You stand in the Dark Room with your pockets full of gems and keys, looking at the eastern door. All three template silhouettes on the drawing screen appear equally unpromising. You go all in and choose the one on the left. Oh man, you drew a video game journalist's bedroom. There is nothing in it but rotten coils of USB cables, the smell of bad coffee, and a single active computer screen displaying a freshly written article about an esoteric strategy puzzle.
What puzzle strategy? The one that rhymes with “blueprints,” of course.
Edwin: Although you could write a bunch of words about occult architectural logic, this is what I like best. Blue Prince this is peace. I walk into the study and spend a few minutes by the fireplace, listening to the clock and studying the single gemstone idly tossed on the coffee table. I head into the bright and elegant living room and straighten my back to admire the paintings hanging on the ceiling.
I walk along the veranda, breathing in the green air. Then I accidentally drew the gym and my steps were cut in half. I walk to the other door and wearily assess the possibility that I'll draw the master bedroom, where I can salvage the rest of the day.
Either way, it describes the experience of wandering around the estate from the beginning to the middle of the game – discovering new rooms, trying out different combinations, and letting larger mysteries come together in your head. A limit on the number of rooms you can enter in a day encourages method but not urgency, and the game's werewolf house is great, whatever you want to say about it – a place of soft, eerie textures and tidal trinkets, a building where you can rummage through your slippers to try to find the room with your favorite chair.
Later, the strategy element comes in with a vengeance and you struggle harder with the game's randomization elements, figuring out ways you can skew the odds through items, outside room modifiers, and clever room placement tricks. I'm not sure which game is more interesting: early or late. I know many of you have been frustrated by randomization once you've figured out the path to a solution. Personally, I just hate the boiler room.
However, Blue Prince is hardly a dice game on par with a predatory gacha game, and some of the late-game puzzles are fun to solve – the correct “multiple exclamation points” in the notepads – even if it may take you a few tries to work your way to victory. More home games that change the face of Series I.
