Blue Prince

Confession : I PIRATED THIS GAME. (Sorry i am no good at HTMl so i am not going to figure out how to make this as pretty as it should be.) A friend handed me a flash drive and said just trust me. I opened the flash drive and found a game installed. I copied the files and began to play. I am a big Board game guy and instantly it felt like betrayal at the house on the hill with how you place tiles and it instantly clicked to me. This isn't RNG this is about learning how to place rooms and manage resources. I quickly found myself solving puzzles then realizing the reward was clues to other puzzles. Then i realized wait EVERYTHING is related to the puzzles. The rooms, the lore text, the time of day, the date, some puzzles are small, some are spread across several rooms sometimes even alternate solves, AND THE HOUSE ITSELF AND MOVEMENT THROUGH IT IS IT'S OWN PUZZLE. I then realized oh i ignored the part that said i should take notes cause like no Bruh............ so i couldn't remember wh...

So much is based on luck it's infuriating. The puzzles are clever, and I did solve a decent amount, but hitting a dead end because of bad luck with drawing rooms, or running out of keys or gems, or not getting the rooms or items you need to make progress, and needing to start over with another day is just disrespectful of my time. It feels like the game doesn't want you to play it. Even with mods for infinite resources and all items it's frustrating, like standing in the library and needing to come back tomorrow to read one book. Aren't the books right next to me? Why can't I take them off the shelves? The puzzles are difficult enough without the hurdles.

If you enjoyed Outer Wilds then you will love this game, Blue Prince has way more difficult puzzles in my opinion (except maybe Quantum Moon). Every time you think you have made a breakthrough another crazy puzzle/secret takes its place. Im not even finished with the game yet and look at my hours... One negative aspect for me is that the roguelike gameplay loop can get tedious, and sometimes you have to do many retrys to solve a puzzle :/ other than that 10/10

This is the only game I have played in the last few years that has truly given me Outer Wilds vibes, and if you are anything like me you will understand that this is indeed the highest praise I can give it.

One of the best games I've ever played. Incredibly deep mystery that had my friends and I scratching our heads, cross-referencing our notes, and shouting in elation when we finally put the pieces together. The game goes so much deeper than I initially realized, and every step along the way feels earned. None of the twists or puzzles feel cheap or unsolvable, yet they are able to test your limits quite well. The story is engaging. The mechanics are clean. The puzzles are IMPECCABLE. If you like escape-room style contained, in-universe problem solving, this game is for you. If you like strategy rogue-likes, this game is for you. I hgihly recommend giving it a shot.

Not recommended for non-English speakers. There will be English in documents with hand writings to present the story, and will require vocabulary knowledge to solve puzzles, which is not friendly to any player that English is not their native language.

This game is not suitable for 3 types of people: 1. You don't have enough free time to continuously play this game. The puzzles in this game have very subtle hints spread out in different rooms, which you may not draft due to RNG. There are numerous notes with lots of red herrings. It's very possible to come across a puzzle with hints from a rare room 9 runs ago. If you can only play 1-2 hours a day, you'll likely already forget the contents from those notes. Even screenshot can't save you here. There are so many notes I've taken over 100 screenshots from 15 hours of gameplay, have fun re-reading all that every time you try to solve a new puzzle. 2. You're not a native English speaker. There are LOTS of reading, some of them requires you to change a word or letter to form a new meaning, some are just puns. Only a few puzzles requires you to study the environment instead. 3. You get frustrated easily This game contains no hints, there is no way of knowing whether you've completely sol...

I really enjoy games like Outer Wilds and Tunic because they require cleverness and experimentation. I was excited to try this game because at first glance it feels like it should be right up my alley. What absolutely kills it for me is the RNG aspect. So many runs at this point have been cut short by me being unable to build the room I need or experiment with tools I have. When seeing the negative reviews, I thought they were exaggerating how bad it was. I've wasted 2 hours of runs just from bad RNG and I've only played 5 hours. 40% of my time is flushed down the toilet. It's frustrating because I have SO MANY hypotheses I want to test, but there's all these stupid roadblocks in the way. It feels designed to waste your time. I REALLY want to like this game. After 5 hours, I have things I'd like to test but so far the game does everything it can to stop me progressing. If any of you have starting advice for me to follow that minimizes RNG, I'd love to hear it.

I really wanted to like this game, A few friends talked me into trying it. But after a week in-game days with little progress... The same rooms, The same dead ends, Running out of resources, being unable to solve a simple puzzle because its adjoining room refuses to spawn.... I gave up. Maybe I just don't "Get it" But I just don't see any real depth here besides simple luck. Blowing through dozens of runs just to get Lucky enough to reach the top AND have enough resources to continue just is not fun. Repeating the same puzzles with the same solutions over-and-over is not fun. Friends have told me that the game has a lot of depth and meta narrative, But I think the fans are simply turning a blind eye to some rather glaring faults in it's basic design. I wish i could go on, There is the bones of a fantastic experience here, But it is ruined by needless layers of RNG. Perhaps with some changes or a mode that adds some agency back to the player I will give this another go, But its sim...

This game would be fun with more generous meta-progression. I got to room 46 and have spent every minute since wasting my time. I am sitting on the solutions to 5 or 6 Puzzles but cannot solve them simply because I am not drafting the right combination of 3-4 rooms. Frankly, it's simply stupid. The game is far too stingy with permanent upgrades. 2 floppy disks but no screen run, 6 green rooms and no shovel run, 40 allowance but absolutely no shops for 5 runs in a row; the list goes on. The game will let you spend 5 runs trying to get an upgrade, you'll get it, and find it does nothing or provides a vague clue towards a puzzle you haven't seen before. If you have nothing but time, maybe this is the game for you. If you like solving puzzles, stay away. Go play Outer Wilds, it knows what it's doing.