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.
Just wanted to say thanks for your posts and seeing as it’s almost like a blog ask: is there a way to subscribe to these posts on lemmy in a RSS reader?
I think if you click on anyone’s profile in the Lemmy web UI (or any community) then you can click a little RSS button to get this link, not sure if it can distinguish between posts and comments though
A lovely read for Saturday morning, thank you. I’m really surprised to learn that Cyberpunk is running sub HD on the Switch 2 and then being upscaled. Maybe I don’t really understand it properly but I guess the filters and technology hide the jank?
is the game an mmo? or is it more like a survival craft game like Rust? I guess i’m just realizing that this is coming from the Conan: Exiles dev. That game had a decent loop but it was janky as all hell. How “unfinished” does this game feel?
Not sure if you’re trolling or what, but I still play MK Wii regularly with friends on local co op. Used to play it on the console, I now emulate it on a steam deck. There’s nothing that matches the quality and charm of the game on any platform and I say this as a regular opponent of Nintendo. I don’t find it unfair as it strikes a good balance between skill and luck. Everyone I’ve played with, gamers or not, pretty much agree.
I was enjoying right up to the point where I stopped making progress and started getting frustrated at the random aspects of it. Even some of the self contained puzzles were taking a bit of trial and error.
The last puzzles are likely going to take a lot more hours than I’m willing to give it, not because they’re hard but because they require the stars to align before it’ll let you even try them. I stopped playing a while ago now, and I haven’t felt the urge to go back.
Ohhh well because it’s casual fun I suppose. Why is Mario party fun? Sure it’s RNG bullshit but the fun part is playing with friends.
Mario Kart World is not a 9/10 game. It’s a 7 at best compared to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
I’m waiting for Sonic CrossWorlds to see what a Game it brings. The creative director was passively trash talking Mario Kart so let’s see if it can back up the talk
I do not understand how world is as highly rated as it is. The levels are awful, too big and lacking anything to make them stand out, moving between tracks is dull and just leads to extra win-moring, auto attaching to rails fucks up more often than not causing you to over compensate or just jump off of it by accident, it feels like they game just overrides your input sometimes even without auto steering, 24 players adds nothing but chaos if you aren’t leading the pack and is likely the reason levels are way too wide and featureless, and I miss custom horns per character.
World is a 7 at best and 8 is like a 9.
Edit; oh yeah free roam is worthless. The list of events in DS was better without contributing to fucking up the level design to fit the gimmick
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