Blue Prince Steam Charts & Stats

TLDR: Brilliant game idea with a major design flaw. After 30 hours and about 80 in-game days, I give up. The RNG in this game is way out of control. I have notes for half a douzand different puzzles and know what step must be done next to proceed in them. But, for all of them I need a specific combination of drafted rooms and collected resources, both of which are randomized. In the last ~30 in-game days, there was pretty much no progress, at least nothing that helped in any way. At this point, the game has just become boring and I am not motivated to grind through another douzand runs in the hope of being so lucky that the game allows me to actually solve a puzzle. The mixed reviews totally make sense when you consider the huge RNG factor of the game: If you get lucky, you may have a very nice progression throughout the entire game. If not, well, then the game just starts sucking at some point. I hope they make a patch some day that gives players more control over what rooms you draft and what items you can find.

You’ll notice a significant number of hours logged at the time of this review. Most of that time was spent in the debugger, trying to mod the game into something more tolerable for me. I’ll get to the negatives later, but let’s start with the positives. This game excels at world-building and has a deeply satisfying theme. I would even say the storytelling is excellent - if not for the fact that by the end, we don’t get the full story. Still, the parts that are present are engaging, clever, and refreshingly non-cliche. Despite the shortcomings that frustrated me from the start - and never really improved - the game still managed to captivate me, as it has many others. I first picked up the game in mid-April, shortly after its release, and just finished it now in early June. Over these past two months, I interacted with it in some form almost every day. If you can overlook the flaws that I couldn’t, you might enjoy it. As for me, I walked away with something else entirely: a deeper understanding of how Unity games are structured internally, a grasp of Playmaker and how it works, insight into how IL2CPP translation functions, and knowledge of how mod frameworks like BepInEx and MelonLoader interact with it. During my deep dive, I also discovered a crashing bug in Unity Explorer - caused by MelonLoader, which was caused by the IL2CPPInterop library, which was caused by a minor bug in the AsmResolver library that IL2CPPInterop relies on. That was a fascinating journey. I met a lot of clever and interesting people and learned a ton of new things. To each their own, I suppose. In the end, I got a working mod (read: cheat) that made the game more playable for me by removing most of its randomness. But you’re not here to read about my modding adventures - you want to hear about the game. So here it goes: the negatives. Quality of Life (QoL) Issues • The game lacks basic QoL features: no key bindings, limited screen resolution support (leading to a cropped screen), and no option to save mid-run - even though runs can last more than an hour, sometimes two. • The mouse pointer is barely visible on the screen, which is particularly frustrating since the game includes ridiculously small, hidden point-and-click areas. Even if you know they exist, they’re nearly impossible to spot, and the barely visible pointer makes it even worse. Of course, you wouldn’t even know they exist unless you stumbled upon spoilers, because… Puzzle Design and Clue System The further you progress, the vaguer the clues become. Players often cycle through dozens of interpretations before stumbling onto something that works. By that point, it’s not a feeling of cleverness - it’s exhaustion. That’s not how good puzzles should work. A well-crafted puzzle should make the solution feel like a natural conclusion, where all the clues finally fall into place. That never happens in Blue Prince. Instead, you’re left sorting through dead ends, vague foreshadowing, and elements that simply don’t fit. Apologists claim this is intentional - either the inconsistencies are red herrings or their meaning hasn’t yet been discovered. Ironically, these two excuses contradict each other. Even after solving a puzzle, it’s not always clear which clues were useful and which were meaningless. You keep wondering if certain details are connected to something else. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re just plain useless. The game never strives for the “I’m proud I solved it” feeling - it’s more like, “I blindly fumbled my way to the answer.” Unlike similar titles, Blue Prince lacks a journal or clue catalog to help players organize their discoveries. Many other games provide tools to help you track connections, giving a sense of progression as you piece things together. They even offer checkmarks when you correctly solve something. This game? It offers no assistance. At all. Visual Clarity Issues The art style makes loot almost imperceptible. There’s no highlighting or outlining of interactive objects, and as mentioned earlier, the mouse pointer barely changes. Unless you already know that a hammer is collectible, you could walk right past it without realizing it. Even if you do know, it blends into the scene so well that your brain registers it as background decoration rather than an item to pick up. Time-Gated Puzzles Certain puzzles require waiting until a specific time - sometimes 15–25 minutes in real time. Go watch cat videos while you wait. You can’t do anything else because every action consumes steps, forcing you to remain idle. This, in my opinion, is inexcusable. Hidden Pathways Remember the hammer blending into the scenery? The same issue applies to side tunnels. Some passages are practically invisible due to the graphical style and can only be spotted from specific angles. You either need to know exactly where to look or accidentally stumble upon them. I once spent five minutes searching for a tunnel I had already found and used before. Misinformation and RNG Nightmares The game occasionally presents incorrect or ambiguous information. SWNSNG/SWANSONG aren’t acronyms, as far as anyone knows, just like D8 isn’t a portmanteau. But the biggest flaw? Blue Prince does not respect your time. Even if you have all the necessary clues and know exactly what you need to do, executing your plan can take hours due to RNG. You might need one or two specific rooms to proceed, but with a pool of 110 possible rooms, getting the right combination requires numerous failed attempts. That’s tedious, not fun. Modding the game to bypass this? That was fun. Final Recommendation Before buying, try it on a friend’s PC or watch early non-spoilery gameplay footage. When you’re still in the exploration phase, RNG is tolerable. When you need one specific room to progress? It’s significantly less enjoyable. So try before you buy. Unless you’re a masochist - or enjoy debugging - you might not like this. Hardcore genre fans probably already know they want it, so to them, I ask: please don’t flood the comments telling me I’m wrong. I’ll just disable them now for good measure.

