Game 14: Blue Prince

I'm going into Blue Prince knowing nothing other than it's an 'adventure puzzle game' and people seem to think very highly of it.

This place is huge! And remote!

My great grand uncle has left me his huge estate in his will, with one condition:

Seems like a jerk move to make me find room 46 in a 45-room house.

On receiving this note I think I'd just build another room? That would make number 46 in a 45 room estate, done and done!

I guess I'm supposed to find the question mark room?

And... that's it. We begin.

Our hero is dressed up to explore the jungle rather than a mansion.

It's first-person game, but I can only make so many room transitions per day - I lose a 'step' every time I walk through a doorway.

I accidentally cost myself two 'steps' by initially stepping outside and back inside before finding this note.

I guess this is a reasonable rationale for why I can't just bring a bunch of stuff in. It also prevents me from just building a 46th room, so that plan is out the window.

Also, the layout of the house changes every day!

Trying to make a map will be useless!

But I do have a self-updating map, and there's one other room on it.

I'm currently at the bottom in the Entrance Hall.

Choosing a door lets me pick what room the next one will be from a selection.

The house isn't just changing, I'm basically building it each day as I walk around.

My first two rooms are a bedroom.. and then adjoining that, a guest bedroom that's also a dead end, so guests and hosts can have the.... unique experience of having to pass through the host's bedroom whenever they go to bed or get up (or need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night).

This is going to make for some awkward mornings.

I chose those rooms because they get me extra steps, but they also created a dead end and now I'll have to backtrack.

In the Guest Bedroom I found a clue to solving a puzzle in the Billiards room.

I take a moment to step outside and explore around the house, and high on the 'implausible insurmountable obstacle' list is this gate with a coded padlock protecting this little orchard and a shed.

Darn, if only this gate were not locked, I could get in there!

Feels like these simplistic art pieces on the walls may be clues for something.

The art feels a little out of place in such a nice house.

You can find items that will be used in later puzzles / games, I imagine once I'm out of steps I'll lose it and have to find it again. I wonder if any given item always appears in the same room.

Pick up everything you can!

The key turned out to be for these great little logic puzzle boxes, you get to open one.

I'm getting three kinds of resources - keys, gems, and money. Some of the room placements have gem requirements, and I saw (but didn't place yet) a shop where I presume the coins are spent.

Oh good, the Antechamber will be easy to get into.

Actually the Antechamber will not be easy to get into.

Guess this means the Antechamber is locked and I have to use levers to unlock it. I screw up day 1 by assuming that this weight room effect will only halve my remaining steps if I step into the room.

That assumption was incorrect - just placing it robs me of 13 steps.

Locked doors get more frequent as I approach the antichamber and I run out of keys, and soon will run out of steps. Thus endeth day 1.

I got close but failed to reach the Antechamber.

Day 2 is cut short by me having to leave in the middle of the run, and finding out you can't save in the middle of a run and just have to exit. Happily there doesn't seem to be a penalty for doing so other than you having to end the run, so I don't think there's any problem with taking a lot of attempts to accomplish something in Blue Prince. Some day 3 breakthroughs: I place an Observatory room which you can use to see constellations that will give you bonuses on a run (this game appears to be a repeating mass puzzle, sort of in the vein of Outer Wilds?).

The Observatory features a puzzle to set up the telescope but it only needs to be solved once.

I also solve a boiler room puzzle, which lets you provide an adjacent room with power, and the next room I place gets the power running through it, so there's something we need to provide electricity for but I don't know what.

If this is how electricity works then I'm afraid plumbing and sewage are a lost cause.

Looks like one of the Sinclair relatives may have ended up stealing jewels?

Come to think of it there have been quite a few gems just lying around the house...

New day - looks like I keep whatever star resource the observatory gave me, so I'll try to place it every day if I can.

The clocks in the Den all show the same time, and time progresses over the course of the day.

Oooh, on Day Four I managed to exit the house via the garage and unlock a gate forever!

So you can make permanent changes that help you in the future.

This unlocks access to a little stand-alone room outdoors with it's own separate room set, cool.

Hopefully I don't need a bomb shelter anytime soon.

Another bonus - I've unlocked an 'allowance' which gives me some money at the start of each run.

Which means this is a roguelite, the gameplay loop repeats but you can permanently improve your starting state.

The Game's publisher is 'Raw Fury', which is quite the contrast with such a sedate experience of spending your time walking around an house with nobody else in it.

I've discovered the 'Laboratory' room which modifies the house rules for the day as well as a machine in here that requires power, so I need to achieve a house setup that features both rooms and successfully route power to it.

The experiments can yield significant rewards, doing things like awarding extra steps for placing rooms.

Even after I provide this thing with power I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the switches.

I also found a gear wrench that will let me permanently adjust the rarity of some rooms. This would help with the house-drafting game in the long run except I'm not exactly sure what I should do with it because I'm not clear on what rooms I want to see more of right now.

Ah well, if I screw things up hopefully I can find it again and do better next time.

Ah, this is also a sort of deckbuilding game. I found a room which will permanently add an option to the house room deck, and it has a strategy guide.

Can I remove rooms from the house forever? Probably not, some red rooms are pretty rough.

I'm often unsure of whether objects, drawings and diagrams in any given room are clues or not, but this definitely is - there' s a room called the Great Hall with seven locked doors and keys are a precious resource.

Knowing the layout behind the doors will help me use those limited keys efficiently.

