I've been meaning for a while now to write about Blue Prince, a fantastic puzzle game that I've grown increasingly obsessed with over the last month. I had initially planned to do an early-game checkin (once I realized that there was an early game and this wasn't just a small stand-alone experience), then thought of doing a post once I reached the credits. I'm now a ways past the credits, probably more than halfway through the content but it's hard to be certain. In any case I think I've experienced enough to pass a very positive judgment on it.
I've heard good things about the game, but otherwise had avoided any details about it prior to being generously gifted it by my brother (no, not that one: the other brother). When I hear "puzzle game" I tend to think of something like, say, Myst: a game you explore and figure out and solve. You might get stuck on something for a while and may ask for help or keep banging your head against it until you solve it. If you know what you're doing, the actual content tends to be on the light side, and a subsequent replay will go much faster than the first one.
MINI SPOILERS
The most important aspect of Blue Prince is that it is a rogue-lite. Each run consists of one day inside the mansion that you have inherited. The key mechanic of the game is "drafting": every time you open a door in the mansion, you are presented with three randomly selected rooms, and pick one of them to be what lies on the other side of the door. Other than the entryway and maybe one or two other rooms in the 45-room mansion, nothing is fixed, so every day the layout of the mansion is new. Unlike something like Diablo or Sunless Skies where the game decides the layout, here you get to pick, re-architecting the house anew each day.
The main goal of the game is to reach the 46th room of the 45-room mansion. There are several obstacles in your way, most of which come down to resource management:
Keys. As you move further north in the mansion, doors are increasingly likely to be locked. You can find keys as you explore, but each key only opens one door.
Security doors. These are un-openable to begin with, unless you can find a Security Card or another means to bypass them.
Dead ends. Any given door might lead to a hallways that branches in multiple directions, or a corridor that continues straight on, or a room with no other exits. You can always backtrack, but if you run out of doors, you can't draft any more rooms.
Steps. You have a certain amount of energy each day. You spend one point each time you move between rooms. There are plenty to reach the end of the manor, but not enough to carelessly backtrack back and forth multiple times. Once this reaches 0 you are forced to call it a day.
Gems. Certain valuable rooms will cost one or more gem to select and draft. These might be rooms that contain many exits, or useful tools, or additional resources. If you don't have enough gems, you can't select those rooms and will be stuck with others that may not take you where you want to go.
So, a lot of the mechanics of gameplay revolve around managing these resources. For example, drafting a Patio will spawn Gems in all existing Green Rooms in your house, so you can go back and collect those; but doing so will consume a fair number of Steps. You can spend Gold Coins on Food that will give you more Steps; but there's an opportunity cost since you could have instead spent Coins on Keys or other tools. A frequent quandary is whether to take a Dead End that will give you a lot of items but block off further exploration along this corridor versus a hallways that doesn't have any immediate rewards but opens up more space to explore. This resource-management aspect reminds me positively of the Sunless Skies / Sunless Seas games, where you were often trading off resources like Crew, Fuel and Terror as you tried to make progress towards your destinations and goals.
As with those games, though, this is a rogue-lite, so even though you almost certainly won't reach Room 46 on your first day, you also will almost certainly unlock some permanent rewards that will improve your chances on subsequent days. One early example is the Observatory: each time you draft it, a new star is added to the sky. The more stars there are, the more and better constellations you can see, each of which gives you special abilities for that day (like making apples extra delicious, or increasing the odds of drawing rooms with four exits). You can eventually unlock an Allowance, which can gradually grow over time, giving you a tidy collection of Coins at the start of your day. This can become a big help over the long haul, as you can just buy tools as you come across them, as opposed to waiting until you have collected enough coins on a day or debating between tradeoffs.
As I said up top, though, this isn't primarily a strategy game: it's a puzzle game. This game is filled with puzzles, of all kinds, from the smallest factor to the largest. Some puzzles are self-contained within a room: there's a Parlor that poses a logic puzzle which you can solve to earn Gems, and a Billiard Room with a math puzzle you can solve to earn Keys. A lot more are abstract and require careful observation and thinking, various riddles and word games and allegories. It's common to notice one thing, think "that's odd", then days later see something else, realize "Oh! That's what the first thing meant!", then try to get back to the first thing now that you know what to do. And the game as a whole is also a huge puzzle, trying to work out what it is you're doing and why.
The biggest risk with puzzle games is frustration: it stinks to get stuck on something and not be able to progress, berating yourself for being dumb and/or the designers for being obtuse. Considering the density and difficulty of puzzles in Blue Prince, I'm astonished by how pleasurable the puzzles felt. There are a few great things going for it.
