Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece | Hacker News Reader

Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

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188 pointsadrianhon115 comments

After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it.

The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the next run so it didn't matter that much. After that first hour, the game became a slog. I encountered the same rooms, solved the same two puzzles for resources and was constantly praying for the RNG to give me something new. There is some RNG manipulation, but not enough to mitigate the boring part of the game. There are a few interesting overarching puzzles, but most of them are wrapped in multiple layers of RNG.

For example, for one puzzle you need a specific item that randomly spawns, use it in a room that randomly spawns which you need to unlock with another room that also randomly spawns. It took me 6 hours for the game to give me a run where I got all three of those things in a single run. The reward? Some resources that I have next to no use for and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.

I have absolutely no idea where the praise for the game comes from. Maybe this game is perfect for those who are really into roguelites, but for me personally it just feels like the game is wasting my time for no reason at all.

> many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends

Since each room can only appear once, you can minimize this by strategically choosing to place dead end rooms early on in the lower southeast/southwest, and edges generally. Then always make sure you have gems as you move north, so you can usually pick good rooms.

Also, there's a great book on drafting that you can find at the Library (of course you need to draw the Library twice, one to request the book and one more to get it - another issue with the RNG)

> After playing the game for 10+ hours

You paid $30 for it. Did you get $30 worth of entertainment from it? $3/hr sounds pretty good, and if all it did was not live up to your expectations because of what other people been saying, I'd say that's still money well spent, just you gotta adjust how much stock you put into what those particular people say as relates to good you enjoy something.

For me, a dead end after 10 hours of playing feels like frustration. I don't like starting games I can't finish, especially if I rage quit. It stays with me as a painful memory, the opposite of entertainment.

This is fair enough.

When I bought the original Brothers, it took me maybe 10 hours to finish, if even that. It was well worth the cost, amazing game. (Apparently the remake was badly done...)

Some games are in the "experience" category, $30 for 10 amazing hours, great deal. $30 for 10 hours and then a rage quit, not a good deal.

I generally have the same frustration with roguelites as you seem to: every time I start a run, it feels like I'm gambling whether I'll have any fun at all. A bad seed or start can mean losing in ways that feel unfair or boring, like in balatro if you get a bunch of bad hands and bad jokers, you struggle through rounds and hands until you either lose or get an interesting combination. I don't need that kind of gambling in my life when there's tons of games out there where I know I will have fun.

E: I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast. I'll also still try out Blue Prince because people I respect seem to like it.

One common mantra about most roguelites is that every run can be a successful run if you play your cards right. Some will be harder, in others you’ll become unstoppable, but the general idea is that once you get good enough you should be able to win runs. I’m not sure if this holds and is extremely dependent on how balanced the game is, but I think it’s a sane way to approach the genre since it pushes you to improve and generally becomes a rule once you become good enough at some of the games.

One of the key differences between rogue lites and rogue likes is meta progression. In most roguelites you're able to unlock things and get more powerful for future runs. In roguelikes you always have the same starting rng. I definitely agree with you that it's all up to the game to balance the progression through both unlocks and skill improvement so it's not entirely rng. But I also don't think many put much effort into "every run is solvable". Especially for roguelikes.

I'd say it's even worse for roguelites. They tend to balanced assuming the player has done some or most of the meta-progression. Sometimes to the point where it feels the game forces you to lose to experience more of it. (I really liked inscryption up until it forced me to fail 2-3 times because I progressed too much)

With roguelikes at least you are at the intended power level every time, even if some of these games are too RNG reliant.

With real roguelikes (aka games on a grid with turn-based combat), I believe they're not designed to be fair at all. There's so much rng involved, so you will get unexpected and unfair deaths and lots of them.

Roguelike community has a saying - "losing is fun". And while I only played a few traditional rl games and finished none of them, I had great experience while constantly "losing" only a few hours into the run.

In most roguelites I play, losing isn't fun - it's frustrating. There is often very little variety in earlier stages of the game, so if you're bad (and I am) you're stuck replaying the same section for hours, only to get good RNG, go 1 level farther and immediately die to some new mechanic or difficulty spike.

