Blue Prince

Words: 5848 Approximate Reading Time: 35-45 minutes

A long while back when I decided to take a step back from this blog, I said I would release a large batch of essays all at once, and then do the very occasional long-form piece when it caught my fancy. It’s been nearly six months since then, and I am actually mostly done with that batch. They are coming.

But something happened in the meantime. A game called Blue Prince was released.

I had been looking forward to this game for quite a while. It was sold on the premise of being a roguelike with an adventure puzzle game mystique. As someone who remembers being fascinated by Myst back in the day, that mystique was appealing. I had a chance to play the game before its release and I truly fell in love with it. I did not do everything because I wanted to save some of the fun for the release. It felt like something worth sharing with others.

When the game came out, I began streaming it nightly. For a while I felt the allure of that interesting combination. The way the puzzles were crafted in a way that encouraged observation and made you feel clever when you noticed something. The way that the randomness made “exploration” feel fresh without locking you out.

As I am writing this opening, I have put probably about 70-75 hours into the game. I am not finished with the game. There’s still more to do. But it is still a lot.

Of those 75-ish hours, I would say the first 20-30 had this feeling of wonder and joy.

The next 20 or so still felt good, but the game began to get in the way of itself. Some incredibly intense moments of frustration happened during this point that began to really wear on my patience.

What has been left – and what continues – is an experience that has left me miserable. Indeed, some part of me knows that I should just stop. In fact, I have just recently encountered a note within the game which suggests that maybe, just maybe, a person can reach a point where they acknowledge that they cannot make progress and to let someone else carry the torch.

I have been spending this evening simply looking up solutions in a guide so I can be done with this experience, trying desperately to get a particular room to spawn in one of a few particular places. A series of attempts which lasted three in-game days, or about an hour. A series of attempts which all ended in failure, because it turns out I can’t actually do it. I had misinterpreted a clue and was supposed to be doing something else entirely.

And it was at that moment that I closed the game and started this.

I wanted to write this essay because this game is fascinating. It has been a success, and I think that success is deserved. There is something truly unique about this game. The depth of what exists in this game is absolutely stunning. When I played a couple of years ago, I thought I had reached the end and simply had a few loose ends I could clear up. It turned out I had barely scratched the surface.

The game is, in many ways, impressive.

But its design is a double-edged sword.

So I wanted to examine the game from that perspective. Why was I so elated to begin, and so miserable at the end? After all, it was the same game at a fundamental level. The game hadn’t actually changed. It was a roguelike puzzle adventure game from the very beginning. So why the shift in my perspective?

Adventure Game Logic

Your standard puzzle game is one I’ve often referred to as “puzzle box” design. You’re put into a single “level” which is self-contained, and all elements that you need are immediately available. Progress in the game is tied to introducing new mechanics, combining them with old mechanics, and asking the player to think outside the box in how the rules for all of its components work.

Blue Prince follows along the lines of other puzzle games in having a more open-ended approach. This approach is shared with Myst and Outer Wilds. These games are designed around gathering information in one place that relates to a problem in another place. I often refer to this as a “lock and key” approach, where you are finding a clue that is the key to open a lock somewhere else (or vice versa).

The upside of this open-ended approach is it allows a game to integrate more parts of its design – the mechanics and world and narrative and the like.

The downside is that it relies on internal logic.

We often refer to that downside as “adventure game logic.” A game wants you to interact with an object using some other object, but the connection between those objects doesn’t make intuitive sense. Which is not to say it doesn’t make sense at all. You can perhaps even see when you look back why that connection makes sense. But the problem is that the player needs to be able to figure out that connection looking forward – the game needs to prevent them from just randomly doing things (using every item on every object until you find the correct interaction), or consulting a guide.

As much as adventure game logic is bad, it may well be an inevitability. Or at least an inevitability as you start adding in more and more problems for the player to solve. So I think the mere existence of adventure game logic is not the problem. Rather, we need to ask how frequent it is, and what a player has to do when they run into it.

