I want to get off Uncle Sinclair’s Mild Ride

As anyone who’s played Myst will attest, completing puzzle-heavy games can be one of the most rewarding experiences video gaming has to offer. We’ve had a surprising amount of solid ones over the last few years! Often well written and always mind-bending, modern puzzle games like The Case of the Golden Idol and my beloved The Forgotten City deliver challenge upon challenge until you eventually earn their finales and a wave of dopamine crashes over you. By contrast, rolling credits on Blue Prince felt like I’d passed a kidney stone. You could argue that’s a kind of satisfaction, but I’d have much rather not gone through it.

Rest assured that I won’t get into spoilers because that’s kind of the whole point of these games, but this fucking thing was so frustrating throughout that I desperately want to. What I can say is that everybody who compares this to Return of the Obra Dinn, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, or any given member of the puzzle-game-of-the-year-club has not experienced enough of the medium to be trusted with comparisons. You certainly aren’t going to stay for the story, which is equal parts functional and unremarkable. What you’re here for is mostly the puzzles, and these are broadly decent, but are hamstrung at every turn by the game’s greater structure. By chunking gameplay into roguelite runs, Blue Prince attempts to graft two wholly different genres together that compliment each other like peanut butter and fish.

Guides weren’t employed here, by the way, because I am simultaneously a puzzle-enjoyer and a very stubborn man. What I was fortunate to have was a friend who was kind enough to tell me things like “hey, that item you can craft that doesn’t say what it does serves X function” without actually giving me solutions, as well as occasionally being kind enough to warn me when a puzzle was rendered unsolvable and not providing feedback after I hit my head against it long enough. That’s a thing you’ll be seeing a lot of, in case you were wondering!

The game’s mechanical framework is basically a solo board game that strongly resembles Castles of Mad King Ludwig, only rooms are exclusively square, need to fit into a preset 5 x 9 grid, and can have anywhere from 1-4 doors. They carry all sorts of benefits and detriments, but I won’t get into that here, let’s just focus on the doors for a sec. You need doors aligned on adjacent tiles to progress towards your goal of reaching a deep hidden room, but Blue Prince has exactly zero governance of what’s available for draft at which point in the house, instead just lumping everything into 4 increasingly rare categories and dealing you 3 at random every time you open a door. As such runs are wildly inconsistent. Some give you everything you need to succeed with a bit of clever positioning, while others hand you nothing but closets and force you to quit for the day at a moments notice and lose all your items. There are rooms that help mitigate that loss, but those are also completely at the mercy of RNGsus, both with regard to drawing them in the first place and how many runs it’ll take to see them again. Prior drafting and tile-laying games have given players heaps of methods to control the chaos, some as simple as just being allowed to pocket a tile for later or turn pieces 90 degrees, but Blue Prince is fully committed to the shuffle.

Of course this is also a puzzle game, and that means it isn’t enough to finally get lucky and snake a path from start to finish, you also need to lick the surface of each room clean. Small puzzles can be contained to the rooms you find them in and typically award resources: keys/gems/money/rerolls/what have you. A lot of them are repeated and remixed on each run, and I generally like them (especially the dart board), but spending time on each of these every single run because you need their guaranteed goodies ends up reducing them to friction. Combining that with the excruciatingly slow animations for every action, the items that always remind you of their function on acquisition, the daily walk to the [REDACTED] every morning, and all of the other little ways the game insists on extending your play time end up contributing to the slowly building resentment.

Those aren’t even the most significant issue at hand here. For that we need to briefly mention the “big” puzzles. There are progression-gating ordeals that demand you draft the right tiles, in the right order, and in a few specific cases the right orientation. You have zero control of any of these variables. Add in required items that aren’t even guaranteed to spawn, and you’ve got a recipe for frustration that frequently backslides into futility, forcing you to start runs again and again with essentially zero progress made aside from potentially seeing a room for the first time, or in a new context. I can think of few games that respect the players’ time less than Blue Prince.

The kicker, and what fully made me become The Joker by about day 18 of my 28, was realizing just how few of the puzzles actually affected progression. Some granted benefits both temporary and permanent, but those were often the easiest of the bunch. It was the truly cockamamie bullshit that was actually satisfying to solve which ended up mattering the least, which I guess means that more folks are likely to reach the main goal eventually, but what’s the point of a game in this genre where the most interesting bits are vestigial? Blue Prince is a pretty good puzzle game if you take its thinky bits out of context, but it’s been surgically attached to a below average roguelite by an unlicensed game-surgeon, and the resulting homunculus can barely stand up on its own.

It isn’t a spoiler to note that there’s a generous post-game. It’s a roguelite, of course it wants you trapped forever. After rolling credits I was sufficiently curious about what that could look like and started another run, immediately spotting two new rooms! “hey, maybe this could be getting better“, I thought!

The game promptly walled me out by the third rank. Oops! All closets. Never had a chance.

I promptly closed the game and have yet to reopen it. If that’s moving up then I’m moving out.

4/10