One exception is The Binding Of Isaac, this is probably the best roguelite game I've ever played and nothing comes even close.

There is fair and then there is "fair". I do think most rougelikes spend at least some time on making sure the the default path is usually workable. I think roguelites fall into the trap of relying on meta-progression to push in-game progression too much. Some of the card roguelites I play feel impossible to "win" without meta progression. And in some it feels like they mostly expand complexity. It's a difficult thing to balance. I'm mostly okay with the difficulty spikes because they usually accompany power spikes that you can get with the right choices and rng. I really like the "breaking the game" aspect of roguelites like Balatro. Getting mathematical notation for high scores hits different, even though it's not necessary for beating the normal levels.

> I still quite like Balatro - when it works it's a blast

I enjoyed Balatro for quite a few hours before I had this problem, which is more than enough for me to call it a good game.

Beyond these first few hours though, you need ridiculously high multipliers to succeed. There's way too many jokers and 90% of them are trash by this point. The ones you need have vanishingly small probabilities, and then you need to add those probabilities together to get the combo of jokers required.

I would start a run, and within the first few minutes I would know that the RNG hadn't given me what I needed, reset, start again, repeat.

I looked up some guides, and they'd recommend using specific legendary jokers, which over my entire time playing (maybe 15 hours?) I didn't encounter even once. The only way to get them would be to play hundreds or even thousands of times.

At that point, it doesn't feel like a game anymore. It feels like a gambling addiction.

For me, that's time to call it quits. But I do wonder if the same people who struggle with gambling addiction in the real world are the ones who continue playing here.

At least with Balatro there is ten hours worth of game before your reach this point.

Hades is fun because there is some skill involved with the button mashing to go with the RNG, but it feels like too many games are just dressed up gambling mechanics these days. Balatro is too naked and bare with being clever gambling, plus all the ding ding ding slot machine dopamine special effects.

I really don't agree. When you learn the mechanics well, you can consistently win runs.

There are unbeatable seeds [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/t3habp/the_fi...

Yes, but by consistent I meant like 90%, not 100

Hades relies too heavily on meta progression. You are supposed to grind before winning. The game is not balanced around your original state. I personally hate that because I view it as the game wasting my time but I can understand how it’s supposed to be enjoyable.

Balatro has a different issue for me. Despite having a lot of joker it sometimes feels very RNG reliant and limited once you reach high stakes. Plus the difficulty rises somehow artificially by withdrawing options rather than expending the challenge.

Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me. No other game has the same level of complexity. You get all the tool to limit variance but every choice becomes very significant.

> Slay the Spire remains unbeatable for me.

is there actually something to beat in there?

I thought you rush through opponents, then hit the "collectively with all players of the world apply bajillion damage" and there's nothing more?

I don’t know how to understand your comment. The goal of Slay the Spire is to climb all the way to the heart while picking cards and beating it, preferably on A20 - all the other difficulty levels being basically a tutorial leading to the real game. There is no moment involving all the players of the world and the game is generally very slow so I’m a bit lost.

I swear I remember that when you get to the heart, you get to see something like "you need [huge number] of total damage, damage that has been applied [medium number gets increased by your measly tiny damage]" or maybe "health left [huge non-round number gets decreased by very little]" and then your character dies

I just assumed that it's some online thing where it counts total damage from everyone to finally slay that heart "together"

You get your score shown as damage once you beat the act 3 boss(es) and then go on to act 4 to fight the final boss if you properly collected the three keys which unlock it while climbing.

People win streak gold stake Balatro, A20H slay the spire, unfair slice and dice, and plenty of other games in this category. Nothing wrong with playing a game for 10 hours and being done with it but calling them rng fiestas just because you can’t beat the game on the hardest difficulty every time after 10 hours is a bit dismissive of the level of effort that is put in to getting these games as tightly tuned as they are.

I'm not GP, but I thought I'd weigh in given I basically started this thread. I watch Balatro University who has the longest gold stake streak in Balatro, and while I respect that, I don't think that counters the point that the genre is heavily dependent on RNG. Winning isn't fun by default, and neither is losing boring. But you can win in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting a "broken" start and crushing through all stages) and lose in ways that are boring (e.g. by getting terrible rng that makes each round a slog until you finally lose.) With a rogue{like, lite} you are always at the mercy of RNG to see which of the {win, lose} x {fun, boring} combos you're in for, which when you're busy and have limited time to play games is extremely discouraging.

