Blue Prince: A house full of fun, until it's not fun anymore

If you follow me on Twitch or YouTube, you saw me addictively playing through Blue Prince on stream for a week. In all fairness, I greatly enjoyed the game and had a lot of fun getting through it on stream. You probably don't know, though, that I continued playing it for significantly longer off stream. That experience was very different, and it's why I feel the need to express my experiences (and frustrations) with the "post-game" content.

Initial impressions

I won't go into too much detail about my initial runs and reaching Room 46, because I streamed it all and you can literally watch it on my YouTube channel. So I'll just summarize it a little. I had a blast. Legitimately, I could not stop praising this game because it constantly had me moving in new directions and working towards solutions. Even if a day ended up being a complete dud and was going nowhere, I could still work towards other things by trying to spawn something else that might make progress towards a different task. There was a constant sense of progress even in the face of defeat.

The puzzles I was solving at this stage were great. I got a couple of them wrong along the way, but they were all very interesting and felt like they integrated a variety of skills in order to solve them. The parlor had logic puzzles, while the break room had math puzzles. The notes and clues gave you just the right amount of information to know where to go next. They instilled that sense of curiosity that encouraged you to go look at something because there must be something there.

The quest for Room 46 was also immense fun and a much tougher journey than I had initially expected. Every time I thought I finally made it to the room, I was met with another prerequisite that led me to entirely new areas to play around and explore. I was fine with the moving goalpost, because the game gave me new areas in the process. It didn't just slap me in the face and say, "no, go do this now."

The later puzzles

I decided to continue playing off stream to experience some of the other puzzles in the game that I knew existed, but I was just struggling to figure out - thinking maybe I had just missed something small. But the more I pursued solutions to the later puzzles, the more I just got frustrated with them being overly convoluted, confusing, and just not puzzles. By that, I mean I literally did not feel like I was solving puzzles anymore, but rather trying to decipher what weird lines of thought I needed to follow to get to some nonsensical solution.

After experiencing some of the "harder" puzzles, I don't believe the writers of this game really understand what makes puzzles fun. It really feels like they wrote these puzzles with the solution in mind, and worked backwards through weird lines of logic trying to go from Point B to Point A. Let me be clear: you will always make a shitty puzzle when you try to do that. The point of a puzzle is for the solution to be obvious - something that makes you go "oh, duh" when you finally realize the solution and experience that sense of pride for figuring it out, no matter how long it took.

I never had those moments with the later puzzles. In fact, most of these puzzles left me even more confused at how the fuck they expected me to get from Point A to Point B. I found myself frequently looking up guides to how I was supposed to solve things, only to be left just as confused because the explanations people were providing still didn't make any sense. These are bad puzzles. They didn't much feel like puzzles anymore - they felt more like someone who told a terrible dad joke that reached a bit too far and got no reactions, only the sound of crickets. And for a game that is meant to be all about solving puzzles, that is incredibly disappointing.

So, so much grinding

The most brutal part of pursuing the later puzzles is part of the game: randomness. Near the end when I gave up, it felt like I was wasting 4 hours of my life trying to get the correct combination of rooms to appear so that I could find another clue, which would then send me off to waste another 4 hours of my life to get another specific combination of rooms for another clue, to then be sent off to waste another 4 hours of my life in search of a final clue, finally leading me to a letter that would give me a tiny bit of lore.

This all boiled down to a simple concept: effort versus reward. The amount of effort you have to put into solving the puzzles vastly outweighs the reward of the tiny amount of lore you get for completing it. And to be perfectly clear, the reward in many of these situations is only that: a tiny bit of lore. I was encouraged to pursue these long quests because prior efforts that were far easier resulted in permanent unlocks, allowance tokens, and other things that helped me in future days. For some unknown reason, they stripped all of these out of later rewards and just left me with pieces of paper and the thought of, "oh, great, thanks for wasting my entire fucking day on that."

The reward system for later puzzles honestly left me feeling more pissed off at the game than anything. At the end, I just kept thinking, "Why am I even bothering with this shit?" I really don't care enough to complete these puzzles just to scavenge up all the tiny pieces of the story that may or may not reveal something bigger. The pieces I had gotten so far didn't seem like they were leading to any big revelation or secret ending. It just felt like I was collecting lost pages of a book that I didn't really need. In the end, I quit out of the game in the middle of the day because I just didn't care anymore. I uninstalled it, and don't have any plan to go back and try again.

The sad part is there was still obviously so much more to do. When I gave up, I had only unlocked 4 of the 8 doors in the Inner Sanctum, the solutions to which I looked up online because I do not recall ever being given any hints as to what the solutions might be throughout my entire play experience. There was still some complicated castling puzzle I could complete in the Underground that I don't know if it would have ever given me anything interesting or just another piece of paper. And there was still the random red door near the Inner Sanctum that I had seen but never got any information at all as to what it might be for. But based on the way the game is designed, with no real way to guarantee my ability to achieve certain room combinations, that all could have taken me another 50 hours easily. Not worth it.

The game deserves two different scores

The very nature of Blue Prince makes it hard to provide a good rating for it. The enjoyment of the game entirely depends on where you decide to stop playing. If you decide to only play through the puzzles and chaos up until the point that you reach Room 46, the credits roll, and you've "completed" the main objective of the game: this game is a solid 5/5 and I would recommend anyone to play it for at least that long. Even if you don't particularly enjoy solving puzzles, you can still make it far into the game without being good at them. Many of the puzzles only make it easier to complete the game but aren't necessary to do so.

If you want to see every part of the lore that the game has to offer and experience every puzzle in the game to its end: I would give this game a 1/5 - there's no excuse for how abysmally slow, tedious, and flat-out boring the game becomes trying to just find pieces of paper. The moment the credits rolled, at least for me, the game went from 100 to 0 instantly. There was no middle ground. The whimsy of the game fell of a cliff and never tried to get back up. Because of that, I felt it was only fair to split the difference when giving this game an overall rating.

But I think my experience boils down to the simple fact that RNG never makes a great game. Ever. Maybe a good game, but not great. This game will never be a "game of the year" in my eyes because it simply can't be. While you can skate around the randomness in the early game by just pivoting to a different objective based on what you get, it completely destroys the experience later. If you watched my streams, you can see some of that frustration starting to bleed through in the later episodes where I was trying repeatedly to get the combination of sledge hammer, battery pack, and broken lever to appear all in one day. If a little RNG is needed to enhance the game, fine, but relying on it as the sole component of the game inherently dooms the game to exist in mediocrity.