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fotozBlue Prince - Day 30 and I'm still looking for the stairs
Blue Prince is a deeply entangled, addictive, mastercrafted, and compelling work of art. At about 30 days in (which is also roughly 30 hours) I feel I’ve got a decent handle on what the game is about, but have only scratched the surface of the mysteries buried beneath the roguelike facade. It’s taking a lot of willpower to get my thoughts down instead of starting just one more run.
I’ve played lots of roguelike games, and I’ve played lots of deduction/puzzle games. But the game Blue Prince most reminds me of is Outer Wilds. I get the same sense of satisfaction piecing puzzle pieces together over multiple ‘runs’, and while there is more permanent meta-progression in Blue Prince, the predominant source of progression is still knowledge. It’s very much a metroidbrainia in that sense, and scratches all the same itches.
Word of warning, I will try to limit spoilers and when it’s unavoidable I’ll try to be vague enough to not give much away. However it’s probably best to have at least some progression into Blue Prince or you won’t get much from reading this anyway, it’s not a review.
These nodules of knowledge in Blue Prince come in different forms. There’s the more obvious things like learning how to breach the knee-high wall of the inner-cloister for those juicy dig sites, or learning that a path can be opened by draining water from thiswhere to thatwhere. Pretty typical puzzle-game stuff. But then there’s less tangible things that can only really be done in roguelike games, like building up an inherent instinct about which resources to prioritise at different stages of the run, or knowing which rooms are more likely to appear and where.
Strong Foundations
Take the core mechanic of the game, the room-laying. The shape of the house is (I assume) deliberately a shaped in a 5x9 grid because it limits the maximum amount of open connections for future rooms. This, combined with the random nature of drafting, means you’re always having to make a decision between keeping those connections open (thus mitigating against risk of dead-ends), and drafting actually useful rooms which tend to have fewer doors. In practice this means throughout the run you’re always balancing at the precipice and every draft feels very important.
If instead the house was 7x7, roughly the number of rooms but layed out in a square rather than a rectangular grid, a dominant strategy would form. It would be best to expand by drafting rooms with many doors, obtaining lots of open connections, then with that safety net, draft lots of high value rooms without much risk. The game would become stale and much less interesting.
As you progress further into the house, to higher ranks, rooms generally get more expensive to draft. This is accomplished with a variety of mechanics: more doors are locked and need keys to open; rarer rooms become more common, and these tend to have higher gem costs; and most of the cheap connecting rooms will already have been drafted earlier on. This all leads to it being difficult to forge a path upwards without first creating a sizeable foundation for gathering resources (a nice metaphor that is referenced in one of the game’s self-referential books).
There’s a fantastic transition that happens when the estate is close to being filled with rooms. It stops being a roguelike and starts being an optimisation puzzle, and it’s amazing. After exhausting most open connections you’ll probably be low on resources including steps, and you’ll usually have a few things you still want to accomplish. There could be a few unused doors to backtrack to and open up. You might want to make some trips underground to progress some meta objectives. You might want to do stuff in previous rooms with newer items you’ve acquired, e.g. crafting. You might want to make sure you end the day in a specific room.
Prioritising these and determining which are possible with the steps you have remaining, then executing and accomplishing what you set out to do, before ending the day, is immensely satisfying.
All of this is to say that Blue Prince’s core deckbuilding (though I wouldn’t really call it a deckbuilder) roguelike mechanics provide a compelling and addictive enough foundation for everything else it’s trying to do. Which is A LOT.
Before moving on to all of that though, lets briefly talk about the elephant-in-the-room which is the random aspect of room drafting.
The RNG-lephant In The Room
For the most part I’ve been avoiding discourse around Blue Prince for fear of spoilers, but I have listened to Tom Francis’ thoughts on it, and the first few parts of Northern Lion’s playthrough. In addition to a few reddit threads about it (though I think most of that was discussing the demo which I never played).