Having multiple ongoing goals helps mitigate being locked out from one.

> solved the same two puzzles for resources

I'm eager to play more, but this is something that was a worry already an hour in. The logic puzzle I did was good enough and seems like it can be generated procedurally well enough, the "math" puzzle I did wasn't. There's more than that, right?

> and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.

And on top of that, it's hard to know if those clues actually will matter in other runs. I found a safe code in one run. If it takes three runs before the RNG decides the room with the safe will be there, will the code be randomized? I've been trying to avoid spoilers so it's hard to know what matters.

There are plenty more puzzles than that. Some of them sort of metapuzzles

I was also sad to hear about how much RNG is in the game, that is a detractor to what seems like a well put together experience otherwise. If you wanted to give something else a try, and have a PC, I made a first-person puzzle game that's (hopefully) more akin to Antichamber and the puzzle bits of Outer Wilds, called Chroma Zero. There's a demo on steam if you just want to dip your toe in. https://store.steampowered.com/app/3121470/Chroma_Zero/

I've played about an hour and am getting the feeling I won't see it through to an ending.

For anyone wanting a non-RNG puzzler set around a large building I highly recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorelei_and_the_Laser_Eyes

Having played both of these games I agree that Lorelei stands out as a sort of foil for blue prince. And my opinion is that that is a huge endorsement of blue prince. Lorelei’s puzzles felt so inelegant and largely detached from the ideas being explored. Felt like a logic puzzle book, with some esoteric story stuff on top that just did not keep me interested.

Blue prince’s rng is quite well thought out imo. Once you pick up on some of the unwritten rules about the room drafting system and start building strategies around what to prioritize and how to adjust your goals, it starts feeling a lot like many other popular card-based strategy games.

There are weak points, for sure, and your contrasting it with Lorelei makes sense. But Lorelei’s puzzles felt so plain and unchallenging. I like that blue prince is keeping me on my toes.

Lorelei is pretty great in its atmosphere, though the puzzles can be quite disappointing. 80% of the time the solution is "you're overthinking it, it's a number written down somewhere"

Still, I 100%-ed and enjoyed it. Also a shameless plug: I made a mod that tweaks controls to add a back button, a map button, and to allow code locks to spin in both directions

https://github.com/graynk/LoreleiAndSaneControls

I've played for about an hour and agree with your assessment. I still have it installed but I doubt I will revisit it.

I've switched to South of Midnight and it's amazing. Not everyone's type of game - and certainly not a puzzle game - but the graphics, music, story, and gameplay combine to make it one of the best games I've played in a long, long time.

I have both and enjoy both but am like 80 hours into Blue Prince and 5 in to South of Midnight... I am LOVING Blue Prince.

This is 'article' is just an advertisement

I haven't seen a single good review from anyone I trust, most people are saying it's not good.

FWIW Adrian Hon (the writer) is easily the game reviewer that I trust the most! I am quite sensitive to false positives with games - it really sucks to spend a few hours on a game that you drop - and my false positive rate with his reviews is very low.

(I have no affiliation with this post beyond being a fan of Adrian's writing and work + haven't played Blue Prince yet, although I'm very likely to play it because of this review)

OP here: Is there anything that makes you say that other than the fact that it’s positive and I received a review key? I’ve written about plenty of games I didn’t enjoy that I got for free (e.g. for judging awards) including games that were very well-received, like Viewfinder and Pacific Drive.

Posting a review for an arbitrary game to HN definitely smells like advertising to me. I don’t think you would be posting an article like this to HN that shat on a relatively unknown indie game you didn’t like.

How is this _not_ advertising in your mind? Surely you don’t think random people on HN are invested in your take on this game. What purpose did you intend if not to promote the newly released game?

I feel you’re trying to say you weren’t paid to advertise this game, which I believe, but it is 100% what you’re doing.

