Blue Prince came out a week ago; it’s a puzzle game where a young boy gets a mysterious inheritance from his granduncle the baron; a giant manor house which rearranges itself every day, which he can keep if he manages to find the hidden 46th room.
The basic structure—slowly growing a mansion thru the placement of tiles—is simple enough and will be roughly familiar to anyone who’s played Betrayal at House on the Hill in the last twenty years. It’s atmospheric and interesting; I heard someone suggesting it might be this generation’s Myst.
But this generation, as you might have noticed, loves randomness and procedural generation. In Myst, you wander from place to place, noticing clues; nearly all of the action happens in your head and your growing understanding of the world. If you know the solution to the final puzzle, you can speedrun Myst in less than a minute. Blue Prince is very nearly a roguelike instead of a roguelite, with accumulated clues driving most of your progression instead of in-game unlocks. But it’s a world you build out with a game, giving you stochastic access to the puzzlebox.
This also means a lot of it ends up feeling like padding or filler. Many years ago I noticed that some games are really books or movies but wrap it in a game for some reason, and to check whether or not I actually like the book or movie enough to play the game. (Or, with games like Final Fantasy XVI, whether I was happier just watching the cutscenes on Youtube because that would let me watch them at 2x speed.) Eliezer had a tweet a while back:
My least favorite thing about some video games, many of which I think I might otherwise have been able to enjoy, is walking-dominated gameplay. Where you spend most of your real clock seconds just walking between game locations.
Blue Prince has walking-dominated gameplay. It has pointless animations which are neat the first time but aggravating the fifth. It ends ups with a pace more like a board game’s, where rather than racing from decision to decision you leisurely walk between them.
This is good in many ways—it gives you time to notice details, it gives you time to think. It wants to stop you from getting lost in resource management and tile placement and stay lost in the puzzles. But often you end up with a lead on one of the puzzles—”I need Room X to activate Room Y to figure out something”—but don’t actually draw one of the rooms you need, or finally get both of the rooms but are missing the resources to actually use both of them.
And so you call it a day and try again. It’s like Outer Wilds in that way—you can spend as many days as you like exploring and clue-hunting—but Outer Wilds is the same every time, and if you want to chase down a particular clue you can, if you know what you’re doing. But Blue Prince will ask you for twenty minutes, and maybe deliver the clue; maybe not. Or you might learn that you needed to take more detailed notes on a particular thing, and now you have to go back to a room that doesn’t exist today—exploring again until you find it, and then exploring again until you find the room that you were in originally.
So when I found the 46th room about 11 hours in—like many puzzle games, the first ‘end’ is more like a halfway point (or less)--I felt satisfied enough. There’s more to do—more history to read, more puzzles to solve, more trophies to add to the trophy room—but the fruit are so high on the tree, and the randomly placed branches make it a bothersome climb.
Blue Prince came out a week ago; it’s a puzzle game where a young boy gets a mysterious inheritance from his granduncle the baron; a giant manor house which rearranges itself every day, which he can keep if he manages to find the hidden 46th room.
The basic structure—slowly growing a mansion thru the placement of tiles—is simple enough and will be roughly familiar to anyone who’s played Betrayal at House on the Hill in the last twenty years. It’s atmospheric and interesting; I heard someone suggesting it might be this generation’s Myst.
But this generation, as you might have noticed, loves randomness and procedural generation. In Myst, you wander from place to place, noticing clues; nearly all of the action happens in your head and your growing understanding of the world. If you know the solution to the final puzzle, you can speedrun Myst in less than a minute. Blue Prince is very nearly a roguelike instead of a roguelite, with accumulated clues driving most of your progression instead of in-game unlocks. But it’s a world you build out with a game, giving you stochastic access to the puzzlebox.
This also means a lot of it ends up feeling like padding or filler. Many years ago I noticed that some games are really books or movies but wrap it in a game for some reason, and to check whether or not I actually like the book or movie enough to play the game. (Or, with games like Final Fantasy XVI, whether I was happier just watching the cutscenes on Youtube because that would let me watch them at 2x speed.) Eliezer had a tweet a while back:
Blue Prince has walking-dominated gameplay. It has pointless animations which are neat the first time but aggravating the fifth. It ends ups with a pace more like a board game’s, where rather than racing from decision to decision you leisurely walk between them.
This is good in many ways—it gives you time to notice details, it gives you time to think. It wants to stop you from getting lost in resource management and tile placement and stay lost in the puzzles. But often you end up with a lead on one of the puzzles—”I need Room X to activate Room Y to figure out something”—but don’t actually draw one of the rooms you need, or finally get both of the rooms but are missing the resources to actually use both of them.
And so you call it a day and try again. It’s like Outer Wilds in that way—you can spend as many days as you like exploring and clue-hunting—but Outer Wilds is the same every time, and if you want to chase down a particular clue you can, if you know what you’re doing. But Blue Prince will ask you for twenty minutes, and maybe deliver the clue; maybe not. Or you might learn that you needed to take more detailed notes on a particular thing, and now you have to go back to a room that doesn’t exist today—exploring again until you find it, and then exploring again until you find the room that you were in originally.
So when I found the 46th room about 11 hours in—like many puzzle games, the first ‘end’ is more like a halfway point (or less)--I felt satisfied enough. There’s more to do—more history to read, more puzzles to solve, more trophies to add to the trophy room—but the fruit are so high on the tree, and the randomly placed branches make it a bothersome climb.
Thanks for this informative review! (May I suggest that The Witness is a much better candidate for “this generation’s Myst”!)