Editor’s note: Blue Prince is the sort of game that one may wish to enter completely blind. However, if you have already gone two months without playing it, perhaps you are not concerned with such things. That said, if you are planning on playing it with as little information as possible, this post is probably not for you. It would be impossible to say anything about this game without at least gesturing towards things like items, rooms, puzzle structure, etc. I will say that I have done what I can to avoid major spoilers throughout the discussion. If you are curious about Blue Prince but are exerising only a standard amount of spoiler-caution, this should be a safe yet informative read. Thank you.
Blue Prince is, so far, one of the preeminent indie darlings of 2025. Though it had been on the radar of some game journos since it was demoed at last year’s Summer Games Fest, it emerged as a relative unknown in April of this year. If you were paying attention to games media in the week before its release, you may have heard rumblings that Something Was Up.. that something Very New and Very Intriguing was on its way.1
Once the hoi polloi got their hands on Blue Prince, we found out that Something Was Only Sort of Up with it. The game abounds with mysteries and puzzles, there is no doubt, but you also basically know what you’re in for within an hour of playing the game. What you do in that first hour is not dissimilar to what you do in its tenth hour (or its fiftieth).2 The scale of intricacy and contrivance increases as time passes, certainly, but there are no surprises to come on the scale of something like Inscryption or Tunic.3
As for what you do: you are the heir to the fortune and manor of your eccentric great uncle. In order to claim your inheritance, however, you must reach the “46th room” of the manor. The manor is composed of 45 rooms arranged in a 9 x 5 grid.4 At the apex of this grid is Room 46. In order to reach it, you begin each new day (i.e., each new run) navigating the house, drafting a new room each time you enter a new one. The house resets each night, however, allowing/forcing you to draft a completely new path the following day. Each room has a different configuration of doors and a different function within the house. Bedrooms tend to restore your steps, a finite resource that will forcibly end your run when they run out; green rooms provide gems, which can be used to draft higher value rooms; red rooms hamper you in some way; and so on. Along the way, you manage various resources, collect unique items, learn about the world and characters of Blue Prince, solve puzzles, all the while heading towards that elusive Polaris: Room 46.
Here is what I like about Blue Prince: I like how utterly jam-packed full of puzzles it is. I like that you can feel its sides bulging with just how many how mysteries and quandaries are vying for your attention at all times. I also like the gameplay, broadly-speaking (forthcoming critiques notwithstanding). Once you get the hang of it, runs become very pleasant and tranquil, so long as you can manage your frustration with things around the gameplay. I like the feeling of exploring the manor and its grounds and I like the unique bit of piano that plays each time you enter the Music Room. In general, I think that it is a good game, though I also think that it is a game that is very hostile to the idea of me liking it. It is far more impressed with itself than I am with it and it seems to believe itself deserving of vastly more of my time than other (much better) games do.
The heart of this complaint is no secret to anyone familiar with this game. Whether one adores or detests Blue Prince, her second breath will almost certainly be devoted to discussing the game’s RNG.5 This is because nearly every single moment of your time in Blue Prince will be governed by RNG—and it is a cruel, vicious master. The rooms available to you on a given run are determined by RNG. Perhaps even more importantly, the rooms next to the rooms available to you on a given run are determined by RNG. Items available on a run are determined by RNG. Places to use those items are also, naturally, determined by RNG. And those resources I mentioned earlier that must be managed each run? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but…
You probably get the point but let’s hammer it a little further down your throat with a vignette. [The following paragraph contains concrete information about locations and items you will encounter in Blue Prince. I hesitate to call them “spoilers”, but this is probably the closest thing you will encounter to “spoilers” in this text. You may safely skip to the following paragraph if you value ignorance more than parables.] During a run, I draft the Library (RNG). Connected to the library (as it is the only place it will spawn), I draft the Bookshop (rare RNG), and thankfully I have enough money on hand to purchase the book “A New Clue” (partial RNG; it is always in stock but it may have been impossible for me to get that amount of money at that point in the run). This will allow the book “A New Clue” to be orderable on the next time I visit the Library. This means that I have to again roll the Library on a subsequent run (RNG) and then use the Library to order “A New Clue.” Then, again, on another run, I have to roll the Library. At this point, I can finally read “A New Clue.” It is, fittingly, filled with clues. Unfortunately, if I didn’t happen to get a magnifying glass on that run (considerable RNG), then it will all be for naught because much of the book is unreadable without a magnifying glass. Documents you encounter in Blue Prince are not catalogued or archived for you in-game; you are expected to screenshot every single one of them.6 The magnifying glass does not work on screenshots, however, so you will need to find the magnifying glass on the same run as you find “A New Clue.” If you do not, then you will miss your opportunity, and must draft the Library two more times (on two separate runs) to read the book. You will still need the magnifying glass at that point, of course. Oh and, by the way, there is literally no way to guarantee getting the magnifying glass or drafting the Library.7 Have fun!
