Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.
So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.
The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.
People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.
You’re missing many of the most iconic games on PC, namely stuff like League of Legends, DOTA, WoW, Overwatch, Runescape… Kerrigan is the only one you’ve included that kinda fits this group.
Now, to be honest, I haven’t touched most of these games myself, so I can’t tell you their mascots. But at least the MOBAs are bound to have one.
Pretty much all of those are characters from franchises that quickly jumped to consoles, or had the intention of multiplatform releases from the very start. I’m not sure any of them are very fitting.
So on that note, the least nonsensical mascot for PC gaming in particular I can think of is that dwarf, whoever he is, from the box art of World of Warcraft. Or possibly the orc from the alternate version. WoW is earth-shatteringly popular and has basically defined the entire private lives of a depressing number of people, not to mention it’s the sole and singular thing even non-gamers think of when you mention MMORPGs. And it has only appeared on home computers. Never consoles. Other Warcraft properties have, but not WoW.
As a pc gamer, I disagree with the premise. PC gaming doesn’t have a mascot squad because PC Gaming isn’t a monolith, whereas Nintendo (or Xbox or Playstation) is.
You want THE PC gaming mascot? It’s Steve from Minecraft. No other character, not even Doom Guy, comes even remotely close.
Maybe I’m biased (see profile picture) but I’d argue that Kerbals from KSP fit.
KSP exists on consoles but almost everyone plays on PC. It was one of the first successes of the early access model which for better and worse has affected gaming as a whole. It’s influential too. The internet is full of anecdotes about KSP being the reason someone became interested in space, got an engineering degree, or even getting jobs at NASA or private space.
Agree with Gordon Freeman 100%. I might also suggest the Guide from Terraria and the CS:GO player models. Maybe also the player character from Noita, the goat from Goat Simulator, Quote from Cave Story.
These ones may be more niche, but for me personally I would also add Guy Spelunky, Princess Remedy, and Worm (Worms Armageddon).
Most that you included aren't really associated with PC anymore though. Geralt, Doomguy, Vault boy, BJ Blazkowicz etc are very popular on consoles too. The only one I would say qualifies for real would be Gordon Freeman, since half-life is usually referred to as one of the great PC classics.
Sure, a lot of these characters have gone multiplatform. But let’s be real, they’ll always have PC in their blood.
Doomguy was fragging demons on a beige tower long before he set foot on a console. Geralt was busy crashing Windows installs before he ever picked up a PlayStation trophy. Vault Boy practically has “runs best on PC” stamped on his forehead. Console gamers might have visiting rights now, but these mascots grew up in the wild west of PC gaming, and that’s where their roots (and all the weird mods) are.
And honestly, you can play Mario games on PC too—emulation is a thing—but everyone still thinks of Mario as a Nintendo icon. Same logic applies here. PC or bust.
Define “long.” I disagree with the Doomguy proposal explicitly, because Doom appeared on the Sega 32x in November of 1994 which was barely a year after the initial PC release. One of the defining aspects of gaming in the mid '90s was the monumentally cynical gold rush of trying to cram Doom onto any damn fool console as fast as possible, in a vain attempt to capture part of the lightning and make those sales. And until the Playstation and arguably the N64, every attempt failed spectacularly in various ways.
The definitive Doom experience remaining locked to the PC for those few years was absolutely not for a lack of trying. Every greedy video game exec on the planet wanted Doom on their system. id themselves assisted with several of these ports in various ways and they had absolutely no intention of leaving Doom only on PC, either, if they could help it.
Totally fair, but let’s put “long” in context—by ’90s gaming standards, a year was practically an eternity. That’s like five TikTok trends or three failed live-service shooters today.
And sure, there were console ports flying around faster than a cacodemon on nightmare mode, but let’s be honest: nobody was lining up to play Doom on the 32X, Jaguar, or 3DO. Most people didn’t even know what a 32X was, let alone own one.
The SNES version had about as much horsepower as a Roomba with a dying battery.
Meanwhile, on PC, Doom was running smooth, loud, and proud, exactly how John Romero intended—mouse, keyboard, and all. Even the execs chasing that gold rush had to admit: the real party was on DOS. If you wanted Doom at its best, you were booting it up on a beige box, not squinting at a blurry mess on a doomed add-on.
So yeah, everyone wanted Doom, but only the PC really delivered. The ports were like decaf coffee. Sure, you can drink it, but why would you?
The aesthetic of Starfield is excellent. The planets are beautiful but you can only access one small square of surface at a time. The ship flight and navigation is simplistic but the combat and boarding is fun. In fact I can’t really think of a better game for ship boarding.
But overall Starfield somehow is less than the sum of its parts.
As an Elite Dangerous Enjoyer (I enjoy Star Citizen too, but SC is more “rule of cool” than “rule of real” than Elite) I appreciate the more or less “grounded in reality” setting that Bethesda created with Starfield. Most planets are giant, empty, desolate rocks or iceballs, which is exactly what one would expect from real life planets. And I suppose this may be a big reason why many people were disappointed. It seems that many expected the game to be “Star Wars Skyrim,” but Star Wars is very unrealistic with regards its planetary depcitions. Planets are varied and generally not shown to be mostly empty, desolate space rocks. Full world cities, jungles, magma, gas storms, etc. Likewise I more or less find the gameplay enjoyable, even with its annoyances (most of which are fixable with mods that are available right now).
However, I actually found myself very disappointed with the visual aesthetics of the game. When Bethesda marketed the game, they described it as “NASA-Punk.” But I suppose my disappointment comes from them failing to communicate what that meant to them, since it obviously meant something different to me.
When I first heard the term “NASA-Punk,” I became excited to see an abundant use of white and black, with copius amounts of shiny gold foil. I expected to see exposed mechanics and rocket piping. Basically, a mood board of NASA created technology from the beginning of NASA up until now. Ships inspired by the Lunar Landers, Lunar Rovers, etc. Bethesda on the other hand, seems to have created an aesthetic of “what would NASA look like 1000 years from now?” Since the two are so drastically different, you likely can imagine my disappointment at what I see as a weird, ugly aesthetic for many of the ship designer parts and space suits.
Holly shit a New Ayaneo Flip DS. :D I have the first one that released last year and I love it. If you love WiiU, 3DS and DS games. This is your device. It emulates them flawless. It also emulates Switch games. You can also use a USB-C laptop dock to use it as a Mini PC or play on your TV. On Vacation’s it’s my gaming and workstation at once. The only downside is the Price but besides that… Man I love that thing!
I’ll be honest, they fucked this game over hard in my opinion.
It really does feel like they separated everyone into teams, and none of the teams spoke to each other once. They all just delivered their chunk of the game without connecting pieces together.
Base building was a nightmare, and that’s the primary reason I downloaded it in the first place.
Then I finished the main quest and spoilers ahead for anyone who cares
spoilerThe concept of “well now you’re out of the universe so let’s go to a new one right at the start of the game again but this time a few things might be slightly different” was fun until all my hard work figuring things out with the bases got erased by “and by the way literally everything except your experience and abilities has been reset and you can either choose continuing the ability tree and maybe solve some mysteries of who built everything or you can care about the current universe but you can’t do both”
Kind of killed literally every desire I had to play the game. Especially when they patched the easily accessed chests that at least gave me a shortcut to some things.
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