Blue Prince :)
I rolled credits on Blue Prince last week.
What a game!! I love what a singular expression it feels like. Really and truly One Guy's Shit (and his shit is: Myst-style puzzle adventure gaming).
I am not an enormous fan of this type of puzzle design - thinking through wordplay puns and doing deranged math and taking a book of notes about every room in a giant clockwork mansion isn't really what I would describe as "my kind of thing" - but I did fill out a massive library of Notion documents about this fucking game, and I did take notes on an enormous amount of bullshit, and I did solve a lot of wordplay puzzles. So it got me! It fucking got me.
I understand why some people are having a horrible time with this game - there's a lot of variance in it. But if you're just going for the credits, you don't really need to solve as many of the puzzles as it seems you might. A lot of the challenge associated with hitting the credits is merely about spending and managing resources, and about learning to handle the game's unique room drafting system.
To address variance, a lot of the puzzles also have clues supplied in multiple places. Thinking back on the puzzles I was required to complete in order to get to the credits, I'm surprised at how forgiving many of them are. Most of the puzzles I spent the greatest amount of time investigating were not actually related to the credits "ending" at all. The cruelest two "required" puzzles I can think of (not strictly required in a lock-and-key way, but very strongly contributing to a successful run) are:
A puzzle where you might have to look at a specific object in a specific room with a specific item in your possession to get the answer.
A puzzle where you just repeatedly do algebra.
However... that first puzzle does does have its solution supplied in alternate places where you don't need that specific item to get the answer. It's really surprising how good this game is at being a challenge that wants to be solved.
I had an enjoyable time digging into the "not required" puzzles, and I'm still picking at many of them now that I've completed the game. I rolled credits on Day 34 with most of the puzzles in the game barely scratched. I think I had one single red envelope?
The resource maximization/drafting/layout gameplay is surprisingly central. Based on what I know about the game, if you get extraordinarily lucky, you can blast through to the credits without really being that good at anything else. And because this stuff is not really "a secret," I'm glad to tell you my strategies here:
- Getting good at filling up the whole mansion grid is really helpful. Learning your "deck" of rooms, and getting a fuzzy sense of which rooms spawn on which rows and columns of the mansion, and how often, will make you better at filling out the grid. Getting good at filling out the grid helps you maximize the number of resources available to you on a given run.
- Treat your "doors" like they are a resource. The game will track keys, gems, steps, and dice for you, but it won't help you track the number of "cards" in your "deck" which have three or four doors. Developing a fuzzy sense of how many three- and four-door rooms you have left will help you manage those resources as you move up the mansion.
- Take notes on where rooms spawn. This was the habit I developed which led most concretely to my ability to finish the game. Some rooms have extremely strict spawning rules. I kept a page of notes with a section on it for each room in the house, and noted which days I found the room, and what position it was at whenever I found it.
- Try to establish connectivity at the higher ranks of your mansion. It's possible to end up building two "snakes" of rooms which travel upward separately from one another... But connecting them at the top can help you avoid a lot of costly backtracking.
Anyway, I really like this one! It's so strange. I might continue playing for a bit, but I have 5 red envelopes now and I'm feeling pretty good about my growth as a Puzzle Solver. It's an extraordinary experience and I am glad that I had it!