Look Timmy, Santa brought you a massive steel safe for Christmas!

"Thanks Santa I always wanted one!"

My best run yet, I reached the Antechamber but all three entrances were sealed off. I did find a broken lever so I probably have to find where to fix said lever and then pull it to open it.

Just getting there is not enough.

Sweet merciful heaven the pictures! The pictures are a clue to a message!

And the pictures actually depend on the location in the blueprint layout, not the room they're in!

In reference to that puzzle, I can't come up with what words these two images represent. Most of the others however I've been able to do and once you have enough of the words you can fill in the blank with context.

flight? airplane?

paint? planet?

Another permanent unlock! I had to draft the laboratory next to the boiler room to give it power, so after I pulled a boiler room and a re-roll for room selection I used it and got lucky.

Powering the lab and solving a puzzle in it netted me a new outdoor area.

And I pretty much lucked into this but I accidentally supplied power to the furnace and it forged a key for me, so when I can obtain power I should be powering rooms to see what they do.

Normally there isn't anything useful in the furnace room.

Interesting, I got strange revelations from a coin-operated fortune teller! Trippy!

They dial up the creepy on this guy.

Is this a metaphor or the future?

We're going heavy on the metaphor. Poor cat.

Which is where, exactly?

I finally managed to do what intrepid climbers can only dream of - surmount a waist-high locked gate. Doing so provides a big boost to my steps each day.

You normally start with 50 so this is a 40% increase in steps.

And this book I found in the orchard's shed feels important.

I'll try to place garden rooms on rich soil and see what happens.

I've been keeping a notepad file to write stuff down because a lot is going on. I won't share the whole thing because there are some puzzle solutions, but here's my current list of goals: Find the East / West levers.

Repair the broken lever in the greenhouse.

Get into the Antechamber.

Find the key to the Foundation door.

Open Safe in Office, identify bust it is under.

Open Safe in Study, determine if D8 Black King is relevant to it.

Find remaining safes.

Find safe deposit key and open deposit box.

Find use for Microchip.

Find and turn on last gas faucet.

Read more library books.

Drain rooms other than the pool.

Get Network password for house terminal.

Get Network Password for Blackbridge terminal.

Reach 4th Grade and beyond.

Find music sheets 5-7.

Place Greenhouse on Rich Soil. Why is this mountain all fucked up? I can see it in the distance from the front of the house.

There has to be a reason for it right?

This blog and the screenshots I've taken have been invaluable, I snapped pics of all these in the Chapel when I first found them days ago, and now I've stumbled upon the puzzle for it.

The roman numerals clued me in to these being relevant to a puzzle somewhere else.

And that puzzle led to a whole new area!

There's an entire Catacombs under us!

I've been assuming that the levers to the Antechamber are somewhere in the house, and one is- the broken lever in the Greenhouse (which I still haven't repaired or pulled because I have yet to get a house layout with both the Greenhouse and the Coat Check where I stored the lever - one of the frustrating aspects of the game is that you may want to do something but it might take you several runs to get the room combination to do it).

I found a document that mentioned the Greenhouse as well as an East and West lever so I assumed there were just those three somewhere in the house, but this reveals there's a North lever as well, and the other levers may well not be in the house at all.

As with many puzzle game maps this one is ripped into pieces and scattered around.

The Resevoir is down here so I'm going to have to get to the Pump room in the house and do some water level stuff to proceed further, but this was a huge discovery - probably the biggest single leap I've made in a run. I assume that if I lower the water level a little I'll be able to get in the boat and take it across, and there's a nearby flooded stairwell that I assume I need to lower the water level by much more to traverse.

It's back to the Pump room if I can find it again.

I found the West lever and opened one of the Antechamber doors! From this is looks like I'll have to find and use that North lever too to make a path beyond.

At last, one entrance to the Antechamber is open!

A couple runs later I manage both Greenhouse and Coat Check together and I unlock the South door - unfortunately the West door didn't stay open! I'll have to get into the Antechamber the same run I pull a lever, but at least I don't need all three. A couple runs later I finally manage to both open a door and make it inside.

I already know which door this unlocks, I just hope I have enough steps left to get back there.

I'm really enjoying this game, it's very cerebral, and it's a very unusual mashup of genres which lets me take my time and think about things. But every so often, our protagonist would be better served to not bother with whatever puzzle is required to do something, and just clamber over the waist-high gate, or in this case...

SWALLOW YOUR ARISTOCRATIC PRIDE AND CLIMB ON A COUPLE BOXES SO WE CAN SEE WHAT THE BUTTON DOES.

Ok, I got to the button. The solution actually was climb on the boxes - but not here, where you can just do it, no. It involved four pushable carts that can be lowered and raised in order to make a path. I found the North lever, same run! The way through the Antechamber is open, and the door is number 46!

Is this victory? There's a lot of goals I still haven't accomplished.

Victory indeed!

My winning house is not one I would have designed. It looks like it's going to hit itself with a hammer.

There's definitely more to discover in the game, and there are hints that there's a 'true ending' if you solve more things, but for me I think I'm good to stop here at the normal one. I've enjoyed my time with it and I'm ready to move on.

There are, after all, more games to play.

In particular: I never found the passwords for the computers (which galled me the entire time! Where / what are they?!?), there's a microchip-related door to unlock, and there's a fourth permanent change to the Mansion that I never activated. But who cares? I inherited an entire Mansion that I'm terrified of ever sleeping in.