You've probably heard that this is a puzzle game in which people have spent hundreds of hours solving it, and you may think "oh, so there's hundreds of hours of puzzles!" This is a half-truth. Yes, you can probably solve almost every early and mid-game puzzle, and may even take you 100 hours to do so--largely because this game deliberately slows your progress down by attaching an anchor to your foot. If you didn't have to spend thirty seconds to a minute or longer getting from place to place in this game, and if you didn't have to rely on luck day after day to advance certain puzzles, these puzzles would probably cover 10-20 hours? Additionally, on completion of the mid-game the story just kinda peters out. There may well be some interesting and amazing fantastic ending to this game (doubtful) but if there is, nobody has yet solved it, and you're almost certainly not going to solve it on your own. This is the problem of the Crowdsourcing Puzzle trend--like Animal Well, you as an individual player can only play up to a certain point and despite the fact there's still clearly more secrets, you have practically no chance to solve them on your own, and trying to do so will make that anchor on your foot weigh even more because it will take *even more* time to chase down sparser and sparser clues. But of course, if you accept that these puzzles need to be crowdsourced, well, it's either too late to get in on being a part of that crowdsource (it's already been solved by someone else and crowdsourcing amounts to "looking it up on the wiki") or else you need to become one of the game's elite by joining a discord server and devoting those hundreds of deliberately-slowed hours to chasing down clues. And naturally, when you've accepted that you're basically just looking up the answers for anything already solved, it's then a matter of your personally executing those tasks, which is not a particularly fun or engaging thing to do after dozens of hours of drafting rooms. Now, I do not like that the Steam review thingy requires a binary Yes or No. The first ~30 hours of this game are perfectly fine for the price of entry, and you may even desire to finish the midgame. And maybe you're the kind of person who isn't dissuaded by my personal view of futility at the endgame and want to try it anyway, and will find fulfillment in doing so. In which case, go ahead and buy it! It's interesting! There are still puzzles here that you can solve and they are very good puzzles! But you need to brace yourself, because if you're not ready to put this game down at the very moment you are done with it, it's going to eventually peter out into a long, long slog without a real point to any of it.

If you purchase this game here is what you can expect: 5% puzzle solving 5% deciphering poorly worded hints 90% waiting on rng to let you progress with the game This game has an amazing story and atmosphere, but it would be far more entertaining to watch an edited play-through than to waste your time playing it like I have :)

I so wanted to love this game. But I don’t. I consider myself to have enough curiosity to want to explore, but the way Blue Prince is set, that curiosity will fizzle out very quickly. The point of the game is the “random” mechanic. Each time you encounter an unlocked door, you get a choice of three rooms to spawn from your draft pool, some rooms need resources to be spawned. Inside those rooms you may find items you’ll need or clues to solve this whole puzzle. The slow trickling of clues was not a problem for me, I found one that kept me entertained for an hour and when you do resolve something it is so satisfying, you feel like an absolute genius. The issue was when I finally found a crucial piece of puzzle and realized that to test this theory I would have to get lucky and get to spawn one room with a precise item, another room that has a gem requirement to spawn and also get to the end, hoping I have enough resources to do all of that. I am extremely unlucky with dice rolls and games of chance in general so this was just not happening for me across several days. As any other good detective, it seems I, too will have a cold, unsolved case that will haunt me.

Look, the game is INCREDIBLE. Add mid-run saving, and I'll sing its praises for all eternity. For now it has to be a thumbs down, this one single accessibility problem is *way* too huge to be acceptable.

