would be forced to reset and spend more time just holding my W key down with no gameplay going on. The rest of it was interesting and I want to see more, but I don't want to play walking simulator to get to it.

Un ami n'arrêtait pas de me parler de ce jeu et je comprends totalement. Blue Prince peut être frustrant oui, mais surtout addictif, d'autant plus quand on aime résoudre des mystères puisque tout le jeu tourne autour de ça. La DA du jeu est une pure réussite. Cette réflexion sur l'agencement des pièces et de la gestion des ressources impose du joueur qu'il développe une vraie maîtrise de ces éléments. Puis, à la différence de beaucoup de jeux où on fonce dans le tas, il faut dans ce jeu tout planifier à l'avance! C'est propre, c'est exigeant, tout ce qu'on demande quoi. Period.

Too repetitive, grindy and boring to play.

3 keys, 46 locked doors. Riveting.

incredibly repetetive for a game with puzzles you solved in your head 4 hours ago