This is bafflingly absurd and completely unnecessary. Once I have done the hard work of acquiring a document, why isn’t it archived and catalogued for me? Must it truly disappear completely into the aether, maintained neither in my menus, nor in the Library? Similarly, once I have unlocked the magnifying glass, why must I simply hope to find it on future runs? Using a magnifying glass to “unlock” hidden bits of documents is a neat mechanic. Why won’t the game permit me to engage with it? Why gate it behind undue RNG? Why gate any of this behind layers upon layers of RNG? This sort of unpredictability destroys the pacing of Blue Prince. I want to solve its myriad puzzles and mysteries but I am permitted to do so only according to the whims of the RNG Gods.8
Let us now deal with the most common response to this complaint: “I don’t get why the RNG is such a big deal! I find every run useful.” To this I would simply respond: just wait. After a certain point—perhaps around the halfway point, in terms of seeing everything the game has to offer—the RNG ceases to be additive or interesting and instead becomes a massive detriment to your experience and your attempts to make progress. The puzzles become increasingly complex and contrived, requiring more and more pseudorandomly-determined elements to line up on the same run. If you have not reached the mid-game of Blue Prince,9 you probably cannot imagine how maddeningly-frustrating this becomes. Let me illustrate. Imagine that I have asked you to solve a simple math equation: 38 = 4x + 2, solve for x. Now, instead of simply telling me the answer, I ask you to reach into a bag of a hundred balls, each labeled from 1 to 100, and to pull out the ball labeled with the correct answer. Imagine, if you would, that each attempt to pull a ball out of the bag takes 30–60 minutes. Do you think you would enjoy that experience? How long do you think you would pull balls out of the bag before you tired of the exercise?
In this way, Blue Prince commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin of puzzle games: forbidding me from implementing the solution to a puzzle that I have already solved in my head. What value is there in forcing me to wait hours before attempting to implement a solution to a puzzle? How could this possibly contribute positively to my experience with the game? It doesn’t even make the game more difficult—just more time-consuming. If I have figured out that Room X requires an item created by using Room Y to combine Items A, B, and C, why not just provide a way for me to obtain said items? And what if I also need to use that new item in Room Z (or Room α, etc., and so on, ad infinitum). This is not a hypothetical, by the way; this is a real and literal example that I experienced repeatedly with multiple room–item combinations. Trying to obtain these configurations at the whim of Nearly-True Randomness is genuinely hellish. It is very difficult for me to imagine why a game would be designed this way and even more difficult to imagine why it would not be changed in the course of playtesting.
For the sake of further illustration, let us now deal with another strawman. In a podcast of which I am a dedicated listener, an occasional guest-host makes the following observations (timestamped for your convenience). Let us deal with each in turn.
I’m a competitive TCG player. I don’t get mad at Pokémon because there’s a random element, because it’s a card game. You kinda have to meet the game on its own terms there.
This is a very strange thing for someone to say if they are indeed serious about playing card games. Major card games—like Pokémon, like Magic the Gathering, like Netrunner—all have serious design flaws related to their randomness. Games of Magic can end prematurely and spuriously due to failing to draw land; games of Pokémon can end prematurely and spuriously due to failing to draw either energy or Pokémon; games of Netrunner can end prematurely and spuriously if the corp draws too many agendas and no way to deal with them. Anyone who has spent any time thinking about card games understands that they are good insofar as they emphasize the strengths and de-emphasize the weaknesses of randomness.10 It is absolutely fair to critique how elements of randomness are implemented or (failed to be) controlled, in card games and videogames alike.11 These are design decisions like any other.
