malvasia bianca

Blue Prince is kind of amazing? There’s this roguelike structure, but you’re not trying to gain anything approaching mastery over a single run: sure, you get better at choosing rooms in ways that make your individual runs last longer, but for a long time you’ll fail for reasons that are beyond your control. And there’s also a puzzle game structure, but you can’t actually make progress on most of the puzzles on any given run. But somehow those two aspects of the game end up dovetailing much better than I would have imagined possible: over and over, I would start a run with a list of questions in the back of my mind to make progress on, I’d actually make progress on two or three of them, and I’d add another three or four questions to have in the back of my mind over the course of the run.

And yes, some runs were duds, runs where I didn’t feel like I’d made any progress. But, honestly, those runs were extremely rare for me; and while I do think that I got a little lucky with how some things came together in my runs, I’m also pretty confident that my experience was only a little outside of the norm. I don’t know how the game’s designer pulled it off, but Blue Prince really hits a sweet spot where randomness is present but in a way that adds to the richness of the game’s texture much more than it adds to the game’s frustration.

As you play it through, the “uncovering questions” aspect of the game just keeps on going. At the beginning, the questions you have about the game all involve how to make it to the 46th room. So you’re learning about strategies for selecting rooms, you’re learning what the rooms are, you’re uncovering questions / puzzles which are generally focused on improving your ability to deal with the game’s randomness. (If you’re a pedant, you might call Blue Prince a roguelite instead of a roguelike, because of the importance of cross-run progression; for what it’s worth, I have never seen a roguelite with anything approaching Blue Prince’s variety of ways in which cross-run progression manifests itself.) During this phase, you’ll be filling out more and more of the map during a typical day, and you’ll start uncovering the different possible steps involved in reaching Room 46 and figuring out how to make more of those happen more often.

But also the estate will start feeling weirder / more mysterious / more interesting. And sure, some of that mystery is related to getting to Room 46; but not all of it is, and even when there is a relation, the mystery has its own pull beyond that goal. So the game will start changing from a game about reaching one specific goal to a game that’s about exploring both a physical space and a possibility space, with that latter exploration valuable just in its own right.

If you keep on going with the game, you’ll then uncover a third layer of mysteries: who are the people who lived in this estate, what was their history and their motivations? Yet another rich source of questions and puzzles to solve.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t make it as far as that third layer. I played (or my wife and I played: I had the controller but we were talking about everything together) far enough to reach Room 46, and far enough to start getting into that second layer of questions, but not nearly long enough to have a feel for the composition and extent of that layer. Based on some chatter that I’d heard, I was pretty sure there was quite a bit beyond what I’d seen, so then my question was: I’ve already spent a month on Blue Prince, do I want to spend another couple of months going deeper? I’m sure I would have enjoyed doing that; but also, there are a lot of other games out there that I wanted to play.

And so, somewhat reluctantly, I decided that I’d come to as satisfactory an off-ramp for the game as I was likely to reach for a while, and it was time to take that off-ramp. I still had my notebook, maybe we’d decide to pick it up again over the holidays or something, but for now, it was time for me to play something else.

That’s all well and good, but then a couple of weeks later, my wife decided to start a run of the game under her account. And she went quite a bit further than we had in our initial joint run: she made it well into that third set of questions, uncovering many aspects of Blue Prince that I had no idea whatsoever even existed from my run.

Honestly, exploring that third layer of mysteries probably wouldn’t have been entirely to my taste. (Which is totally fine, not every part of every game has to be for me!) But the second layer of mysteries would have been, and seemed very well done. Also, I suspect that the existence of the third layer of mysteries adds richness to the second layer: the backstory from that third layer makes the rooms that you’re struggling with in the second layer seem much more grounded, because it helps them fit in as part of a world, not just as abstract puzzles.

Quite a game; I feel like I’ll be trying to understand how it does what it does for a long time. Blue Prince feels like the sort of game where I should be writing three thousand words about it, but I can’t, simply because I don’t understand the magic well enough; that makes me very happy.