To try and explain why adventure game logic happens, I want to draw on my prior experience as a teacher. I would assign papers to students and those papers would ask them to construct an argument by pulling together various pieces of information from a core text.

And one of the ideas about good writing that I would try to get across to students is that when you are writing, you need to think about how your words will be understood by your reader. When you think about a subject and make an argument, you are putting together a bunch of ideas and laying them out in a particular order. And when you lay those ideas out, you are seeing all sorts of connections between them. But those connections all exist in your head. You see how Concept A relates to Concept B because you are the one seeing it.

But when seen from the outside, that connection doesn’t exist. Perhaps someone else links those ideas in different ways, or not at all. And so when you are writing something for someone else, your goal is to help them see those connections. Which means you need to make those connections clear. If you don’t, then your argument will fail.

This principle applies to writing in general, but can also help us understand the pitfall to puzzle design. When crafting a problem that has a particular solution, you obviously want the solution to feel clever. You need your audience to think about it. But at the same time, the more freedom they have in what the solution could be, the more likely it is that people are going to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

This is why so many open-ended puzzles are usually about finding the clue which gives you the answer to your problem – finding the key to the lock. It gives the player the impression that they’ve been clever, but they’ve actually never had to think about it. And conversely, when you provide them a vague hint or ask them to combine pieces of information that don’t directly point to each other, people may end up going down the wrong train of thought.

All of this is to say that in crafting puzzles that rely on this more open-ended design, the first line of defense is trying to prevent adventure game logic from happening at all. There are a variety of tools that are used, perhaps the most common being playtesting. If you actually observe people play and see what they get hung up on and how they process information, you can tweak your puzzles to better nudge people in the right direction.

Likewise, it’s important to trace out the logic of a puzzle by working backwards. What are the steps that are required for a solution, what are the clues a player is meant to find at each step, and what is the thought process you want from the player? The more steps, the more clues, and the bigger the leap of logic, the more likely you are to run into this adventure game logic problem. It’s often the biggest and most complicated puzzles that need the most fine-tuning.

A good rule of thumb, and one that Blue Prince implements in its early stages, is giving a player multiple clues that lead to the same puzzle and provide hints for the solution. This system works well with the game’s randomness (there’s no guarantee that players will encounter the exact right clue at the right time), but also by giving players additional information. If one clue doesn’t work, the second can help them reconfigure their thought process. I will delve into this subject more in a later section.

But at a certain point Blue Prince runs into this adventure game logic problem. It’s hard to say what the exact percentage is, and as I mentioned before the mere existence is not the issue. I think the adventure game logic that exists becomes a serious problem when combined with other elements, particularly its randomness. But it serves as the groundwork for everything else that needs to follow.

Randomness

Probably the single biggest source of frustration in Blue Prince is the randomness. This element is really a double-edged sword – it serves both as a major strength and weakness to the game. But to see why, I need to provide some explanation of how the game works.

In Blue Prince you begin each day in the entrance hall of a large manor. The manor is composed of a grid of 45 squares (nine rows, five columns, with you starting in the bottom center). Each room has a certain number of doors, and when you interact with a door you are given a choice of three rooms to pick from to create the next room in the manor. Those rooms are largely static – they have a variety of effects that don’t change, and the rooms are always going to be laid out in the same way, with only the orientation and a few random items changing each time you pick it.

The initial charm of the game comes from the fact that those rooms reveal hints to larger puzzles, which often require you to record information to be used elsewhere. Sometimes the puzzle involves creating a specific room, sometimes it involves putting together a specific combination, and sometimes it involves observing a variety of rooms or rooms in different spots on the grid.

Your initial goal is to reach the other end of the manor. This seems simple enough, but you quickly find yourself running into problems.

The first is resources. As you get deeper into the manor, you’ll encounter doors that are locked and require keys. Keys can sometimes be found lying around, or purchased (which means finding money as you explore). But keys are a finite resource that depend on random chance. If all of your exits are locked and you run out of keys, the day is over.

