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Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

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Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#71

Post by earlyriser »

adrianhon wrote: post #58
jncfhnb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do think random people are invested in my take on this game, yes. If they weren't, it wouldn't have been upvoted. It's actually very difficult to get links on the front page of HN, the signal to noise is quite high. I post around a third to a half of the articles I write on my blog to HN – the ones I think people here will like. Sometimes they hit and sometimes they don't. Three weeks ago I wrote about Odysseus, a…

I haven't heard about this game until today, but literally 10 mins before reading this on HN I was reading this Polygon article about it https://www.polygon.com/awards/557285/blue-prince-game-of-th...

So it seems it's quite popular.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#72

Post by dluan »

esperent wrote: post #70
square_usual wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally have the same frustration with roguelites as you seem to: every time I start a run, it feels like I'm gambling whether I'll have any fun at all. A bad seed or start can mean losing in ways that feel unfair or boring, like in balatro if you get a bunch of bad hands and bad jokers, you struggle through rounds and hands until you either lose or get an interesting combination. I don't need that kind of gambli…

> I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast I enjoyed Balatro for quite a few hours before I had this problem, which is more than enough for me to call it a good game. Beyond these first few hours though, you need ridiculously high multipliers to succeed. There's way too many jokers and 90% of them are trash by this point. The ones you need have vanishingly small probabilities, and then you need to add…

Hades is fun because there is some skill involved with the button mashing to go with the RNG, but it feels like too many games are just dressed up gambling mechanics these days. Balatro is too naked and bare with being clever gambling, plus all the ding ding ding slot machine dopamine special effects.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#73

Post by ajkjk »

skyyler wrote: post #12
riffraff wrote: post #7

> As with other roguelikes, you can unlock persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game. I think those are called rogue-lites, for the reason that real rogue-likes (e.g. nethack, DCSS) actually wipe out all your progress on each attempt.

At this point, times have shifted, and meta-progression is usually considered an aspect of modern roguelikes. There was a trend of calling them "rogue-lites" but that's faded and now games like ADOM and DCSS are "Classic roguelikes" It's not a hard and fast rule or anything, just what I've observed in gaming discussions.

I kinda disagree? mostly I see people use roguelite to refer to roguelikes with progression and roguelike for those without. But I suppose both are also called roguelike as a gloss.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#74

Post by magicalhippo »

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 read this[1] review on Steam which also raises the same point as you.

The thing that made The Talos Principle, The Witness[2] and similar games so great was that they spent a lot of time on designing the puzzles.

I'm not opposed to a Groundhog Day sort of scenario, but in that case it really needs to be done well, like The Stanley Parable, not just rely on pure RNG. If you want to use RNG you really should have some constraint system involved to ensure at least some progress could have been made by the player.

[1]: https://steamcommunity.com/id/ADHunter/recommended/1569580/

[2]: If you've played The Witness but haven't played The Looker, you've been missing out IMHO.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#76

Post by chongli »

tstrimple wrote: post #69
chongli wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because the goal of the game designer who adds meta progression is to increase the number of players who actually finish the game, at least when it comes to the "true progression" style meta progression. There is another approach based on unlocks, where the player unlocks new characters or game modes rather than having a single character get more and more powerful with each run. Some people prefer these unlocks…

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 around with that stuff and just dive into the full experience. Players like Jorbs can feel so strongly about it that I think they're actually offended by games that try to curate their experiences to that degree.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#77

Post by SamBam »

gs17 wrote: post #15
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.

> 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.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#78

Post by drilbo »

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…

it seems like it might be mostly attributable to the RNG element of the game

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#79

Post by ClicksButtons »

tstrimple wrote: post #65
DanielVZ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve…

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…

I'd say it's even worse for roguelites. They tend to balanced assuming the player has done some or most of the meta-progression. Sometimes to the point where it feels the game forces you to lose to experience more of it. (I really liked inscryption up until it forced me to fail 2-3 times because I progressed too much)

With roguelikes at least you are at the intended power level every time, even if some of these games are too RNG reliant.

Re: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

#80

Post by archargelod »

tstrimple wrote: post #65
DanielVZ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve…

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.

In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.

One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.

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