A lot of people do this, no? It doesn't seem more offensive than any of the other handful of self-submissions per day; certainly it's less so to me than all those tech blog posts by companies. Also Blue Prince is a puzzly, escape-roomy game that's one of the highest-profile indie releases this year, so probably more in tune with HN's taste than most games.

I like that a link aggregator serves to surface things that people don't necessarily have investment in. I thought the article was well-written and I'm more interested now in what he has to say in future. (I guess the advertising worked...)

Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here.

Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy.

Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising.

And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing tone and then negative comments here has really thrown me about the whole thing. Whereas before I would just say it’s a difference of opinion, now there’s a question of intent to deceive. Meh.

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.

I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.

it seems like it might be mostly attributable to the RNG element of the game

Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review.

A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of game (never mind that it might be deliberate) but I think it's possible for some games to have been designed for game reviewers rather than for long-term players. The top HN comment on this story (as I write this) would seem to indicate that the game has an issue with running out of steam after a few hours.

This sort of thing is not unheard of in other media as well. In the film industry this strategy is called Oscar-bait. Of course for a film it's not based on duration but subject matter. Certain themes and filmmaking techniques have been accused of being targeted at the narrower interests of the Academy rather than a broad audience.

Many of the people reviewing the game highly (at well-regarded publications) have spoken about playing the game for tens of hours, some mentioning 100h+.

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

I do think random people are invested in my take on this game, yes. If they weren't, it wouldn't have been upvoted. It's actually very difficult to get links on the front page of HN, the signal to noise is quite high.

I post around a third to a half of the articles I write on my blog to HN – the ones I think people here will like. Sometimes they hit and sometimes they don't. Three weeks ago I wrote about Odysseus, a very ambitious larp, that was popular here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414992

And last year I wrote about my thoughts on The Sphere in Las Vegas:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40858165

As for things I disliked, I wrote about Tonight with the Impressionists, a VR exhibition in Paris:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40745133

I think you are saying that anyone posting a positive article about something you don't know about on HN is a shill, which seems quite strange. Sometimes people genuinely like things and want to share their thoughts on why.

My final note is that Blue Prince is not a relatively unknown indie game. It was included for free on PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass at launch – quite unusual. It was also previewed by quite a few publications and is almost certainly going to be shortlisted in a lot of game of the year lists.

And to be clear, I have not been paid to write this article. There are no incentives involved whatsoever.

I haven't heard about this game until today, but literally 10 mins before reading this on HN I was reading this Polygon article about it https://www.polygon.com/awards/557285/blue-prince-game-of-th...

So it seems it's quite popular.

Look, I believe you.

What I’m saying is that it doesn’t feel obvious that I should definitely believe you. You are unambiguously promoting this newly released game. By doing this a savvy reader does need to question whether or not you’re a shill. And that is tiring. It is fully possible that this article is intended to manipulate.

Maybe background info on your past activities can provide evidence to reinforce the idea that you are doing this only because you want to. But I’m not really interested in researching you. Content like this is just not easily readable with blind trust.

I thought it was a well written and entertaining review. While I’m probably not going to buy the game, I think what the author wrote, and this discussion here is important for discovering games I might be interested in.

OP here: I can see how that would be frustrating and I do touch on that in my piece. It’s not my job to convince you that you should like it, but I would say that the mystery and atmosphere and sense of discovery is what pulled me through the first hours where I wasn’t sure what was going on. If those things don’t chime with you, it can be a slog. What I’ve told other people is that it’s better not to view the game as a race but more a place to explore.

Same experience after 8 hours. I can see how roguelite fans would enjoy the dopamine hits of new information / upgrades / solving tiny bits of puzzles. As a pure puzzle fan I found the roguelite stuff repetitive and boring, and the puzzle stuff itself is good but not mindblowingly good. (Yes - even the less obvious puzzles)

I had my doubts when people were playing 100+ hours of it. That gave me the idea it would be a skinner box type game that is addictive but empty. So far nothing has changed my opinion on that.

