Nothing turns me off a game faster than hearing you have to open up a notebook to really make sense of what you’re doing. So why am I obsessed with Blue Prince?
I am extremely late to the Blue Prince train, I know. Part of that was because I was terrified of its puzzles. Whenever someone describes a game with puzzles as hard, or complex, or, most tellingly, that they will require me to take careful notes, I usually know that game isn’t going to be for me. My fear stems from the fact that I am bad at math, and eventually, every puzzle in a game like this will become a math puzzle. Let me just save myself from some future pain when I’m forced to do a series of complex calculations to unlock some kind of phlebotinum.
Another reason I avoid these kinds of games is that I feel like notes about a video game is a waste of nice stationary. I journal in my journals! They’re all meant to house all my genius thoughts and nonsense rambles, the one place that is not consumed by my thoughts about video games. I know this is probably a problem unique to me—most people enjoy the tangible evidence of the time you spent figuring something out. It just feels like work to me.
What helped me get over these two hesitations were two things. One, I didn’t realize the game was a roguelike. For some reason, the knowledge that I could spend a couple hours just fucking around, trying to figure out the broader rules of the puzzle before me while watching baseball, was a comfort. The other was the solution to my fear of wasting stationary: I grabbed it for the Switch 2, where it’s really easy to take a whole bunch of screenshots.
I am not very good at this game, not yet. But it’s pretty cool to finally understand what made people love it.
How about you guys? Have you played Blue Prince? Love the kinds of puzzles I abhor? A complete sicko for another type of game? I wanna hear it all.