Likewise, a large number of rooms require gems to create. Again, these are a resource that you find in various ways each run. Rooms can cost between one and five gems, and often it’s important to make sure you have a decent supply on hand each time you open a door. While you can never be stuck because you can’t create a room at all (you will always draw at least one room that is free), those free rooms can leave you with no exits, meaning the day is done.

And speaking of which, dead ends. I mentioned that rooms have various exits, but sometimes the only exit is the door you came in from. There are a lot of rooms that have no additional exits, and sometimes that’s fine. You will often be trying to make sure you have at least a few pathways available to you. But the randomness of the game means that as hard as you try, the game may hand you a series of rooms that loop back in on themselves (if an exit leads into the wall of an already existing room, the door is simply boarded up so you can’t go through, and you effectively have a dead end). Or it may create too many dead ends, and you have to keep looping back.

Which leads to the final resource – exhaustion. Each time you transition from one room to another, you spend one “step,” which represents your exhaustion for the day. If you run out of steps, the day ends. Usually this isn’t a problem, but if you wind up creating a long pathway that leads to a dead end, you may then have to walk all the way back to the beginning to start a new path, using up a lot of steps. While that does become part of the strategy for how you pick rooms, as a resource you’re still relying on the randomness to either hand you the right rooms, or else to hand you the resources (food) to increase your steps so you can keep going.

So as a player you’re contending with all of these variables, which could be annoying enough after a while.

Generally at the start the randomness works in the game’s favor in a couple of ways. Firstly, it introduces a bit of wonder. Because you don’t know what rooms exist and what is in them, you have what feels like a neat secondary goal along with your primary goal of getting to the other end.

Which corresponds to the other positive bit about the randomness: you have a lot of threads to explore in terms of puzzles. When you start out you accumulate something like four to six extra goals, and usually achieving one goal creates another in its place. So not only does creating a room you’ve never seen before give you a sense of freshness, but there’s the potential that it leads to a new thread to tug on.

That loop at the beginning works well with the roguelike nature of the game. You always feel like you have something to accomplish, and just about any run will let you get something done on a given day. So you’re still feeling like you’ve made progress, even if the game screwed you over in one way or another.

But that sense of progress gets exhausted the further you get, because the number of threads starts to narrow down. At a certain point you may only have one goal that you’re pursuing, with only a vague sense of what to do. Or you may have a specific goal which requires a very specific thing to be done. As an example, around the middle or late part of the game you unlock an item which gives you additional clues if you draft a certain kind of room on the eighth “rank” (the game’s word for “row”) of the manor. For that kind of room there are somewhere in the range of 40-50, and each room contains a different clue. And as I mentioned, there are only five spaces on the grid on a given row. So on a given day you can create at most five rooms to get five clues. And that relies on a) you not getting locked out and thus not even reaching rank eight, b) you getting the right kind of room, and c) you getting a room that you haven’t seen before. It should be clear how running through the effort to get all of the stars to align here can get maddening.

There are a few components that let you manipulate the randomness a bit, but these components are generally a) locked behind mid-game puzzles that also b) rely on randomness to access. And even then those components are probably only mildly to moderately helpful.

The most intense points of frustration this game has given me – and the friends that I’ve talked to – is when the game seems to screw you over. You need to get a specific room and the game just does not seem to want to hand it to you. You need a combination of items and you can only get one of the two or three that you need (items reset each day). You’re making good progress and then you run into a barrier that you can’t get past. And usually these points occur once you have a very specific goal and little else to do.

Obviously the game can’t just have a dozen threads that you pursue forever. The solution isn’t necessarily to expand the number of puzzles for a player to pursue at once, but to give them more tools to deal with the randomness as they get deeper into the game. If they need specific rooms or items, make it far easier for them to get those things.