As someone who just rolled credits on Blue Prince after 20 hours or so, I can definitely confirm that there’s much much more to the post-game content than a skinner box. It’s much more like a mega puzzle hunt[1] with an RNGish roguelike wrapper.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzle_hunt

I'm about 8 hours in and really enjoying it, but I feel like I can see this in my future. For now I have so many puzzles/threads going that even if one doesn't work on a run because of RNG I'm still making progress somewhere else, but I could see that drying up a bit as I solve more things and want to focus on something specific.

The puzzles for resources you mention are by far the worst part for me. I really wish there were a way to say "I get it, I know how to solve simple logic puzzles and do basic arithmetic, just give me the stuff".

I read this[1] review on Steam which also raises the same point as you.

The thing that made The Talos Principle, The Witness[2] and similar games so great was that they spent a lot of time on designing the puzzles.

I'm not opposed to a Groundhog Day sort of scenario, but in that case it really needs to be done well, like The Stanley Parable, not just rely on pure RNG. If you want to use RNG you really should have some constraint system involved to ensure at least some progress could have been made by the player.

[1]: https://steamcommunity.com/id/ADHunter/recommended/1569580/

[2]: If you've played The Witness but haven't played The Looker, you've been missing out IMHO.

I disagree. The game is not meant to be played looking for one specific item/room. It drip-feeds you clues and progress. Every run pretty much I get something that helps. If you’re beelining for just one thing it doesn’t really work.

Also, for your example, I think you missed that you get a major permanent bonus when you got the room after using the other room.

I long for the day when people have tired of roguelites and stops putting roguelite elements in every. single. game. of. every. genre.

But hey, it makes you get away with reusing the little content you made ad nauseam and procedurally tweak some numbers on top of it to fake progression.

Loop Hero was probably when I nope'd out forever, but at least that game was pure and honest.

I completely agree with this evaluation, I dropped it as well fairly early on.

I have been playing this game and it is really a blast. The tutorial note cards strongly recommend using a pen+paper while playing and I can second that as pretty much required for some of the more "meta" puzzles.

Worth noting that I believe it is also on Gamepass and whatever Sony's version of Gamepass is called if you already had those services and wished to save a few bucks.

> The tutorial note cards strongly recommend using a pen+paper while playing

This is my largest complaint. The game should really have a notepad built in. It doesn't need to write down clues for me, but it would be nice to not have to find where my notes were if I put the game down for a long time. Is it that it's a console release?

So many games desperately need this feature. Almost all games could benefit from it to some degree. I see zero negative consequences to adding it to every single game in existence just in case someone wants it.

if you play on PC through Steam, Steam at least has a notes function in the overlay nowadays: https://www.polygon.com/2023/4/28/23702656/steam-beta-update...

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure adding Game Pass games to Steam isn't really compatible with that. It looks like there was a "notes" app for the Windows "Game Bar", but it's no longer available.

possible, yeah, from what I've heard the launcher is weird for those.

I don't recommend using it, there's unfortunately a bug where your notes will not save randomly and just disappear between sessions. Which for a note taking feature basically makes it usuable. You can find discussions about the bug on steam ex https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/6679490218977...

I've played 10 hours ish and it needs pen and paper notes. A text notepad probably won't work

I haven't played this, but I played Obra Dinn, which the review mentions, and I really don't think digital notes would have been nearly as good as pencil and paper. I really needed to draw arrows between things, sketch out a timeline, put question marks around ideas, etc. Pencil and paper is just so much more expressive.

I think the option would be great regardless. What you say is true - pen and paper is more expressive than digital notes, but digital notes is better than nothing.

I played Obra Dinn without pen and paper and I was fine.

There was a game called The Roottrees are dead which is based on Obra dinn with a built in journal system and it is really useful.

It’s an indie game. I think that adding a full-fledged note system with as much creativity as paper+pen is a big undertaking and perhaps not the best use of resources for the developer

Thanks for this callout, I was looking at the reviews here and on Steam and waffling, but I've got Game Pass.

Also, re: notepad writing: if you've got two monitors, it Alt+Tabs just fine. I'm writing this as the opening credits play.

> whatever Sony's version of Gamepass is called

Just mentioning that it's PS Plus, and the game was made available on their Extra & Premium tiers at launch [0], which is nice, as they typically release all the games on the same day in the middle of the month.

