Apologies if you think I included a huge spoiler in my screenshot for this post, but I don’t think it spoils anything on its own (I never figured out what it means!) and it was thematically appropriate.
I still think that Blue Prince is a brilliant game. The only thing that’s changed since my last take is that I continued with a few more in-game days after the end credits rolled, and my thoughts changed from the excitement of “I’m just getting started!!!” to a much more sanguine “That was very good, but I’m done now.”
A significant part of that is because I only have a moderate tolerance for puzzle-solving. There’s a definite boundary where it stops being “a fun challenge” and turns into “a tedious slog,” and I comfortably hit that point. I know that there are many players who consider the end credits to be just the start of the “real” game, and the prospect of using clues scattered across dozens of sources, deciphering anagrams and diagrams across multiple stages, each puzzle unlocking a part of the next, is extremely satisfying. But I spoiled myself by reading the full solution to one of the game’s puzzles, and I could immediately tell it wasn’t for me.
That’s not at all a criticism. One of the many ingenious aspects of Blue Prince‘s puzzle design, and one that I never appreciated while I was playing, is that it gracefully provides multiple exit points for players. There’s a clear, straightforward goal presented at the game’s beginning, and once you’ve achieved that goal, you get the end credits. It’s reassurance that yes, you can keep uncovering more details if you like, but if not, then you’ve had a complete experience.
An equally significant part of why the end game stopped being interesting to me, is exactly the same reason the start of the game was so overwhelmingly compelling: it’s a roguelike.
At the start, the possibility space is infinitely huge, so structuring the game around a random number generator is an elegant way to focus. You can’t possibly do everything yet, so here’s a set of things that you can focus on for this go-round. There’s almost never a time limit on anything, so you can relax and divide-and-conquer your way towards solving as many puzzles as you like.
It’s kind of a shame that conversation around the game has polarized into opposite camps of “the RNG sucks and was a terrible design choice!” or “it’s not randomness, it’s strategy, and you just need to get good!” Neither take is entirely accurate.
In addition to focusing your attention on the subset of problems you can solve today, the fact that the game resets at the end of each in-game day means (paradoxically) that you’re never losing process or getting completely stuck. Red room penalties don’t carry over, you’re never permanently punished for a bad placement of a room, and any bad situation you get yourself into will last only until you decide to call it a day. Plus, learning how to mitigate the randomness is a key part of the strategy — there’s a reason that most players are eventually able to reach room 46, which wouldn’t be the case if it were actually completely random, or if you were like Sisyphus cursed to have all of your work completely undone at the end of each day.
But insisting that it’s just part of the strategy does nothing to change the fact that there undeniably are diminishing returns from the game’s model. There’s still plenty to do after the credits roll, but it’s significantly less than at the game’s start. The longer you play, the more likely it is that you know exactly what you want to accomplish, but the game simply prevents you from being able to do it until you have an unusually lucky run through the house.
Continue reading “More Blue Prince, or, Home on the RNG”