If the developer set out to do something, I think it’s fair to critique it but I’m not sure some of the way people have been talking about it is the most fair in the world—where it’s just like ‘oh this sucks because of it’—well that’s what the devs wanted to make, so…
I agree that this is what the developer wanted to make. This is, in fact, why it should be critiqued. If these elements of the game had emerged incidentally or epiphenomenologically, I would actually be less interested in them as the subject of criticism. For example: Blue Prince does not perform very well. Many people, myself included, have found that it runs at an unstable framerate, even on a sufficiently-powerful computer. I imagine that this was not result of the developer’s intention, but rather an “accident” of development. These sorts of elements of the game are not uninteresting to me, critically-speaking, but they tend to be far less fruitful for discussion than what the developer actually did intend and execute.
I totally get if people don’t like it and that’s where you get into some of the more subjective elements of game criticism where it’s like ‘well, is this thing that I don’t like bad or is it not a thing that I’m into?’”
Ah, my old friend, the spurious invocation of the concept of “subjectivity.” As I have explained elsewhere, I try to avoid the use of the terms “subjective” and “objective.” They are misused far more often than they are used correctly and so I try instead to describe precisely what I mean instead of using those terms, lest I be misunderstood. This person seems to be suggesting that the use of RNG in Blue Prince is simply subject to taste, to which I would say: Sure! Of course. Every aspect of every media experience is a matter of taste. I love the album “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” by the band My Chemical Romance. I have no doubt that many people would not love it. Does this mean that the album is somehow beyond criticism? Beyond commentary?12 This sort of blithe dismissal is an unproductive and anti-intellectual attempt to resolve that which is unresolvable: a piece of art can be liked by some and disliked by others. There is simply nothing to be gained by hand-waving away disagreements of this nature. Our only choice is to sit in that discomfort and try to understand our own perspectives and those of others, comfortable with the knowledge that we will probably not be able to convince one another. And if we cannot, so be it!13
Now that we have sufficiently—some might say excessively—discussed this flaw, let us briefly discuss some ways in which it may have been ameliorated. Fortunately, there are a wide variety of easily-identifiable potential solutions, some of which are already present in Blue Prince (if in very small and unimpactful ways). These all fall under the broad umbrella that we might label “give me some goddamn control over what I encounter in a run.” The randomness and potential-for-surprise present in the early hours of Blue Prince is undoubtedly part of its charm. At that point of the playthrough, the game’s scope has not yet been revealed and it truly feels like you could encounter anything.14 Mysteries abound in every room and each new area of the grounds is more intriguing than the last. By the time you roll credits, however, this illusion has largely been shattered. At some point, you realize that you are going to be doing effectively the exact same thing on every single run until you run out of things to do or enthusiasm for doing them. This is the point at which the game could start handing much more control over to the player: let them start with some items or at least choose which items will drop on the run; let them manipulate the pool of rooms available on that particular run; hell, you could even let them re-explore old completed blueprints. Why not? Once someone has passed the point at which Potential is the game’s draw, what harm is there in letting those players more expediently seek out and problem-solve the game’s remaining puzzles? These are players who have already demonstrated interest and investment in the game. Why punish them further or test their patience? The game also understands this: there are a variety of piss-poor ways to affect your runs in very small (and still RNG-dependent) ways. Why these utilities were implemented in such an ineffective manner is beyond me.