A common criticism of the game is the way randomness can kill a run, or prevent you from investigating a specific lead. This is related what I talked about above, where by design the game keeps you at the edge of running out of ‘lives’ (aka open connections). This is really the crux of what makes Blue Prince a unique mash-up of genres instead of playing more like Outer Worlds or Myst. It is incredibly important that the game is this way, or the core loop would become boring. At least, it has to be this way to even exist as a roguelike game at all.
If the player had much more control over the drafting process to the extent they could architect every run to follow leads at their whim, it would turn into a fairly standard puzzle mystery game. The roguelike drafting mechanics would no longer serve a real purpose, they would be more of an inconvenient obstacle rather than a core aspect of the game. No, to exist in the form it exists in, Blue Prince has to dance with randomness in this way.
The Patient Prince
So, given the randomness has to exist, how does Blue Prince utilise the RNG to its advantage? Well, by making everything so unbelievably dense with mystery and clues and references and red herrings and a bowl of spaghetti you keep sucking it in and it won’t stop and then you realise it’s all one connected noodle after all and you think how the hell did Tonda Ros do this?
Blue Prince makes sure that, even if you don’t draft the correct room to give you the next piece of a puzzle you’re trying to solve, it will spin you ten new puzzles in the mean-time. Oh, you’re not drafting that specific room you need for the broken lever you found? Well, here’s a different room that lets you add or remove water from all these other places. Why would you want to do that? There’s only one way to find out! HAVE FUN!
So the player ends up with a notepad (I went for the most un-sophisticated method here, literally Notepad++ and Steam screenshots) full to the brim with potential leads, some marked as complete and some marked as false. Diagrams of the house written in ASCII, some rooms filled with letters and some empty. A list of all rooms and a bunch of random items they do or might contain.
Blue Prince is going to appeal to players who are able to be flexible and adapt to what the game throws at them. It’s not going to appeal to those interested in strict and linear puzzle solving. Thankfully I am very much the former. I find it incredibly satisfying to be sit on a piece of knowledge I’m not sure has any purpose, and then ten hours later be presented with a keyhole I can slot it into (sometimes literally). As with most things, it’s most satisfying when you’ve had to wait for it, and Blue Prince really makes you wait.
Above all else, Blue Prince rewards patience.
Making Randomness Work For You
That’s not to say the randomness can’t be tamed. Blue Prince has a lot of similarities with board games, some of which are obvious and some less so. In board game design (not that this is exclusive to board games but it is very prevalent due to the existance of dice and cards), there is the differentiation between input and output randomness.
Input randomness is where the player is given a number of choices at random and has to choose between them. Magic The Gathering and card games in general have a lot of input randomness. The cards drawn into the hand are random, but then the player is able to determine how best to utilise them in a non-random way.
Output randomness is where the player makes a choice from a predetermined list of options (not random), and then the result of that action is determined at random. Most war games tend to have a lot of output randomness. E.g. Warhammer, the player has full control over whether they spend action points on moving or attacking, and which enemy units to attack. But once that decision has been made, the result of the action is determined at random (how far to move, how much damage the attack does).
Both forms of randomness achieve a purpose and typically both will be utilised in any individual game. Input randomness introduces variance while letting the player stay in control. Output randomness instead takes control away from the player which can increase excitement and reduce the impact of player skill. There’s a reason most family board games such as Game of Life or Monopoly primarily contain output randomness, removing the element of player control and skill levels the playing field between children and adults, or those familiar with games and those that aren’t.
Likewise, Blue Prince primarily contains both input and output randomness. The player decides which door to enter, and draws three random rooms (this is output randomness). They then decide which of the three rooms to draft, or possibly activating special abilities like re-drawing or rotating the rooms (input randomness). The room is then placed, and then could be populated with some random items (output randomness again).
In this context, output randomness keeps things exciting (like drafting a courtyard and having it contain a shovel), while input randomness adds variation and gives the player an element of control back.
All that is to say that the randomness in this game serves a very important purpose. And while I can understand the frustration some players might feel when the game denies them a specific room they need, I am very glad it is that way because the possibility of that happening is exactly what keeps the core of Blue Prince addictive and compelling to me. It is the continual act of working with and adapting to the hand the game gives me, that I find so appealing and entertaining. Every time I step through a door in Blue Prince, it hands me a very juicy decision to make, that has true meaning and impact.
