Blue Prince

A good game that ruins many of its best ideas through unnecessary complexity and excessive RNG I bought *Blue Prince* because I find puzzle and strategy games incredibly exciting, and I genuinely enjoy taking the time to understand how things work. So when the game was discounted in the store and had so many positive ratings and reviews, it was an immediate purchase for me. Unfortunately, as you can already tell from my review, I did not enjoy the game overall. I will gladly explain why. However, I also believe that whenever you criticize something, you should mention the positive aspects as well, because they are part of the full picture. It is also unfortunate that Steam does not offer a neutral rating option, because that is honestly where this game would belong for me rather than receiving a completely negative rating. But let us start with the positive aspects. **Positive:** The first ten in-game days are incredibly exciting and engaging. You absorb every detail and write things down in a notebook because you want to understand what everything means. That is genuinely fun, especially when you begin unlocking upgrades and feel as though you are actually making progress. The music and atmosphere are probably the best parts of the game. Whenever I travel “underground,” the change in music is incredibly dark and atmospheric without being too loud or overwhelming. It is simply a pleasure to listen to. The core gameplay mechanic is also interesting. You gradually gain more options and become better at understanding how certain systems work, such as using the keycard with Security. That gives the game a good amount of apparent depth. One of my personal favorite moments happened in the very first room I entered, the Den. The first thing I noticed was the chess piece. These small details later becoming relevant to puzzles genuinely impressed me. I was surprised that something so minor had actually been taken into account. As I said, everything feels exciting and wonderful at the beginning. It is a little like dating someone new: during the first phase, you tend to see everything in a positive light. Eventually, however, you find out whether you are actually compatible. And I am sorry, *Blue Prince*, but you are an enormous red herring that can become extremely frustrating. At least that is how the game felt to me. **Negative:** The game’s overall structure is incredibly exhausting. I understand that puzzles are supposed to be difficult. However, after around six hours and after repeatedly asking ChatGPT for help because English is not my native language, I found the 44-letter puzzle incredibly player-unfriendly and unnecessarily complicated. In my opinion, it was not even especially creative. Building further puzzles around individual words that must be extracted in order to solve something else, such as the puzzle in the Drawing Room, was the final nail in the coffin for me. It was one of the most trial-and-error-heavy puzzles I have ever encountered. A single word is supposed to explain how the puzzle works, yet even after noticing it, there are still four possible interpretations. There is a limit to what can reasonably be called a puzzle and what is simply an attempt to make something unnecessarily complicated. Even after understanding the solution afterward, I still did not feel that the puzzle needed to be designed that way. The excitement of the first ten days also gradually turns into an unnecessary RNG festival. Why do I feel that way? I personally enjoy planning my route through the mansion, and I also figured out how to enter the Secret Garden. At one point, I had already crafted the Power Hammer, and I wanted to test whether it could destroy the apparently fragile wall in the Secret Garden, since the normal hammer does not work. But what do you need to test this? An absurd amount of luck. That is not enjoyable. Yes, I understand that there is a room where you can store one item. That is helpful, but it is not enough. To craft the Power Hammer alone, you need three items and one specific room. You also need the storage room. If you do not find everything during the same run, you then have to find the room again to retrieve the stored item. After that, you still need to obtain the Secret Garden key during that run, use the key on a locked door connected to an orange room, and make sure the entire setup appears on either the far left or far right side of the mansion. Saying that you cannot lose in this game may technically be correct, but the game still contains an unnecessarily high and extremely player-unfriendly level of RNG. The same problem applies to the chess pieces I mentioned earlier. Whether you can solve that puzzle is random. You may have to spend nine in-game days waiting for one specific room to appear. That is simply a bad game-design decision, and it absolutely deserves criticism. Not everyone wants to invest more than 100 hours into a game or spend 20 hours trying to obtain one specific thing a single time. Once you have progressed far enough, there should be systems that make certain objectives easier so that an unsuccessful day does not constantly feel like completely wasted time. Blue Prince* is fundamentally a good game, but it makes so many things unnecessarily long and tedious. It is refreshing to see a game like this in the current market, but the experience becomes even more frustrating when English is not your native language. For example, the word “tier” caused confusion for me because “Tier” means “animal” in German. I first had to stop and think about what the game was even referring to, because that English meaning is not something commonly used in my language. Why could some of these elements not have been simplified slightly? Not everything needs to be unnecessarily complicated. The game clearly has a specific target audience, and there is an enormous amount of love and attention to detail behind it. However, it lost me because so much of the experience felt artificially stretched. Many sections could have been designed in a simpler and clearer way without hiding everything behind a single word while still leaving you with only a 25 percent chance of interpreting it correctly. That was genuinely one of the worst puzzles I have ever seen. I am now going to watch a speedrun because I would still like to see everything the game has to offer. After that, however, this chapter is over for me. Unfortunately, the developer is as well, because I do not feel that the game respects my time. That is especially disappointing because *Blue Prince* clearly contains a great deal of passion and attention to detail.