Excessive use of RNG is, however, not Blue Prince’s only weakness. Although the game is utterly squirming with puzzles, the implementation of these puzzles does leave something to be desired. Many of them feel rough in one way or another, either underbaked to the point of (unpleasant) friction and confusion or spoiled by a “Well, here you go” solution that was likely pasted on in response to playtesters finding them too difficult. One of Blue Prince’s most impressive puzzles is visible to the player from literally the first room they enter, though it may not dawn on them that they are looking at a puzzle until some time later. This particular puzzle spans all 45 of the manor’s rooms and can be solved if one is sufficiently-attentive and creative… or if one simply waits long enough. Eventually, a particular room just tells you the solution, diagram and all. The hints of varying subtlety that had previously been leading one to the solution become irrelevant as the game grows impatient with your sluggishness and simply takes the joy of problem-solving or the satisfaction of a solution away from you. What’s additionally strange about this particular puzzle is its reward: it feels like it is one of the game’s Major Meta-Puzzles, but its reward is a just a hint for solving other puzzles—many of which you have already solved at this point, without the use of this mostly-self-evident hint.15
Other puzzles are just frustrating, irritating, or unintuitive. How does the Boiler Room pass power onto other rooms? Well, if you find the right scraps of text spread throughout the grounds you can figure it out—but don’t you dare try to reason it out through first principles! There are no broader systems that govern its usage, there is no Top-Down Philosophy that guides puzzle design and solutions, the game has nothing to teach you beyond the puzzle you are solving right here, right now. Sure, eventually you’ll have to collate hundreds of screenshots to figure out the exact visual signifiers associated with a handful of different states, but that’s not learning; trawling massive amounts of information for the bits you need and then collecting those little bits into a “solution” is a legitimate form of puzzle design, but “learning” it is not.16 This contrasts very poorly with other bursting-at-the-seams puzzle games (e.g., Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, The Talos Principle, The Witness) that are ultimately training simulations, designed to teach the player to be extremely good at one thing: solving puzzles from the respective game. Solving puzzles in the The Witness, for example, becomes a skill, one that you can improve and one that is tested repeatedly and sometimes dramatically. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes spends its humble 20-hour runtime17 intimately-acquainting the player with the mind of its designers. By the game’s end, you will have learned a great deal about how its developers believe puzzles should be designed, and the game will have demonstrated an uncanny prescience of how you will have approached those puzzles. I have had no such experience with Blue Prince: I have learned very little of its developer’s mind,18 he clearly knew nothing of mine, and I have only improved at solving Blue Prince’s puzzles insofar as I have learned that it’s often vastly more edifying to just google the singular bit of trivium required to solve a puzzle than to tediously forage through several hundred screenshots for it.19
Ultimately, this all culminates in a game that is more interested in punishment than challenge20 and being played rather than experienced. The design decisions across Blue Prince—the excessive reliance on multidimensional RNG, requiring the player to take and track hundreds of screenshots—are all very successful at convincing the player to play more of it, first through enticing them with mystery and surprise and later through forcing them with the promise of progress. They are successful, that is, right up until the point that the player quits. From what I’ve gleaned, regular people play Blue Prince until they reach Room 46 and roll credits, complete another run or two, and then lose interest. On the other hand, enthusiast freaks like myself are only further beguiled by promises like “When you roll credits, you are only just now entering the midgame.” That is the point at which, if the game has done its job, the most-dedicated players will lock in and dedicate themselves to solving every last puzzle the game has on offer. Unfortunately, this is also the point at which Blue Prince truly begins to demonstrate its deep commitment to torment the player instead of tantalizing him, to ensnare him in so much tedium with very little promise of reward. Individudal experiences will vary, of course, but eventually this experience near-invariably21 leads players to quit before reaching the game’s “true” ending. One such player was, of course, me. Once I grasped just how much repetition, tedium, and luck would be required to reach the end, I retired my drafting shoes and resolved to just read up on the ending instead.22 And that was it. For nearly every player, the game ends unceremoniously, testing your patience until eventually and inevitably, you lose interest. You might not even know you’re done with it until you realize you haven’t booted it up in a while and you just accept that you’ve moved on. Someone else will have to uncover the mysteries of the manor, you suppose.
Reading back over what I have written here, I feel somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, I think that Blue Prince is a very cool and (for a time) very enjoyable videogame. The gameplay itself is unique and innovative and implementation of the game’s most elaborate and contrived puzzles is very impressive, even if the player experience of those puzzles leaves much to be desired. A discussion this elaborate and thorough of the game’s flaws may belie my true feelings about the game, which is that: I often liked it! It was fun! Even now, I sort of want to go back and do a run, even though I know that it would be literally pointless to do so within the game’s broader meta-structure.23 More than anything, I am disappointed by Blue Prince. I can guarantee you that I am the game’s primary audience. There are few players more enthusiastic and dedicated than I when it comes to these sorts of puzzle games. Blue Prince could have—should have—ensnared me utterly and completely. It would have done so, were it not for a list of unforced and (to my eye, at least) easily-avoided errors. Further, and perhaps unfairly, I read a certain arrogance in these errors. Design decisions aimed at making a game more hostile to its players are a tricky thing; if they pay off (as they often do in FromSoft games, for example), they can contribute to some of the most engaging and rewarding gameplaying experiences. If they do not, however, they betray a narcissism or pretension: “You thought that your game was good enough to justify this? You really thought that this would augment my experience, instead or ruining it?” In this way, Blue Prince is its own worst enemy, the sole entity responsible for its degeneracy, a corrupt and callous monarch blinded by arrogance to the ruin of his own kingdom.
