More Blue Prince, or, Home on the RNG

Apologies if you think I included a huge spoiler in my screenshot for this post, but I don’t think it spoils anything on its own (I never figured out what it means!) and it was thematically appropriate.

I still think that Blue Prince is a brilliant game. The only thing that’s changed since my last take is that I continued with a few more in-game days after the end credits rolled, and my thoughts changed from the excitement of “I’m just getting started!!!” to a much more sanguine “That was very good, but I’m done now.”

A significant part of that is because I only have a moderate tolerance for puzzle-solving. There’s a definite boundary where it stops being “a fun challenge” and turns into “a tedious slog,” and I comfortably hit that point. I know that there are many players who consider the end credits to be just the start of the “real” game, and the prospect of using clues scattered across dozens of sources, deciphering anagrams and diagrams across multiple stages, each puzzle unlocking a part of the next, is extremely satisfying. But I spoiled myself by reading the full solution to one of the game’s puzzles, and I could immediately tell it wasn’t for me.

That’s not at all a criticism. One of the many ingenious aspects of Blue Prince‘s puzzle design, and one that I never appreciated while I was playing, is that it gracefully provides multiple exit points for players. There’s a clear, straightforward goal presented at the game’s beginning, and once you’ve achieved that goal, you get the end credits. It’s reassurance that yes, you can keep uncovering more details if you like, but if not, then you’ve had a complete experience.

An equally significant part of why the end game stopped being interesting to me, is exactly the same reason the start of the game was so overwhelmingly compelling: it’s a roguelike.

At the start, the possibility space is infinitely huge, so structuring the game around a random number generator is an elegant way to focus. You can’t possibly do everything yet, so here’s a set of things that you can focus on for this go-round. There’s almost never a time limit on anything, so you can relax and divide-and-conquer your way towards solving as many puzzles as you like.

It’s kind of a shame that conversation around the game has polarized into opposite camps of “the RNG sucks and was a terrible design choice!” or “it’s not randomness, it’s strategy, and you just need to get good!” Neither take is entirely accurate.

In addition to focusing your attention on the subset of problems you can solve today, the fact that the game resets at the end of each in-game day means (paradoxically) that you’re never losing process or getting completely stuck. Red room penalties don’t carry over, you’re never permanently punished for a bad placement of a room, and any bad situation you get yourself into will last only until you decide to call it a day. Plus, learning how to mitigate the randomness is a key part of the strategy — there’s a reason that most players are eventually able to reach room 46, which wouldn’t be the case if it were actually completely random, or if you were like Sisyphus cursed to have all of your work completely undone at the end of each day.

But insisting that it’s just part of the strategy does nothing to change the fact that there undeniably are diminishing returns from the game’s model. There’s still plenty to do after the credits roll, but it’s significantly less than at the game’s start. The longer you play, the more likely it is that you know exactly what you want to accomplish, but the game simply prevents you from being able to do it until you have an unusually lucky run through the house.

The thing that finally convinced me I was done with Blue Prince was when I did have one of those unusually lucky runs, after several attempts that ended frustratingly prematurely. In this case, I happened to be getting the perfect synergy of items and bonuses that meant I had tons of money, and also everything in the house was on sale. I drafted the showroom, which is full of very expensive items that make traversing the house easier, and was convinced that this was literally going to be a game-changer for me.

Then I realized that the item I’d bought, like every other item in the game, would disappear at the end of the day. I went from thinking “this is overpowered, but I’m being rewarded for my patience!” to “how is this even useful, if it won’t even be possible to have the right combination of circumstances to be able to afford it until you’re already at the tail end of a run?”

After reading more spoiler-filled descriptions and walkthroughs for the game, I’ve learned that there are different mechanisms that can increase the likelihood you’ll have a lot of money, or a greater chance of drawing the rooms you need when you need them, or a strategy of finding mechanics that synergize with each other, sometimes over multiple days, that make it more practical. But they’re all still dealing with probability, increasing the chance that something will happen.

I completely understand the appeal of that, the feeling of Jackpot!!! when all of the stars align and you’re able to make something happen, vs the tedium of repeating steps that you know are guaranteed to have the same end result every time. But for me, personally, it’s too much of a mode switch. When I know exactly what I’m trying to do, having the game’s mechanics keep me from doing it is too frustrating to hold my interest. (It’s similar with puzzles in action games or platformers, incidentally: when I know what the goal is, but simply lack the skill to get to it, I bounce off the game immediately).

