The Stack

Heavy plot spoilers for Blue Prince ahead. But be aware that I still haven’t finished the later post-game parts and everything I say about the story should be taken with a grain of salt.

It must be said: The whole idea of a will with strange conditions attached to it, especially conditions in the form of a challenge, is pretty paternalistic, even patriarchal. It’s a way for an elder male figure — it always seems to be an uncle, which is to say, someone who isn’t even your real father — to exert control over you even in death, to demand that you prove yourself to him and make youself worthy in his eyes, because that’s what matters, the approval of old dead dudes. If, as in Blue Prince, it comes with encouraging words along the lines of “I already know you can pass this challenge”, that somehow feels even worse.

So it comes as a welcome surprise that the story of Blue Prince actually mainly foregrounds the relationship between the player character and his mother. Mother-son relationships are seriously underexplored territory for games.

Like everything about this game, it’s disguised at first. You’ll most likely find references to the mysterious disappearance of beloved children’s author Marion Marigold long before you have any idea who she is or how her story relates to yours. But as you learn more, it becomes apparent that (A) “Marion Marigold” is the pen name of Mary Epsen, the mother of Simon Jones, the player character; (B) she was under investigation by a tyrranical and censorious regime that thought it saw seditious messages in her picture books; (C) her disappearance was deliberate and meticulously planned, a way to get out of the reach of the authorities; and (D) she was heavily involved in planning and implementing the challenge you’re going through. It’s not primarily about Great-Uncle Herbert testing your worthiness. It’s about Mary doing what she can to convey the truth about what happened to her, and about the deeper family secrets, without alerting the rest of the world. Because she cares about you and wants the best for you, and under the circumstances that meant removing herself from your life, to minimize your exposure to the risks her presence brings, but it also meant making you aware of who you really are. The cutscene you get on reaching Room 46 has her reading one of her stories to Simon, and the voice acting absolutely cements the idea that this is fundamentally a story about maternal love.

But then I kept investigating. One of the remaining seemingly-unrelated plot threads from earlier was a report about the theft of the Ruby Crown, a symbol of the tyrannical regime’s authority, from a museum. In Room 46, you find the same crown, its rubies removed and replaced with sapphires. How did that wind up there? After some time, I found Mary’s hideout in an abandoned railway station, where she and her accomplices planned the heist. Guns of various sorts lay scattered around. Mary wasn’t simply an unfairly persecuted innocent. She was a rebel, an insurgent, and some notes left behind in her rebel lair make her mindset clear. Whether she was a rebel before she became a target, or whether being targetted led her to rebellion, I’m still not entirely clear on. (Possibly I could resolve this by comparing some dates on newspaper clippings.) But it led me to re-evaluate everything I knew about her. She risked her life and liberty for what, the idea “That crown doesn’t belong in a museum, it belongs on the head of my son”? Is that a good thing to want? I get that the current government is a bad one, but “The reason things are bad is that we’ve got the wrong absolute monarch” isn’t a message I trust. There’s a history book you can find, heavily censored by the authorities. When you later get a look at the uncensored version, it turns out to be nakedly propagandistic in a way that didn’t inspire any confidence in the regime’s opponents.

So, the story as I’ve experienced is one of maternal comfort, which is then complicated by doubt, like in Steven Universe. But it occurs to me that this is only because of the order in which I discovered things. There’s no reason why a player couldn’t reach the hideout before Room 46, and I assume there are plenty of players who have done so. Those players had a story in which what they learn about Mary’s darker side is later tempered by reassurance that she did it all for love of her son. This is a very different story than the one I got!

My usual assumption is that when interactive works make it possible to vary the order of fixed plot elements, it prevents those elements from forming a meaningful narrative arc, turning it into a sort of unstructured mass of plot-stuff. There are often good reasons to allow variation anyway, based on player agency, but that just means it’s a compromise between authorial control and player control, between what makes for effective narrative and what makes for effective interactivity. But this makes me doubt that idea a little. The order of discovery here makes for meaningfully different stories, but I can’t say they’re weaker for it.

The very first time I heard about Blue Prince, it was from a social media post by Andrew Plotkin, in which he stated that he didn’t feel the need to write a blog post about it because everyone else was doing that. It’s basically this year’s Animal Well — and not just in the sense that it’s this year’s popular indie game, but in the sense that it’s got multiple layers of mystery to solve even after you’ve technically won. It makes me wonder if every hit puzzle game from now on is going to be like this. The canonical joke among the fans is that when the credits roll, that’s when the game begins. Reaching that point took me four days of real time, and 52 days of in-game time, which I understand to be well above average, but the RNG wouldn’t give me a break — in most runs before that, I’d either be able to reach an entrance to the Antechamber, or have the means to open it, but not both at once. But taking so long meant that I had already made significant progress on the post-game content that’s dominated my attention for the last couple of weeks.