Some final errant thoughts:
My experience with Blue Prince likely suffered immensely by my having played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes so recently before. The two games have a quite a lot in common in terms of what they ask of the player but differ dramatically in how they ask it. Nearly every aspect of Lorelei was carefully designed and refined to ensure that the only obstacle between the player and her success was her own capacity for problem-solving. In this way, the game mitigates the “bad” sort of friction—frustration, helplessness, tedium—and instead emphasizes the good sort—difficulty, complexity, drawing connections and overcoming functional fixedness. Blue Prince, in contrast, does not distinguish between these two types of friction, instead electing to ramp both up as much as possible as often as possible. To the extent that it does distinguish between them, Blue Prince favours the prior form of friction, increasingly miring the player in tedium and haphazard helplessness as the game progresses.
One of the game’s emblematic ‘fuck you’ moments for me revolves around a piggy bank. Without going into unnecessary detail: One of the game’s handful of trophies is rewarded for buying out all of the extremely-expensive items in a particular (rare) shop on a single run. These trophies are not just the typical meta-game trifles but are actually tracked in-game and are necessary to progress in the story. If you fulfill a certain condition, you can gain access to a piggy bank filled with a large sum of money. The bank can only be broken once per file, however. The game warns you: if you break it now, you will never have access to it again. Well, on a particularly-lucrative run where I had also lucked into drafting the aforementioned shop, I decided that it was finally time to break the piggy bank. With it, I would have enough money to buy out the shop, just as the trophy requested. And so I did just that: I broke the piggy bank, took my newfound wealth to the Showroom, and bought each of the store’s luxurious items.. at which point, a new item, the Trophy of Wealth, was made available for purchase for another 100 gold (which is more expensive than any other item in the shop and was wholly unfeasible to acquire at that point). The game intentionally misrepresented its own objective and misled me into wasting a single-time-use extremely valuable item on it. Getting this trophy would thereby become far more difficult and would, as is so often the case, require a ton of luck and a ton of tedium. I remember thinking at that time, “Yeah, that tracks.”24
I love run-based games and I love puzzle games but they do not seem to mix. Inscryption, it turns out, was the exception that proved the rule (though it is only sort of a run-based game and sort of a puzzle game). Blue Prince is a good puzzle game combined with a mediocre-if-interesting roguelite and it really compromises the experience of the former to focus on the (ultimately-weak) merits of the latter. Strangely, this resulted in an experience in which I remember the run-based elements of the game more fondly than the puzzles, even though on paper the puzzles are the actual star of the show. The two halves are just completely stepping on each other’s feet.
Throughout my time with Blue Prince, I took no fewer than 617 screenshots. That has got to be a personal record. Unfortunately, few of these screenshots were aesthetically-pleasing (for which the fault lies with me and not the game) and so some of the screenshots included herein are shamelessly stolen.
Here is a very stupid alternative logline for this post: “Heavy is the head that wears the frown. :(”
A certain type of reader may have found themselves frustrated throughout this post, screaming at their monitor/phone/personal assistant, “There are ways to affect the RNG! There are ways to affect which rooms/items drop!” To this, I would respond: Yes. I know. Ctrl + F for “piss-poor” if you would like to know my thoughts on them. Even those mechanics are based on RNG, which renders them nearly useless. The Conservatory, for example, is a room that when drafted allows you to adjust the likelihood of a room appearing in your draft. Unfortunately, the three options in the Conservatory (only one of which may be selected and adjusted) are also chosen randomly. So, no, I did not ever see the Gallery or the Throne Room in the Conservatory, despite rolling that room every single chance I got.
The final two points in this list will contain information that is a bit more spoilery than the preceding text. The information-wary reader may safely eject at this point, but please do continue if you wish to see me unravel further at the foot of this game.
Off the top of my head, here are a few qualty-of-life improvements that could probably be easily-implemented and would make the game less tedious and less needlessly-time-consuming:
1. Don’t make me go all the way underground in The Foundation to the pull handle to the Antechamber’s North Door open every single run.