Lore-dy lordy the LORE
One thing Blue Prince does very well is transition from the mechanics being the driving motivation, i.e. the satisfying learning experience of understanding the intricacies how all the mechanics work and fit together, transitioning from that into the plot and lore and mystery being the primary motivation. Given the design constraints talked about above (mainly the sporadic nature of info-dumping to the player), telling a cohesive plot in the first tens of runs is not really possible, which is why the mechanics have to stand alone until the player can be drip-fed enough plot that they’re hooked on figuring out the mystery.
This is going to be hard to talk about without significant spoilers, which is probably a good thing for the length of this blog post. But suffice it to say the lore of this game, even after only ~30 hours and without any YouTube sleuthing, is starting to gets its hooks into me. There are some really crazy things going on and it is taking all of my willpower to stop myself looking everything up. I will likely reach the point where the puzzles just get too esoteric and difficult for me (I’ve never been great at puzzles), and I succumb, but I’m trying to delay that for as long as possible and relish in the relentlessness of it all.
Not All Conservatories and Aquariums
So I’ve probably given the impression up until now that this is a perfect game, at least for me. There’s something to be said here for objectively versus subjectively good and I think Blue Prince is more polarising than most other games. I believe it is an objectively good game, as in it’s a triumph of game design, novelty, and world-building. Now, its specific concoction of elements will definitely not appeal to everyone and that is totally fine. However there is a terrible trend in modern society of conflating objective with subjective, mainly because doing so creates conflict and controversy which drives engagment. It’s easy to get frustrated with Blue Prince and criticise it for its randomness or its sporadic storytelling, and skewing that as an issue with the game instead of a difference of taste or approach or expectation. Often, the more polarising a game is, objectively the better it is for those whos niche it caters for. Unfortunately, polarising media tends do worse since the one number with which we assign it worth is averaged into mediocrity.
Philosophical ramblings aside, Blue Prince does have some legitimate issues.
Lack of mid-run saving is inexcusable. I’ve had runs breaching 3 hours and have multiple times had to leave the game running in the background when I’ve had to do other things. While as a developer I appreciate the complexity in saving the presumably complex state of a run to disk, I don’t see it as insurmountable given the already 8 year development time Blue Prince had. I can only image it was a conscious decision to prevent save scumming, i.e. saving before drafting a room and reloading if it comes to a dead-end. However, this can be mostly prevented by overwriting the save game whenever the game state changes. It would still be possible to duplicate the save file, but punishing 99% for the 1% who choose to cheat in a single player game is silly. Anyway, if that’s the reason I hope Dogubomb changes their mind. If it’s purely an implementation problem, I hope it gets patched in.
There is one legitimate problem with the randomness in Blue Prince, and while it’s not something I’ve encountered (or at least, I don’t know I’ve encountered it), and it’s that a few core rooms required for ‘finishing’ the first primary objective can take a long time to show up given the nature of randomness and a large sample size (playerbase). Tom Francis encountered this in his playthrough, and it seemed like it did legitimately impact his enjoyment of the game. Given that most rooms (the specific room Tom was missing was probably the worst case) are not centrally important to progression, this can probably be hotfixed by giving an upper-bound on when these rooms show up, skewing the randomness in a few edge cases to ensure a smoother experience for those impacted.
Some cutscenes and sequences are unskippable and get tedious after much repetition. The boat being a prime example.
I would have liked to have some more agency over the room draft pool. That does come later with some of the rarer rooms, but I think it would have been interesting to have more ways to manipulate it earlier on. I can imagine this opens a can of worms from a design perspective and I can understand why it was limited. The problem with removing rooms from the pool entirely at an early stage is the player doesn’t know which rooms contain useful information. Even after drafting a room multiple times, important info could stil be thought of as innocent set dressing.
Closing The Door
Blue Prince deserves all the hype it’s getting. It’s massive in scope and littered with treasures. I might do another write-up once I’ve finished it, who knows?