But again, I don’t think of it as a problem with the game so much as a game that can appeal to multiple types of players. Games so often seem to be locked into this mindset of either failure or mastery: you either bounce off completely and decide you don’t like it, or you complete it to 100% and get all of the achievements. I like that Blue Prince treats it more like a spectrum. Playing through the end credits will give you a complete experience. If there are things you still find intriguing — what do the chess pieces signify? How do I unlock this door in the mountain side? What happens when I find the gas pipes to light up all four of these flames? — then you’re free to explore.

It’s successful as a puzzle game, but especially remarkable to me is how successful it is as a story game. When I wrote a blog post right after reaching the end credits, I said that the storytelling was impressive because it felt like piecing together elements of the story at the same time I was piecing together elements of the puzzles. Making literal connections between rooms is also making connections between characters and story moments. It feels participatory like the best interactive entertainment, where you’re rarely sitting passively while someone tells you a story, but instead actively making deductions and inferring connections.

It’s especially impressive in a game that seems so firmly rooted in chaos. It’s usually fairly straightforward in interactive fiction to recognize where the “gates” or “chokepoints” are: by this point in the story, the storyteller knows that I’ve seen this, this, and this, so we can proceed to reveal that. The gates in Blue Prince are still present, but they’re much more granular and much less obvious.

Finding the Archives is a key to learning most of the “essential” elements of the story. And it’s kind of a remarkable show of bravado to put so much of the storytelling into a red room, where the game mechanics seem to deter players from even wanting to place it. Even without the penalty aspect, several of the other rooms that seemed to be the most dense with storytelling details also seemed to be left completely at the whim of the player to place or not. I have no doubt that there is an intricate flow chart somewhere making sure that it’s impossible to satisfy the mechanical requirements for reaching the end credits without also seeing the story beats that will make the end credits make sense. But they’re so subtly done that I’d be completely unable to tell you what they were, at least without going back through at a level of detail that would ruin the magic. It feels seamless.

And I’m really impressed by how much of the storytelling is done in a way that doesn’t require gates and chokepoints. Instead, it’s achieved by suggestion, repetition, and reinforcement, which are much more suited to a game so heavily built on randomness. You’ll see a name mentioned several times, and likely see an unidentified portrait several times, before you’re able to attach names to faces. By the time you’ve found the room that makes the connection explicit, you’ve likely already deduced it for yourself, in a way that feels more satisfying and with more resonance.

It’s also an ingenious combination of game mechanics and more organic world-building. In a deckbuilding game, you’re dealing with probability, trying to stack the deck so that the outcome you want is more likely to show up. In a real house, you’re more likely to see photos and hear accounts of the more prominent family members, the ones who are most important to the main characters.

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to call Blue Prince a masterpiece of environmental storytelling. Very rarely do you find the single document that reveals everything you want to know. Instead, it’s scattered all around in fragments of notes, abbreviated diary entries, unnamed portraits. By the time you hit the end credits, it has an additional feeling of weight because you’ve already pieced together the story for yourself, instead of passively having it told to you.

Another thing I absolutely love about the storytelling in Blue Prince is how the core mechanic of the game is very much a part of the fiction, but never (at least as far as I’ve seen) the point of the fiction. You’re never tasked with unlocking the mystery of this weird house with its ever-changing rooms. Instead, it’s always treated as something that just exists in this alternate universe. Characters just matter-of-factly comment on how navigating the house means drawing from a set of rooms every time a door is opened, and some days there are rooms in the house that simply don’t exist. I’ve found one story element in which a character proposes using the house’s properties to their advantage, placing a specific room solely for the purpose of using as a practice area.

If I’d been given the same premise, I would’ve been very tempted to make that the entire point of the story, in the name of making the player goals and the protagonist’s goals “perfectly aligned” or some such. And the game would’ve been much weaker as a result. The story in Blue Prince is set in a mysterious, magical house, but it’s actually about a noble family living under an oppressive, authoritarian monarchy, a growing rebellion, and the tensions of loyalty to one’s country vs loyalty to one’s family. I found the closing cut-scene very moving, although it still felt as if I’d only learned the broad strokes of the story to that point. It made me realize that while I’d been focused on solving puzzles and just the mechanics of getting to the end, I’d become quietly invested in this family’s conflicts.

And from what I’ve seen so far in the post-credits game, solving more of the house’s puzzles will add depth to that story, but not entirely new twists. We’ll learn details about the story and characters we already know, and more details about the construction of the house (although I hope the core mystery of the house remains a mystery even at 100% completion). It elegantly rewards players who want to keep diving in deeper — there are plenty of schemes and plots and secret organizations to learn about — while letting the rest of us just enjoy a fascinating story, well told.