But I get ahead of myself. Let’s cover the basics: Blue Prince is fundamentally a puzzle-based first-person adventure game, but it’s sort of embedded or intertwined with a tile-placing board game along the same lines as Betrayal at House on the Hill or the D&D Adventure System games. The premise is a classical freak will: your deceased great-uncle has bequeathed you his manor, but only if you can meet the challenge of finding its secret 46th room, a challenge made more challenging by the way tha the manor’s layout changes from day to day. Whenver you open a door, you get a choice of three rooms, drawn at random from a pool, that can be on the other side. When you’ve either filled up the grid or (more likely in the early stages) run out of doors to open or keys to open them with, you can call it a day and reset the estate. Most of the adventure-game puzzles rely on drawing specific rooms, or specific combinations of rooms, or specific rooms in combination with specific randomly-placed objects.

On the face of it, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. Don’t you get frustrated and annoyed waiting for the combinations necessary for progress to randomly come up? And yes, you do, somewhat. And there certainly exist people for whom this is enough to make them lose interest in the game completely and then make lengthy posts complaining about it on the Steam message boards. For me, it produced the opposite effect. Not being able to try out my ideas immediately makes me all the more eager to keep playing until I can. But why? That’s the interesting part.

I think part of it is that it gives you multiple aavenues of progress. I’ve noted this before about RPGs and adventure/RPG hybrids: when you’re stuck, you can always grind for XP. Blue Prince doesn’t have XP, but it does have other incrementally accumulating attributes that help to make you feel like you’re making progress even when you don’t accomplish your main goals. For example, raising your allowance, which is the amount of money you’re given at the start of each day to spend on special items. Eventually you get to the point where your allowance is large enough for any expense and you don’t need to increase it any more, but by that point you’ve probably discovered another incremental goal to take its place.

Moreover, though, the very fact that you can go through multiple runs without an opportunity to try out your intended solutions to puzzles means puzzles tend to stay alive longer than they would in a conventional adventure game. At any given moment, you have several back-burner goals that you’re ready to pounce on the moment the game deigns to give you the necessary resources. You’re probably thinking “Sure, until the end, when you start running out of goals”. But it maintains this state for a remarkably long time, just by unfolding its mysteries gradually and revealing new meaning in what you’ve already seen.

But I think the really crucial thing is that the tile-placing game is engaging. Picking rooms on the basis of their contents and constraints requires enough thought and attention that it could easily be made a decent game of its own, without the rest of the story and puzzles embedded in it. As a result, most of the time you spend playing this game isn’t actually spent thinking about the adventure puzzles. Minigames in adventures feel annoying when they feel like interruptions, disrupting the game that you were absorbed in playing. Here, it’s kind of the reverse: the adventure is embedded in the minigame.

Still, things do wind down eventually, and I’m well past the point of diminishing returns. As in Animal Well, you have to decide when you’re done. I’m not quite done — there’s still a thing or two I want to do before closing it for good — but I’m getting there.

So, yeah, I’ve dropped into a months-long silence once again. There is a reason for this: I have been making a game. An indie puzzle game, but one that I intend to fill out to the point where I can in good conscience ask people to give me money for it. I’ll have more to say about it later, when it’s closer to complete, but the title is Runecaster and the elevator pitch is “DROD with spellcasting”.

I’m well aware that this is not likely to be a profitable endeavor — the average indie game, to a very strong first approximation, sells zero copies. But I’ve committed to spending a year developing it anyway, because (A) I can afford to, and (B) it beats looking for work in the current job market. Moreover, this is a game that I’ve been thinking of making for many years — decades, even. The initial inspiration came not from DROD, but from an obscure 90s action-RPG called Four Crystals of Trazere (or simply Legend in its European release). Four Crystals had this magic system where you constructed spells from runes, each of which had a specific and deterministic effect, forming a sort of miniature programming language. There were a handful of points in the game where it made puzzles out of this, like a sealed chamber that can only be opened by a lever inside the chamber, so that you have to figure out a way to press the lever with magic. But it wasn’t the game’s focus, and I always felt like the idea could be taken a lot farther.

Over the years, I’ve made a few previous attempts at implementing my ideas — once in Unity, once in Javascript — but this current attempt, using Godot, is the first time I’ve gotten far enough to think I’m going to finish it. And I’ve contemplated repurposing this blog as a dev diary. But the unfortunate fact is: Blogging and working on this game seem to tax exactly the same mental resources. On any given day, I am capable of working on the game, or blogging, but not both. And development has taken priority. I’m going to try to establish a schedule of game development on weekdays, blogging on weekends. We’ll see how that goes.

But in all honesty, although this has been the thing occupying my attention for most of the last few months, it hasn’t been the thing occupying my attention for the last two weeks. Something else took me over pretty thoroughly, and is only just now letting up somewhat. I’ll describe that in my next post.