It could be said, of course, that letting players circumvent the randomness defeats the purpose of the game being a roguelike. And that’s true. But it’s also the case that in your more standard roguelikes the major roadblock to the player is difficulty. Enemies that are strong and can kill you more quickly. The randomness forces players to evaluate their strategies, but ultimately a good roguelike depends on the player’s skill at working with the basic mechanics of the game. As long as you play well enough, you can make it through, and the randomness is usually a bonus to help you get through, not a hindrance. In Blue Prince the randomness is the roadblock. Once you’re fighting the game itself, it stops being fun.

Experimentation

Coming off the topic of randomness, I think it’s useful to look at how players experiment when it comes to solving puzzles.

When you encounter a problem and don’t know what to do, the best course of action is to experiment. Think about possible solutions and try them out. For example, a more standard puzzle box game might introduce a new mechanic to you, and so what do you do? Play around with the mechanic. See what it does. Try different interactions and combinations.

Experimentation is important because it both removes incorrect solutions and provides information that can lead to the correct solution. Giving players a space to experiment is important.

But it’s here where the randomness of Blue Prince really gets in the way. If I have an idea about how two rooms might interact, the only way I can test it is by creating those two rooms.

An example which conveys some spoilers.

One room you can draw is a furnace. The furnace has its own particular power, but it also has a special interaction (that you are informed of via an in-game note) with another room called the freezer. There is also a third room – the boiler room – which can be used to power up certain other rooms, of which the furnace is one.

If you create a furnace within a certain range of a freezer, the freezer will heat up and melt various things in there. But the ice chest in the freezer will not heat up. You need to do something else. But as I said, the furnace can be powered up via the boiler room.

So I had a thought: what if I powered up the furnace, and that made it even hotter, and that was the solution to thawing the ice chest?

But as you can guess, that requires getting the boiler room, and then I need the furnace to connect to the boiler room, and then I need to create the freezer within a particular range of the furnace. It took me numerous attempts to get that working, and it constantly seemed like the game just did not want to hand me that combination. But eventually I got it.

It didn’t work.

It’s obviously a bit annoying when you try something that fails. But it stings particularly hard when you have poured so much effort into a solution that fails.

And that’s where the puzzle solving hits a major roadblock in Blue Prince. Because you’re relying on the randomness, you can’t effectively experiment. If you have an idea you may have to go through multiple in-game days just to have a chance to test that idea. It can leave you with a sense that instead of thinking about what the solution could be, you should just search for some clue that will tell you what the solution is – a process that itself is frustrating, since those clues are scattered in various rooms, which means more randomness.

And it should not be ignored the other way in which randomness creates a problem: uncertainty. A good experiment relies on the fact that if it fails, it means that the theory behind it was wrong. But with randomness, you remove some layer of that certainty. Sometimes your experiments will provide hard evidence. But let’s say that your theory involves creating a room where – theoretically – it can’t ever spawn. If you keep trying and the room is never given as an option, does that mean your theory is wrong, or that you’re just really unlucky? A player can get themselves into dead ends that they can’t escape because the game does not provide them with the information they need.

Hence again why tools for dealing with randomness are so important. If you want the player to solve puzzles, you also need to give them a good space to experiment. And if you don’t want them to experiment (perhaps because you want them to put together information from clues), then you need to clearly push them away from that path and direct them to the correct one.

Ambiguity and Triangulation

So let’s imagine that you want to design your game in a way that limits how much players experiment. Maybe you’re worried that players will end up brute forcing solutions instead (and either they’ll be successful, in which case your puzzle probably wasn’t very good, or they’ll fail and get frustrated). Maybe you want players to engage with clues which are relevant to multiple puzzles at once. Maybe you want to effectively teach your player how to solve the kind of puzzles you’re implementing.

Whatever the case may be, the problem you run into is ambiguity. Adventure game logic exists because solutions are not immediately clear. Riddles, hints, ciphers, whatever it is, if the connection is not totally and completely grasped within an instant, then some portion of your players are going to get lost.

And that, on its own, is fine. Experimentation is one of the ways that players deal with ambiguity. A clue could have multiple interpretations, but if you can try out the solution implied by each interpretation, then you have still successfully solved the puzzle.

