The Stack

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.