First of all, while a particular puzzle may stump you for a while, there's just so much to do that I have never felt stuck on the game as a whole. Even if I don't know how to, say, get into a particular locked safe, I still know that I want to light the candles in the chapel, and that I want to take the Basement Key to the Foundation, and so on, so I can keep making progress towards those other things while I mull over the puzzle. Sometimes I'll encounter something in the game that clarifies things for me, but I also often have the experience of, say, walking down the sidewalk or taking a shower in the real world and getting a lightbulb moment like "Oh! That's March as in the month, not March as in the musical piece!" Which just makes me all the more excited to get back into the game and try it out.
Secondly, most of the puzzles have multiple solutions or multiple trails of hints. I'll often have the experience of coming across a diary or something in the game and quickly realizing that it's a hint towards a mystery I've already solved. But that's great: if I was still stuck on the mystery, finding that diary would have given me the nudge I needed. And they seem to generally be sequenced pretty well, such that the clues you're likely to encounter early on are the most opaque and challenging, while the latter clues are much more explicit hints or directions.
Finally, on the rare occasions I've felt compelled to seek outside help, I've found the community extremely helpful. I'm lucky enough to know someone else who has played the game and can give appropriate non-spoilery hints, but even more impressive, searches through Reddit or the Steam Community reveal that other players are highly respectful of the process and journey towards discovery. They won't just use spoiler tags: the spoilers themselves will contain hints and clues and rhetorical questions, not directly revealing the answer but guiding you to make the discovery yourself. Which feels great!
MEGA SPOILERS
Other than the scope of the game, the biggest surprise for me has been just how much story stands behind it. I had initially assumed that this was a quirky English manor or something. After some time exploring, though, you eventually realize that this is an entirely different planet, with its own continents and history and culture and religion and mathematics and everything. And that itself becomes yet another puzzle, as you must understand this new world to progress in the latter area of the game.
In terms of my overall progression: I did reach Room 46 on day... hm, I think 20 or thereabouts. I really lucked on on a run where I was almost out of rooms, then managed to get the Secret Garden Key and open the Garden just before the end.
I haven't looked this up yet, but it seems like some rooms may fall out of the rotation once certain conditions are satisfied. I haven't drawn the Bookshop once since I purchased all the books in it, which makes sense. I also haven't seen the Rumpus Room in ages, which makes me think it may disappear once you've heard all of the fortunes.
At this point I think I have all of the permanent outdoor unlocks (orchard, gemstone cavern, Blackridge). I usually start the day with 2 gems and around 60 coins. I probably have about a dozen Upgrade Disks loaded.
My most recent big accomplishment last night was opening the back area of the Blackstone Grotto. Pretty cool! I love the view back there. I haven't drafted the Throne Room yet but am curious to check that out.
I keep a list of my outstanding goals nearby while I'm playing, and will jot down notes as I find new things or cross them out as I accomplish them. I'll usually have some idea of what I'm going for, but will pivot early in a run based on the outer room and early stuff I find: maybe hoarding Gold for a Trophy, or trying to draft a ton of Mechanical rooms for the Mechanarium. There are still a bunch of things I want to do.
So far I've opened... I think four or five Sanctum doors. I've added quite a few new floorplans but I know there are still a good number left in the Drafting Studio.
END SPOILERS
You'll hear this everywhere, but this is definitely a game that benefits from having a notebook and pen nearby. There's a lot of stuff worth jotting down. Since I'm playing on Steam I also get a good amount of use out of the F12 Screenshot key - it can be really handy to come back later and re-examine a book or picture that I had found earlier.
The music for this game is gorgeous, typically very minimalist and atmospheric, but highly effective.
Overall production values are surprisingly good. It looks like a walking simulator, and you'll never see yourself or another human in the game, but there's a lot of pretty and thoughtful animation and sound effects sprinkled throughout. There are a handful of cut-scenes in the game which all feel very meaningful and well-done.
My one major complaint with the game is the save system, or lack thereof. Once you start a new day, there's no option to pause it and come back: quitting the game ends the day and resets your daily progress. At this stage of the game, it isn't unusual for a single in-game day to last me nearly two hours: I might come across new books to read, spend time mulling over a new puzzle, flip through my notebook in search of a name, and carefully trace my steps back and forth through the mansion. There's no harm in keeping the game running, so I'll sometimes leave it up over dinner or dog walks and come back to it later, but there are also some nights where I've gone to bed later than I would have liked due to a frustratingly productive run.
That's really my only complaint, though! Blue Prince has been such a delight, a nice change from my standard RPG-and-strategy-game diet and a real pleasure to explore and absorb.
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