[0] https://blog.playstation.com/2025/04/09/playstation-plus-gam...

P.S. "Lost Records: Bloom & Rage", the second half of which is due to come out in a couple of days is very different, but highly recommended too, especially in its emotional vibes and how well they integrated the VHS camera into the gameplay.

> I don’t like what they do to me. I shudder to think how they could supercharge builders like Dorfromantik, Carcassonne, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig.

A very similar mechanic is used in the popular board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. That game's arguably even worse because it has stat upgrades!

I really want to like the super crunchy board games, but it turns out after 90 minutes of setup no one else wants to play anymore. And it's exhausting being the only person willing to learn the rules to teach everyone else. We literally only setup and played Gloomhaven once. I need a better board game group.

> As with other roguelikes, you can unlock persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game.

I think those are called rogue-lites, for the reason that real rogue-likes (e.g. nethack, DCSS) actually wipe out all your progress on each attempt.

At this point, times have shifted, and meta-progression is usually considered an aspect of modern roguelikes. There was a trend of calling them "rogue-lites" but that's faded and now games like ADOM and DCSS are "Classic roguelikes"

It's not a hard and fast rule or anything, just what I've observed in gaming discussions.

Indeed, the distinction used to be useful. But now, it's not useful because honest-to-God roguelikes are just not getting made outside hobby projects. Meanwhile, roguelites have become a core pillar of modern gaming, artistically and commercially. I think calling roguelites roguelikes is perfectly fine. It's simply what the genre became.

That's horrible, but I can't stop you.

I prefer that they be hobby projects or solo-developer crowdfunded efforts. Generally, I find that the traditional (waterfall) lifecycle of commercial games is not conducive to a good Roguelike. This is because the game is quickly shifted into maintenance-mode after release and stops receiving major updates soon after.

Roguelikes really benefit from long-term development and continual balancing, new content, and quality of life updates in response to feedback from players. These are games meant to be played and mastered over the course of several years. Traditional commercial game releases are much better suited to one-and-done style single play-throughs.

The other major commercial model, the subscription- or microtransaction-supported long-term game development, such as you'd see with popular multiplayer games like Fortnite or League of Legends, would seem to be a viable alternative for Roguelike development. I don't think it would work out in practice, however, since most gamers don't seem to be interested in playing a game to mastery unless it involves a high level of competitive play.

Traditional roguelike is the term I see on Reddit and Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Traditional+Roguelike

Traditional roguelikes seem cool in theory, but I like co-op for most of my PvE content, and like most turn-based games, no co-op to be had there.

That’s a shame, because meta-progression ultimately undermines the spirit of these classic games.

Roguelikes were designed to play like arcade games in that you’d always start over from scratch and try to get a high score. Most attempts ended in failure but as you got better at the game it was reflected in your score. Even after players achieve a high degree of expertise they still find the games challenging to win and so they keep playing and enjoying them for years to come.

Meta-progression takes away the from-scratch element and just allows you to win through sheer persistence, chipping away at the problem until it’s easy enough for you to finish it in one final run. But then what? The game is no longer the same challenge it was when you first started. It’s like a mountain that keeps getting smaller every time you attempt to climb it, until it’s finally shrunk to the size of an anthill. This is not a recipe for a game you can play for many years.

Ultimately, what meta-progression does is turn a roguelike into a standard narrative RPG just like any other. This is one where the player’s goal is to reach the end of the game and that’s it, not to learn the game’s systems and reach a high level of mastery.

Eh, idk. Theres an argument to be had that meta progression tends to cap in most of these games so eventually it becomes a stable thing.

Although generally I find the meta progression of things goes too far and starts off too weak.

Yes, because the goal of the game designer who adds meta progression is to increase the number of players who actually finish the game, at least when it comes to the "true progression" style meta progression.

There is another approach based on unlocks, where the player unlocks new characters or game modes rather than having a single character get more and more powerful with each run. Some people prefer these unlocks but others don't. I saw one streamer, Jorbs, who got a brand new game and immediately looked up a save file hack to unlock everything from the beginning because he so detested unlocks.