I really like this game and I think that the first play pattern is particularly enjoyable leading up to 'beating' the game in the most simple sense. On that track everything seems essentially 'fair'. After that, however, many of the further puzzles are weaker or too underclued so it is frustrating and I did, alas, reach to the internet for clues and solutions to gain closure on them.

First, I frankly LOVED the game and have spent 80 initially lovely hours playing it. [h1]BUT![/h1] The developers failure to include a save & quit feature make it more and more frustrating to have to complete entire runs ("days") - that can stretch in to multiple hours. This is easily the most requested feature in the discussions. A LOT of people have pointed out that this prevent people fitting game sessions into their lives without having to go to ridiculous lengths like leaving their computer running overnight etc. Still the devs fail to comment on this with a word, and that frankly is just disrespectful of paying customers time. Another thing that similarly rub lots of players the wrong way is the very slow movement pace and many unskippable cutscenes, from forced pop-ups with descriptions of items being the same the thousandth time as the first time one pick it up to completing common actions, not least using in-game computers. This again fails to respect players time and what was initially enjoyable exploration gradually turns into grating grind. There are more QoL-features missing, like the lack of a separate music volume or the fact that the game DOES NOT MUTE OR PAUSE IN GAME TIME in menu or EVEN WHEN TABBING OUT! Combine this with the fact that some of the games most tedious puzzles demand waiting for specific times of day and you get the situation where having to prioritize a phone call, child or ANY real-world demand may grant you a "punishment" from the game. There is also a heavy RNG element. Early on it’s not that much of a problem, since there is so much to discover, and you can always roll with the punches and redirect as appropriate. But the more you have already seen and the more specific and complex outcomes you are trying to achieve the more repetitive and annoying the game becomes. There are also a instance of the game not warning the player that one of the more powerful meta-progression elements is a limited resource, while otherwise ALWAYS doing so. This mean lots of players will end up realizing that they have squandered it only when it's too late. With restarting the entire game, resetting all progression, the only alternative to just sucking it up. This would be easily fixable but the devs studiously ignore this one to. Taken together my feeling went from enjoyment and wonder to tedium and irritation. Frankly it's hard not to feel that the devs are so full of themselves that they fail to just show basic respect for the fact that their audience may have an actual lives that are - gasp - MORE important than their fabulous piece of art. This is a pity since the game has LOTS of good sides. It's certainly not a case of a bad game - that would NOT have prompted me to write my first Steam review ever. It's a very original and in many ways GOOD game with fatal flaws that become apparent with time, once the positives have drawn you in and engaged you. I will not be playing Blue Prince again before it AT LEAST has a proper save feature and a few other key QoL issues have been addressed. My prediction therefore is that I probably will NEVER play it again, and my recommendation, unfortunately, must be to not get the game. IF these things were fixed this would change to a STRONG endorsement.

If you like immersive, difficult, clever, varied, puzzles, this is the game. layered to an extent that boggles the mind. all you could want from a game. i'm not done but i am reaching a point where i am ready to accept hints from others to tie up loose ends.

This game is special. Blue Prince is a super hardcore puzzle game with lots of wonder and adventure thrown in. The game plays out as follows: You are a young boy exploring a huge manor where you create, ie. "Draft" the next rooms as you click on the doors. Every door you click on, you receive a choice of 3 rooms to create the next room. Essentially you build the huge manor yourself daily, unlocking the mysteries within, with new items and new rooms to explore. However when each "in game" day ends (about 20 minutes to 45 minutes), the manor resets itself and you have to start all over again from scratch. I played the game for over 35 hours, and received the base game ending. I watched most of the late game endings on youtube to save myself 100 hours of playing. I'll get into that more later. + There are more secrets and puzzles in this game than probably any game ever made. Some people with over 100 hours are still finding new material to study and secrets to find. + The game is an intricate work of art. The planning and design that went into this game is an immense achievement. I have no idea how the developers even could get all the inter-connected events straight on their story board. + The music in the game is beautiful, absolutely fantastic and relaxing. + The game is super addicting at times. It draws you in and gets you thinking about it even when you're not at the computer. - This game is absolutely not for casual gamers, or gamers that get frustrated with RNG. There is an element of luck to this game. You can literally spend 5 hours doing the same thing over and over again trying to obtain one special item. - You will probably have to use a guide for the late game puzzles. They are INSANE. They make Myst and Riven feel like games for babies. If you do not use a guide finding out these puzzles would literally take hundreds of hours. I just don't have the time for it. Overall: For die hard gamers that enjoy extremely well made, difficult, obtuse puzzles: 10/10. For casual gamers that want a nice relaxing puzzle game: 5/10. You probably won't reach an ending. For everyone else: 0/10. Don't even try it you'll get frustrated!