2. Let me see the menu while I am drafting. What’s my experiment again? What does that constructed item do? What’s that rare fancy Showroom item do? All of this information could be relevant to choosing a room but I cannot access it when I am choosing a room.
3. Just let me re-read documents. You know I am going to screenshot it—the game insists upon it. Just help me avoid that unnecessary tedium and drudgery and keep the documents in my menu.
4. Why do I have to re-open every safe on every single run? You know I know the solution, it never changes. Just leave it open.
5. Which red letters have I collected again? Which sanctum keys have I collected? Surely this can be tracked and indicated in the menu screen. (N.B. The number of red letters you have found is tracked on the menu screen; which number red letters you have found is not.)
6. For the love of God, why can’t I save mid-run?Here are some notes that I took on some of the game’s more shockingly-frustrating features:
1. There is a chess puzzle you have to solve, which is naturally based on extreme RNG. I solved it almost immediately in my head but the game did not deign to allow me to solve it for many, many runs. Once you do solve it, you unlock one of a few “powers.” If you want to try another power, well, you better believe you’ve got to complete the puzzle again, RNG and all. And, it turns out, you’ve got to solve the puzzle at least three times to progress in the story. You have already demonstrated that you can solve the puzzle; this is literally just lighting fire to your limited hours on this mortal coil.
2. There are four safety deposit box keys that can sometimes spawn randomly throughout the game. Where they spawn and whether they spawn at all is, of course, random. If you find one, you better hope you also draft the (rare) Vault where the keys can be used. Otherwise, the key disappears and you’ll have to just hope it shows up again. If you do find the key and the Vault on the same run, hopefully you get the one that opens the security deposit box gating your progress in the game. Otherwise, you’ll have to just get that lucky again.. and again.. and maybe a fourth time… At a certain point, you literally can’t progress in the game until you luck into getting the correct security deposit box key—again, randomly spawned!—on the same run as the Vault. Good luck!
3. I unlocked the Throne Room. Great! That seems important. Unfortunately, I did not see it ever again: fifteen runs later and the room never once popped up as an option while drafting.
4. I would love to complete Room 8. It seems important! Unfortunately, the room that generates its key, the Gallery, has appeared for me only twice. And… would you believe me if I told you that none of the doors leading to rank 8 were locked when I had that key, so I never even got the chance to get to Room 8? Again, with these layers of RNG on RNG on RNG!
Footnotes
For better and for worse, I am very susceptible to this sort of hearsay. I am relatively-immune to regular hype, especially for AAA games and the like, but a vague allusion to the idea that a game is mysterious or surprising or subversive—that’ll catch my interest, ten times out of ten. The most successful instance of this was Inscryption: I heard that it was a rogue-like deckbuilder (which is already highly-appealing to me) but that also Something Was Up with it. Say no more, I’m sold. It ended up being one of the most impactful gaming experiences I’ve ever had, so the heuristic is not a terrible one.↩︎
or, god help us all, its two-hundredth↩︎
which were also designed and developed primarily by a single person↩︎
you know, like blueprints. Blue Prince. you get it.↩︎
For the uninitiated, RNG is an initialism for “random number generation”, but is shorthand for (pseudo-)randomness as an element in game design. Rolling a die in D&D is RNG, as is generating a new map in Slay the Spire or opening a door and gaining a benefit in Hades. Notably, these things are almost never determined “randomly”, but “pseudo-randomly.” The results are subject to some amount of chance but are also partially-determined by some aspects of the game’s programming (e.g., when the player already has X, he is more likely to draft Y; if the player is having difficulty, he is more likely to receive stronger options). When channeled correctly, the chaos of RNG can make games unpredictable and exciting, often enabling replayability. When channeled incorrectly, it can make games frustrating and irritating, shattering the illusion of player agency that games usually try to cast.↩︎
If there are parts of the book that need to be magnified in order to be seen, you will also have to have screenshotted that specifically. Otherwise, you’ll just have to find the document and the magnifying glass again. Good luck!↩︎
Okay, yes, I can draft a room with a terminal (RNG) and then use that to order a magnifying glass to the Shop, and then hope that I draft a Shop in the “2–3 days” after which the magnifying glass arrives (RNG), and then hope that I draft a Library in that run (RNG), but that is still not a guarantee. If you found yourself forming that counterargument in your head in response to the main text then I would love to face you in hand-to-hand combat. No one will miss either of us.↩︎
