Blue Prince

With some 12 hours of gameplay and 20ish runs, I believe that I gave the game a fair try, and am deciding to drop it. To summarize my feelings: interesting idea, frustrating beyond belief, please don't let this become a new genre of puzzle-roguelikes. At its core, I fundamentally don't like the gameplay loop. The roguelike aspect takes what would have been a pretty good mystery-mansion/escape-room styled game and transforms it into a series of the worst kinds of puzzles that a developer can create: time- and luck-gated ones. 90% of the (early) game is [Walk into a room, see what is quite obviously a puzzle, often discern the solution/intention behind it, realize that you're missing a key piece of information/item/room configuration/room position to progress it, hope that you stumble into it in a future run. Walk into a room...] over and over and over again. I'm certain that many people enjoy "chipping" away at a series of puzzles in manner... I don't. I think that it sucks, and just disrespects my time and attention. "Too bad, better luck next time" isn't an acceptable design philosophy when designing puzzle games.

Très exigeant, très lent, très aléatoire. Quand tu te coltines du theorycraft bien lourd, si en plus tu y ajoutes de la RNG c'est vite épuisant. Rien de prévu côté sauvegarde (sortir du jeu pour aller sur un Excel regarder des captures d'écran pour chaque document, c'est le contraire du fun). Peu satisfaisant passée la découverte du début, quasi aucune récompense concrète après avoir résolu un puzzle si ce n'est un autre puzzle. Les énigmes qui jouent sur les mots en anglais ça va 5 minutes. Le jeu est tellement terriblement silencieux en se baladant dans le manoir que ça en devient pesant. On a constamment l'impression de perdre son temps, soit parce qu'on réfléchit sur une énigme sans être certain d'avoir tous les éléments pour la résoudre, soit parce qu'on essaie de chercher des autres indices sans être certain qu'ils existent. J'abandonne avant la fin sans regrets

Это очень атмосферно, сюжет полный загадок, играл примерно неделю чтобы таки пройти и даже после прохождения тайны еще остались, так что вообще не линейная дается несколько способов пройти, в общем очень атмосферно играть можно долго, загадочно и сюжет присутствует. Но надо английский понимать чтобы пройти, есть каламбуры и игры слов которые в загадках используются. Если что и не понравилось так это ачивки, они тут прям совсем для задротов. В целом игра одноразовая и после прохождения можно поставить точку, что хорошо.

I don't think I can keep playing this game praying for the items and rooms I need every single run

This turned out to be such an amazing, incredible, and mind-blowing take on the puzzle and rogue-like journey. RNG is a beast all its own, and any plans you make for a run can quickly change to other objectives. The goal is to get room 46, but you are guaranteed to find other things to solve along the way, and there is no way to know what will help you open that door or will lead you to other secrets. It required me to get a notebook to solve things and keep track of stuff I thought would be important, and it took me back to having to do that as a kid playing Myst. Beating the game is just the beginning (if you want it to be). This is technically my second time playthrough it, though this time I'm in it to find out every single thing I can, and I've found it just as riveting as the first time I played it on console. Plus the addition of some accessibility features like not having to hold to run has been wonderful for my hands.

Very fun puzzle game, hampered by frustrating drafting mechanics, that only get worse as the game goes on. The game is too RNG heavy, and the developer should have really put hidden mechanics to increase the likelihood of relevant rooms appearing, or a pity timer, to prevent the potential of you going 10+ runs without any progress due to the specific combination of rooms not appearing.

A Gacha Game in Puzzle Clothing I really wanted to like Blue Prince. A puzzle game in a procedurally generated mansion? Sounded right up my alley. The music, art, and presentation are fantastic. Unfortunately, the game makes too heavy use of its rouge-like mechanics. Many of the puzzle solutions rely on having a combination of not only the right randomly generated rooms and items, but also enough keys, gems, and steps to solve before you run out. Far too often, I'd know what I needed to do in order to advance multiple puzzles, but the house simply wouldn't deal me the combination of rooms and items to solve them, or I'd get the pieces late enough in the day that I didn't have enough steps remaining to backtrack and put them together. Worse, the game does a poor job of flagging when certain changes to the house are permanent. More than once, I burned up a run trying to re-solve a puzzle I thought I needed to open a path, only to find e.g. the elevator in the foundation stays unlocked on every subsequent run once solved the first time. Given each run can take 30+ min with no way to save, Blue Prince often felt like an exercise in frustration. The game does give you tools to manage the randomness, but they aren't effective enough and are doled out far too slowly, often, again, being dependent on getting the right combination of randomly generated rooms and items to unlock. I think the most instructive comparison here is Tunic, a similarly puzzle-themed game that I adored. When I was stymied by a puzzle in Tunic, it was almost always because I needed to think harder about the solution, or I would come back to it later with more information and see something new. In Blue Prince, I'm almost never stumped about what I need to do in order to solve a puzzle, I'm stymied from doing so by the game's roguelike mechanics.

The "game" I finished was good. Should I say, I stopped once I realized after the THIRD successful house completion that it was impossible for me to complete the run due to RNG I never overcame...And that each run would result in such a failure unless I rolled for it inevitably. The concept of making a puzzle based dungeon building rogue-like is fascinating to me. In a lot of ways they got it right. This is the presentation, the visual story telling, the early on "a-ha!" moments, set pieces, and very generally/broadly the progression mechanics. Unfortunately, you as the player can do everything right and fall incredibly flat; whilst having little to no ability to retry or reconfigure your luck without starting anew. I've read a handful of the reviews here, and anyone arguing that you can directly overcome these gimmicks - especially early on - is lying to you. And it's not a challenging "get gud" issue. It's just straight up luck. Luck where you won't know if you hit the jackpot until an hour later once you've finally reached the deepest chamber; only to realize you're missing a key piece that never unlocked for you. There is no save system here, outside of a few niche mechanics at play that you unlock as you complete lateral puzzles less directly tied to the game's first story. This is why a lot of people get torn up on this work as a whole. Parts of it are award winning. The rest of it is masochistic and self flagellating in order to pad out a story which is neither rewarding or imminent. I do think there are parts of Blue Prince that are deeply engaging and worthy of sincere appreciation and investigation. Why the Devs found the need to then blow the foot off of curious onlookers mid journey makes no sense to me. I've played many puzzle games throughout my life. There is the DNA of Myst, with some crazy multiple story over-arching thematics akin to something like Antichamber or Blake Manor or Obra Dinn, with The Witness interactions reconfigured as a build your own Cube (1997) escape room. It SHOULD be a game in my top 10 given this overlap. Ultimately this work about time and space respects neither of yours. It soils what could be an incredible work by not allowing for knowledge influenced direction or mechanical autonomy in a substantive way. Only go in if you're willing to be a slave to its rules, under its conflicting - confusing - red flags and various misdemeanors against knowledge's progression as its new standard. Blue Prince at its core shifts from historical/occult bewilderment into frustration and tedium once you learn its tricks. The journey to test out theories or lines of gathered information just wasn't worth it for me, and I would argue that I'm a target audience member for such a game. Shameful, and I'm sad I'm unable to recommend it to most people.