But as we’ve covered, the randomness of Blue Prince all but prohibits experimentation. So how do you get around that problem?

If one hint could have multiple meanings, then you need a way for players to narrow down the possible meanings. Which usually means additional hints.

In the early game there is a decent amount of this. A note in one room provides a piece of information and also points to somewhere else where you can get more information. You could, if you wanted, try to brute force based off of the one piece you have, but it’s probably better to read that other note first. Additional notes lead to a better understanding of what you’re doing. Let’s call this process “triangulation.”

The consequence of this is that a linear path of logic where a player accomplishes gets a clue to accomplish one task, then gets a clue to accomplish another task, and then gets another clue to accomplish a third task and so on and so on leaves players with too much ambiguity. At each step the player has an opportunity to get confused and lost, and spend hours wandering around. And at a certain point in Blue Prince that wandering loses its value, and the basic gameplay loop becomes frustrating.

The later puzzles in the game run into this problem particularly hard. This problem is then compounded by the solution requiring a setup that involves wrestling with the randomness even more to get working.

To get around this, you need multiple pieces of information to work with, all of which point to the same solution but none of which directly states that solution. The player can then piece together the information, but each piece also helps to eliminate certain incorrect lines of logic.

As a simplified example, you have hidden a special key in a place a player would never normally look. They might have passed the key dozens of times, but not thought to look for it. You hide a note in another room, or maybe a torn piece of note, which gives a partial clue about what the player is looking for and where to look. Another note or the remaining torn piece reveals the rest of the location. Any one piece is insufficient, but also any one piece gives you some sense both of where you could look if you wanted to just brute force it, and depending on how the note is designed, may give you some indication that there is more information to find.

You can expand this idea in a variety of ways. The completed clue doesn’t even need to provide a direct solution, as long as it helps push the player in the correct direction and away from wrong directions.

Triangulating clues like this is especially important where players have a large space to explore. Let’s return to the torn note idea. You’ve located a partially torn note, which implies that there is a piece remaining. So you want to look for it. But where? Imagine now that the game has set you in a large world and the note could be anywhere. The prospect of searching for it is going to feel daunting, because you have no sense of where to go. You can only explore every inch of the world and hope you find it.

The same is true here in Blue Prince. With 110 rooms (plus other places) to explore, the idea of just walking around scouring every surface for something to interact with or a note that you might have missed is going to feel annoying. Especially when checking all 110 rooms relies on randomness, since you could spend several in-game days trying to get a specific room to spawn.

So it’s important that clues point to locations. Limiting the amount of time that the player is wandering around aimlessly is important, because these are moments when the player is going to feel frustrated just while playing the game itself, before accounting for whatever friction exists within the game’s design. More clues with firmer information, and leaving less to interpretation and more to deduction.

Goals and Breadcrumbs

Speaking of wandering around aimlessly, players need goals.

Blue Prince does pretty well early on. As I mentioned, when you begin you are given a specific goal: to reach the 46^th room of a 45 room estate. When you begin and look at your map, you see a room called the Antechamber, which gives you a clear place to work toward.

Once you reach that 46^th room, the game isn’t actually done. There are some new puzzles to solve, for which you have one set of hints. Those expand out and as you begin working on those you then start to get a better sense of what you can be doing, though pursuing a given lead still requires a bit of experimentation with different interpretations.

But in my own playthrough once I got through that set of puzzles I didn’t really have anything left to do. Admittedly this was due to something that happened with how I had played the game: I had unlocked the ability to perform a specific action in a specific room, but by the time I unlocked the ability I was no longer really bothering with the room, so I never checked to follow up (in reviewing the language of what I had unlocked, I still found it to be misleading about what had actually happened).

And even when I finished that new objective up I still had no sense of what to do next.

The further you get into the game, the more nebulous the clues become. Which makes sense to a degree. You would expect that the puzzles should get tougher as you progress. But that difficulty doesn’t quite work the same way as in other games.