One thing I like about meta progression is the gradual expansion of the game. It doesn't have to necessarily make everything easier, but it can be a good way to temporarily lock away more complicated features and abilities. For example, unlocking a new class after completing the game with a previous class doesn't necessarily mean the new class is more powerful or will make the game easier. In some cases, the later class unlocks are explicitly more difficult to beat the game with and are unlocked for additional challenge.

Yes, that class / character unlock system is very common. Some purists will say that a traditional Roguelike cannot have these unlocks but I don't mind them. It definitely is a way of gating the game's complexity so that a new player doesn't have to cope with it all at once.

I think it should be optional though. There should be an option to unlock everything from the beginning for players who don't want to fiddle around with that stuff and just dive into the full experience. Players like Jorbs can feel so strongly about it that I think they're actually offended by games that try to curate their experiences to that degree.

Agreed on the optional part. I've picked up Satisfactory again since 1.1 hit experimental. I like having the option to skip a lot of the tedium. Don't get me wrong. I normally love the early game tedium. That's where a lot of decisions have long term consequences. But sometimes you just want to play with new features, and games like Satisfactory give you enough granularity of control to tailor that experience to what you're looking for in most cases. I appreciate options to make games much more difficult or accessible at the same time. Just because I tend to like brutally punishing games doesn't mean others have to experience the same games in the same way. I want fallout games to have a survival mode and I want rougelites to have a tourist mode. At the same time not all games have to cater to all audiences. So it's perfectly fine for casual games to focus on their audience and the same for more "hardcore" games. I just really appreciate it when a developer is able to thread that needle and give way more folks a way to enjoy their games across skill / difficulty boundaries.

I'm particularly interested in the area of coop games where you've got two players of radically different capabilities. I really like newer games in the vein of "Split Fiction" or "It Takes Two". But they tend to assume somewhat equal levels of competence for skill based sections of the game. So if I try to play with my wife I have to wait over and over again as she fails what are to me basic jumps. I'd love to see more exploration of asymmetric gameplay. Where it's not just both players having to navigate the same obstacles, but allows players to better leverage their skills to overcome something together. I remember staying up late nights with my now wife playing Diablo 2. But now I'm at the point where I want to push high tier rifts and she just wants to finish the story line. I'd like to see more examples of coop games where the burden falls more heavily on one player and the other is mostly along for the ride. Not all gamers are looking for the same things out of their games, but that doesn't necessarily mean they shouldn't be playing together.

I want fallout games to have a survival mode and I want rougelites to have a tourist mode

It's funny that you mention that. NetHack, one of the longest-running traditional Roguelikes (in active development since 1987) actually has a Tourist class. However it's not what you think. The class is based on the tourist character Twoflower from the Discworld series of books. This class is the hardest one in the game because it starts with the least amount of fighting ability, no weapons (apart from some darts), and no armour (just a Hawaiian shirt).

You do, however, also start with a credit card (useful for jimmying locks), some healing potions, a lot of food, a lot of money, some scrolls of magic mapping (maps), and an expensive camera (the monsters in the dungeon hate flash photography)! But until you become a lot more experienced shopkeepers will recognize you as a tourist and try to rip you off, so you better spend your money wisely!

Personally I have yet to see a game where unlocks didn’t tend to be MUCH better than the starting set

I kinda disagree? mostly I see people use roguelite to refer to roguelikes with progression and roguelike for those without. But I suppose both are also called roguelike as a gloss.

NetHack does have ghost files (where you find the levels previous characters died on, including their ghost and their possibly-cursed loot). It's definitely not the same kind of progression as in modern rogue-lites, but it can be a boost to pick up the equipment you found on a previous run.

Do note that enemies can also pick up that old equipment and use it against you. I lost a promising character during the last November NetHack Tournament [1] because a gnome picked up a wand of fire from someone’s grave and blasted me with it.

Yeah that’s another difference. When you play NetHack online [2] [3] you run into the ghosts and graves of other players, not just your own previous characters. I have run into levels online with the ghosts of 3 different people who were all killed by various dangerous monsters that kept accumulating more powerful equipment from each victim. It can be quite ridiculous!

