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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 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.

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.

> 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/

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.

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".

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

> 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)

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

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

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 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.

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.

> 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.