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Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

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Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#81

Post by tstrimple »

chongli wrote: post #76
tstrimple wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I like about meta progression is the gradual expansion of the game. It doesn't have to necessarily make everything easier , but it can be a good way to temporarily lock away more complicated features and abilities. For example, unlocking a new class after completing the game with a previous class doesn't necessarily mean the new class is more powerful or will make the game easier. In some cases, the later c…

Yes, that class / character unlock system is very common. Some purists will say that a traditional Roguelike cannot have these unlocks but I don't mind them. It definitely is a way of gating the game's complexity so that a new player doesn't have to cope with it all at once. I think it should be optional though. There should be an option to unlock everything from the beginning for players who don't want to fiddle aro…

Agreed on the optional part. I've picked up Satisfactory again since 1.1 hit experimental. I like having the option to skip a lot of the tedium. Don't get me wrong. I normally love the early game tedium. That's where a lot of decisions have long term consequences. But sometimes you just want to play with new features, and games like Satisfactory give you enough granularity of control to tailor that experience to what you're looking for in most cases. I appreciate options to make games much more difficult or accessible at the same time. Just because I tend to like brutally punishing games doesn't mean others have to experience the same games in the same way. I want fallout games to have a survival mode and I want rougelites to have a tourist mode. At the same time not all games have to cater to all audiences. So it's perfectly fine for casual games to focus on their audience and the same for more "hardcore" games. I just really appreciate it when a developer is able to thread that needle and give way more folks a way to enjoy their games across skill / difficulty boundaries.

I'm particularly interested in the area of coop games where you've got two players of radically different capabilities. I really like newer games in the vein of "Split Fiction" or "It Takes Two". But they tend to assume somewhat equal levels of competence for skill based sections of the game. So if I try to play with my wife I have to wait over and over again as she fails what are to me basic jumps. I'd love to see more exploration of asymmetric gameplay. Where it's not just both players having to navigate the same obstacles, but allows players to better leverage their skills to overcome something together. I remember staying up late nights with my now wife playing Diablo 2. But now I'm at the point where I want to push high tier rifts and she just wants to finish the story line. I'd like to see more examples of coop games where the burden falls more heavily on one player and the other is mostly along for the ride. Not all gamers are looking for the same things out of their games, but that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't be playing together.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#82

Post by chongli »

npinsker wrote: post #64
jncfhnb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here. Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy. Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising. And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing…

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics ( https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/ ), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release. I'm not exactly sure what lea…

Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review.

A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of game (never mind that it might be deliberate) but I think it's possible for some games to have been designed for game reviewers rather than for long-term players. The top HN comment on this story (as I write this) would seem to indicate that the game has an issue with running out of steam after a few hours.

This sort of thing is not unheard of in other media as well. In the film industry this strategy is called Oscar-bait. Of course for a film it's not based on duration but subject matter. Certain themes and filmmaking techniques have been accused of being targeted at the narrower interests of the Academy rather than a broad audience.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#83

Post by tstrimple »

archargelod wrote: post #80
tstrimple wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the key differences between rogue lites and rogue likes is meta progression. In most roguelites you're able to unlock things and get more powerful for future runs. In roguelikes you always have the same starting rng. I definitely agree with you that it's all up to the game to balance the progression through both unlocks and skill improvement so it's not entirely rng. But I also don't think many put much effort…

With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them. Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.…

There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#84

Post by chongli »

tstrimple wrote: post #81
chongli wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that class / character unlock system is very common. Some purists will say that a traditional Roguelike cannot have these unlocks but I don't mind them. It definitely is a way of gating the game's complexity so that a new player doesn't have to cope with it all at once. I think it should be optional though. There should be an option to unlock everything from the beginning for players who don't want to fiddle aro…

Agreed on the optional part. I've picked up Satisfactory again since 1.1 hit experimental. I like having the option to skip a lot of the tedium. Don't get me wrong. I normally love the early game tedium. That's where a lot of decisions have long term consequences. But sometimes you just want to play with new features, and games like Satisfactory give you enough granularity of control to tailor that experience to what…

I want fallout games to have a survival mode and I want rougelites to have a tourist mode

It's funny that you mention that. NetHack, one of the longest-running traditional Roguelikes (in active development since 1987) actually has a Tourist class. However it's not what you think. The class is based on the tourist character Twoflower from the Discworld series of books. This class is the hardest one in the game because it starts with the least amount of fighting ability, no weapons (apart from some darts), and no armour (just a Hawaiian shirt).