[1] https://tnnt.org/

[2] https://alt.org/nethack/

[3] https://www.hardfought.org/

Not sure I quite agree - I think it's fine to have "persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game" within the proper roguelike genre, as long as they don't make the run easier. Gungeon is an example, with unlocks for skipping lower levels once you have demonstrated sufficient mastery that they're merely time-wasters rather than adding to the challenge.

Already contender for my favorite puzzle game of the year. I would compare it to Outer Wilds or Animal Well, but that would do all three games a disservice. Blue Prince is a thoroughly unique game that is worth your time. And like another commenter said, a pad of paper is _absolutely required_.

I tried playing this after buying it, but it was not what I expected. There was a lot of FPS moving around and aiming and that makes me nauseous so I had to turn it off. I guess there's no refunds on PS games unfortunately.

I just picked this up. Curious if this will be one I can play with the kids while we are going to bed in the evenings. For a long time, that was prime time to play Slay the Spire, as it will get them to go to sleep. :D

It's got a bedtime story kind of vibe.

With the shifting rooms, it's almost dream-like.

I'd imagine it probably will get them to go to sleep, but mostly because they'll be watching a lot of walking up and down corridors.

Cool. Just wanted to make sure it wasn't overly dark in tone.

I also played the Stanley Parable recently, and that is one that has a few sections that are a touch much for the kids.

It can be a little bit creepy in an empty-house way, but I haven’t seen any gore or ghosts

I'm very hopeful about this game, but afraid it might be closer to rougueLITE than roguelike.

I played two days yesterday, and it started to dawn on me that there must be resource accumulation day to day. Some items cost 10's of coins (as much as 80), while in one day I was only seeing just a few. And really only one easy puzzle so far involving a couple of colored boxes.

So is the puzzle to just keep playing through, accumulating resources to buy what you need until you make it all the way? Or does the true puzzle reveal itself to you as you play through a few times? Maybe the things you buy/activate are one-time unlocks that give access to new parts of the puzzle, without making the puzzle itself easier?

Anyway, I love puzzle games such as Myst, and I'm a new fan of rougelikes (but not roguelites) - so I really want this game to work out.

I was mistaken! Coins and other resources do NOT seem to accumulate, though I did also discover a couple of side effects you can trigger that do carry forward to future days, but which appear to be part of the puzzle structure itself, not something to make the game easier on future attempts.

I like it!

Been wanting to build a metroidvaniaroguelike on evenings and weekends and this gives me a few ideas to noodle on... thanks for sharing

The buzz on this game is very strong. The Triple Click podcast just loves it: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/triple-click/blue-prince-rea...

On my M-series Mac devices, I get a warning for missing executable when trying to launch after installing. I've had Steam re-verify its payload files with the same result on two different systems. Any ideas?

Read the review and thought it looked like the kind of thing that I like, but then saw that it doesn't have SteamDeck compatibility. Sorry, but if you're only going to target Windows then you're not seeing my money.

While I presume they don't provide a native Linux build, it is listed as Playable on Steam Deck.

> Valve's testing indicates that Blue Prince is Playable on Steam Deck. This game is functional on Steam Deck, but might require extra effort to interact with or configure.

> • Some in-game text is small and may be difficult to read

> • All functionality is accessible when using the default controller configuration

> • This game shows Steam Deck controller icons

> • This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck

My experience is that "playable" on Steam Deck generally means a poor experience. I'll wait until it's something like "verified".

My experience disagrees. Many "playable" games run very well and many "verified" don't.

You're right it can be a crapshoot as to what the rating means.

I don't have a Steam deck, but for what it's worth I haven't had any problems with it on my arch desktop

OP here: I played it on Steam Deck for 20 hours, it was fine. No performance issues; a very small minority of art was hard to see because it was small, but using the Steam Deck's built-in magnifier tool (Steam + L1) was easy enough.

SteamDeckHQ review says the game runs well on it though: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/blue-prince/

Dungeon of the Endless is another interesting game about essentially opening rooms/doors. The frantic rush to move the diamond thing to the last room while swarming alien creatures try to stop you is very interesting.

From the maker(s) of mythicspoiler.com

OP: A single giveaway just popped up on SteamGifts today:

https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/bloms/blue-prince

Is this you?

Nope.

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