When thinking about your traditional game, difficulty increases because the player is getting stronger. Either their character is becoming more powerful, or the player is becoming more knowledgeable about mechanics and strategy, or both. Whatever the case, giving enemies more health or having them hit harder or have more complicated moves is a direct response to the player’s growth. There is a clear correspondence to how the player and difficulty are progressing.

Even for puzzle box games that progression works because each tougher level builds directly on what has come before. New mechanics are introduced slowly, then in more complicated variations, and then thrown in with other mechanics, and so on and so on.

But adventure puzzle games don’t face that same kind of linear progression. If you’ve solved a puzzle with a word game where you compared pictures, that doesn’t really prepare you for unmixing anagrams, which doesn’t prepare you for a mathematical puzzle. The skillsets don’t really line up, so there’s nothing that’s being built on.

Which isn’t to say that these games aren’t allowed to get more difficult. But rather that the difficulty needs to be in the direct confrontation of the clues themselves, and not in simply locating those clues. The player should at least be sitting in front of something wondering what they’re supposed to do with a puzzle, rather than trying to find the puzzle in the first place.

And starting in the middle of the game and especially later on there is a lot more wandering around, trying to figure out what to do next. Either you don’t know where to go because you don’t know your next objective, or you know your objective but only in a vague sense, and thus you don’t know what to actually do to further that objective.

So breadcrumbs are needed to help guide the player to the right spot. The amount of time a player should be wandering around should be limited.

Again, one of the strengths of the early game is that there are so many threads for a player to pull on that there is a good chance they’ll just stumble on an objective. At that stage, wandering around is good precisely because the player is learning.

But once the player has reached the stage that they have a feel for the game and know what they’re trying to do, wandering stops being fun and starts becoming tedious. In something like Myst, if you needed to backtrack over areas to scour for clues at the very least you knew where everything was. In Blue Prince your attempt to retread old ground is obviously hindered by the random rooms. Trying to visit a small handful of rooms could take an hour because you need to spend several in-game days building an entire manor just to get one or two to spawn for you at a time.

Hence the need for those bits of guidance. The player needs to not be searching everything, but instead given a clear place to go. Put a different way, you’re likely to run into clues which tell you “do this thing somewhere.” But really what you need is a clue that says “do something at this spot.”

Of course, even that kind of clue leads to problems because that “something” may well require an action that involves some specific item. If you don’t realize that connection, you could very well wind up at the spot and find nothing, wondering if you misinterpreted the clue. We’re back to the ambiguity problem.

Concluding Remarks

As I start this conclusion I am done. Approximately 80 hours of gameplay (which is probably a small amount, given that there are a bunch of things I looked up or decided not to do), and I have accomplished the main tasks that the game has set out.

I’m sure the analysis above feels extremely negative, and will turn some people off from the game. I can’t really prevent that, at the end of the day.

But I do want to end on a note of positivity. I did mention that the last 20-30 hours made me deeply miserable. But there is definitely something to this game that felt deeply interesting.

One thing is that so many of the puzzles felt actually engaging. Having played a number of games in this genre, you tend to find a lot that are too simplistic. Puzzles that make you feel clever, but don’t actually require much mental effort. Blue Prince – at least its early game – gave me this feeling of discovery that felt more tangible. Even something as simple as locating a solution that could be immediately used on a puzzle felt more like a massive discovery because I might not have been pointed to it. I was being rewarded for paying attention.

Whatever the overall weakness, there is something to the game that I still enjoyed. I do wish I had known what to expect. I think if I had known ahead of time what the puzzles would be and what the payoff would become and how miserable I would end up, I would have quit far earlier.

Indeed, the game does give you a note which all but encourages you to give up. Which says that it’s okay to stop and leave the puzzle solving to others. But this note showed up something like 65-70 hours in for me. Well after I would have wanted to give up.

But at the end of the day I do appreciate the experience. I think the game is interesting for what it tries to do, and interesting in the ways that it falters. And that’s why I wanted to write about it.