You do, however, also start with a credit card (useful for jimmying locks), some healing potions, a lot of food, a lot of money, some scrolls of magic mapping (maps), and an expensive camera (the monsters in the dungeon hate flash photography)! But until you become a lot more experienced shopkeepers will recognize you as a tourist and try to rip you off, so you better spend your money wisely!

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#85

Post by Secretmapper »

SamBam wrote: post #77
gs17 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tutorial note cards strongly recommend using a pen+paper while playing This is my largest complaint. The game should really have a notepad built in. It doesn't need to write down clues for me, but it would be nice to not have to find where my notes were if I put the game down for a long time. Is it that it's a console release?

I haven't played this, but I played Obra Dinn , which the review mentions, and I really don't think digital notes would have been nearly as good as pencil and paper. I really needed to draw arrows between things, sketch out a timeline, put question marks around ideas, etc. Pencil and paper is just so much more expressive.

I think the option would be great regardless. What you say is true - pen and paper is more expressive than digital notes, but digital notes is better than nothing.

I played Obra Dinn without pen and paper and I was fine.

There was a game called The Roottrees are dead which is based on Obra dinn with a built in journal system and it is really useful.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#86

Post by wgreenberg »

rjh29 wrote: post #47
throwerofstone wrote: post #5

After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it. The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the nex…

Same experience after 8 hours. I can see how roguelite fans would enjoy the dopamine hits of new information / upgrades / solving tiny bits of puzzles. As a pure puzzle fan I found the roguelite stuff repetitive and boring, and the puzzle stuff itself is good but not mindblowingly good. (Yes - even the less obvious puzzles) I had my doubts when people were playing 100+ hours of it. That gave me the idea it would be a…

As someone who just rolled credits on Blue Prince after 20 hours or so, I can definitely confirm that there’s much much more to the post-game content than a skinner box. It’s much more like a mega puzzle hunt[1] with an RNGish roguelike wrapper.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_hunt

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#87

Post by ungreased0675 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #53
adrianhon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here: Is there anything that makes you say that other than the fact that it’s positive and I received a review key? I’ve written about plenty of games I didn’t enjoy that I got for free (e.g. for judging awards) including games that were very well-received, like Viewfinder and Pacific Drive.

Posting a review for an arbitrary game to HN definitely smells like advertising to me. I don’t think you would be posting an article like this to HN that shat on a relatively unknown indie game you didn’t like. How is this _not_ advertising in your mind? Surely you don’t think random people on HN are invested in your take on this game. What purpose did you intend if not to promote the newly released game? I feel you’…

I thought it was a well written and entertaining review. While I’m probably not going to buy the game, I think what the author wrote, and this discussion here is important for discovering games I might be interested in.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#88

Post by graynk »

crtasm wrote: post #22
throwerofstone wrote: post #5

After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it. The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the nex…

I've played about an hour and am getting the feeling I won't see it through to an ending. For anyone wanting a non-RNG puzzler set around a large building I highly recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorelei_and_the_Laser_Eyes

Lorelei is pretty great in its atmosphere, though the puzzles can be quite disappointing. 80% of the time the solution is "you're overthinking it, it's a number written down somewhere"

Still, I 100%-ed and enjoyed it. Also a shameless plug: I made a mod that tweaks controls to add a back button, a map button, and to allow code locks to spin in both directions

https://github.com/graynk/LoreleiAndSaneControls

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#89

Post by klausa »

chongli wrote: post #82
npinsker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics ( https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/ ), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release. I'm not exactly sure what lea…

Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review. A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of gam…

Many of the people reviewing the game highly (at well-regarded publications) have spoken about playing the game for tens of hours, some mentioning 100h+.

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#90

Post by falcor84 »

galleywest200 wrote: post #2

I have been playing this game and it is really a blast. The tutorial note cards strongly recommend using a pen+paper while playing and I can second that as pretty much required for some of the more "meta" puzzles. Worth noting that I believe it is also on Gamepass and whatever Sony's version of Gamepass is called if you already had those services and wished to save a few bucks.

> whatever Sony's version of Gamepass is called

Just mentioning that it's PS Plus, and the game was made available on their Extra & Premium tiers at launch [0], which is nice, as they typically release all the games on the same day in the middle of the month.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2025/04/09/playstation-plus-gam...

P.S. "Lost Records: Bloom & Rage", the second half of which is due to come out in a couple of days is very different, but highly recommended too, especially in its emotional vibes and how well they integrated the VHS camera into the gameplay.

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