or, as I would say in my World of Warcraft days, RNGesus↩︎
Because so much of Blue Prince’s content is “optional”, it can be difficult to meaningfully-refer to stages of the game. It doesn’t really become clear which portions of the game are “early game”, “mid-game”, and so on. Here is a hint: if you have not yet seen the credits of the game, you are in the early game. If you have only recently rolled credits, you are somewhere around the mid-game; you are nowhere near the endgame.↩︎
Ironically, I think most card game aficionados would agree that, of the three games listed, Pokémon is by far the most afflicted by the malign aspects of randomness.↩︎
These design flaws do not necessarily render the games Bad, but they are undeniably flaws, present in the game all the way from the kitchen table to the highest levels of competition.↩︎
actually, in this case, the answer is: yes. the album is beyond critique or commentary.↩︎
I recognize that, at some point, this sort of line-by-line refutation of the vacuous off-handed commentary made by an ersatz podcast host likely ceases to be valuable and instead veers into meritless bullying. I hope I have avoided this. I included these observations and my responses to them because I think that it can be useful to deal directly with an exemplar “argument” instead of attempting to conjure the opposing side myself. I also recognize that, in this case, the commentary does come off as a bit vapid. Unfortunately, I have not encountered a more eloquent version of the argument: some people just seem to think the RNG is fine, whereas others do not. I am attempting to formally articulate where I think the RNG fails and how it may be improved. All that said… one time the quoted podcast guest host referred to himself as the “smart one” on the podcast and I cannot help but think of that everytime he opens his mouth. That probably contributed to my decision to use him as the punching bag.↩︎
I, myself, became convinced that I would eventually be drafting another location entirely—perhaps even something dramatically different, like the neighbouring city. This was largely because I had heard people in games media praise Blue Prince’s incredible scope, and so I assumed that it meant it would eventually break its own mold in some way. Not so.↩︎
I am being vague because I do actually think that this is one of Blue Prince’s better puzzles but I apologize if the paragraph is vague to the point of irritation. I will say that I happened to have solved the puzzle before I encountered the room that spoils it and so I did find it deeply satisfying, even though the “reward” was a bit odd. Most players likely get the impression that this meta-puzzle is one of the most important aspects of the game. In truth, you can probably just ignore it and still progress in the game relatively unhindered. The puzzle itself was fun and clever, at least!↩︎
To be clear, there are games that are largely-based around this sort of activity (e.g., The Return of the Obra Dinn, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Roottrees Are Dead), though I would argue that the best versions of those games do actually Teach the player and do operate according to a Distinct and Knowable Philosophy of Puzzle Design.↩︎
paltry, ultimately, compared to the ever-bloating completionist estimates of Blue Prince↩︎
beyond the fact that he cares little for my time or my screenshots folder↩︎
Lorelei is a note-taking game. Blue Prince is a screenshotting game. This seems important somehow. I was taking notes when I first started playing but I abandoned it when i realized the information was too disparate and diffuse to ever take down. Solving puzzles in Blue Prince is seldom about targeted sniper shots of information but instead buckshot blasts, over and over and over and over.↩︎
I’m looking at you, Dark Souls II.↩︎
Steam achievements indicate that around 7% of players have completed a task that precedes the game’s “true” ending by many, many steps. How many of those 7% got there with minimal guide usage and how many of them continued on to complete the game, I shan’t hazard to guess.↩︎
which I didn’t do. The writing in Blue Prince is presumably meant to be one of the game’s primary incentives but it did not really enrapture me. It was interesting enough but not sufficiently so to incentivize overcoming the obstacles and obfuscation present at every level of uncovering the game’s plot.↩︎
By which I mean that there is no chance of me making progress in Blue Prince by simply booting it up and completing a run. I have long since passed that point. Further progress in the game would require multiple highly-directed runs specifically targeting certain pieces of information or room–item configurations. These sorts of runs are not the fun or tranquil experience offered by at the beginning of the game (that still appeals to me).↩︎
I would like to again stress that these “trophies” are required for in-game progression; they are presented in-game to the player (spoilers) and are not just platform achievements.↩︎
