It’s fantastic and runs great on the Deck. I kept hearing people talking about how great and unique it was, and I’m really glad I jumped on it when I did.
The game is unique and doesn’t really compare directly to any other games I know of. The core game play is kinda similar to a board game, you’re building a house layout by choosing between randomly chosen room tiles. In-between adding rooms, you’re exploring the house in first person, and solving puzzles on the way. There’s also a resource management system, where you sometimes need a keys and other resorces to progress into new rooms. At the end of the day the mansion resets and you start over.
Overall the game is an interesting mix of board games, rogue-likes, puzzles, resource management, knowledge-gated progression, permanent puzzle progression, and environmental story tellings. That’s a lot of things, but they work well together and I’m just getting more and more invested in fully exploring this game.
This game is also now available on Xbox game pass ultimate and streams great on the Deck.
I’ve been spending the last few days playing it and really wanted to get into it, but I just haven’t been able to.
For me, it feels like I’m doing the same thing over and over and I’m just not getting any joy out of it. No revelation, no feelings of success… Build rooms, get to a point I can’t progress anymore, restart, repeat.
It’s fine, but I think I either didn’t play deep enough to get to the hook or it didn’t grab me as much as it did other people, because it does feel a bit overhyped to me.
I think in this vein I’d recommend Return of the Obra Dinn before I do Blue Prince. Not that I think Blue Prince is a bad game in any way, just a bit… soft around the edges, I guess?
I think part of Blue Prince for me is that I keep discovering additional layers of depth to it. They keep giving me reasons to go back and re-evaluate rooms, and I have a dozen different larger puzzles that I’m sorting out the details on as I go. I also appreciate the steady permanent improvements to the rooms and my base resources, and it’s really cool whenever I find a new mechanic to abuse for easier future runs.
The storytelling is vague, I’ve “finished” the main objective of finding room 46 but the pieces of the story I’ve put together suggest there’s a much more important conclusion to reach.
The first time the credits roll is very much just the end of the tutorial
Seconding the recommendations. It’s a phenomenal game for puzzle lovers and its a game that rewards keeping a notebook next to you. I love any game that facilitates that.
That said, it seems that the pre rendered videos don’t run on some Steam Decks (I have the 1TB OLED model and it doesn’t work for me) but I think the devs are aware of it and working on fixing it
Proton GE may get around prerendered video issues as well.
All the videos have worked for me on my OLED deck afaik, and recent patches mentioned fixing videos.
Great news, maybe I’ll update and see what’s going on in the Rumpus Room tonight
I can confirm I was able to watch 3 different videos in the Rumpus room over the past few days.
I did enjoy it and the underlying story kept me going, gotta say after playing it with my partner for a while, the rogue like elements started getting a little grating, especially if you’re looking for extremely specific rooms and get crap RNG (took like 12 days to get a
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Bookstore to show up again, even having dice, drafting off a library or secret passage, just refused to show up.
I know there are
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ways to manipulate it or influence like the chess puzzle, but my drafts suuuuuucked, just weight rooms and archives constantly or dead ends as my choice. Probably not running an optimal strategy but was kinda hard to do when I had no other options. Would get screwed over constantly trying to power the lab too.
Got tedious/frustrating at times but did overall enjoy it.
Yeah, I’ve only seen
spoiler
the book store once. I desperately tried to get it again on a run where I had 50% off and 60 gold, but couldn’t get it to spawn. Several of the boiler room ones took a long time too, although I had a good run with a wrench that helped my boiler spawn rate a lot.
Yeah, I’ve never had
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The wrench spawn, or repellant for that matter, which I don’t know if that’s crafted or from something like the trading post
Definitely up there for the most notes I’ve taken playing a game for a while, some of them aren’t immediately obvious though their usefulness
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I’m glad I started tracking the name of each angel for example.
Finally got
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The bookstore to spawn again, smashed something in a certain room to get money and bought the remainder out
The back story as I said is probably the thing that kept me going, not 100% there but I needed to know if my own theories were correct.
Edit, also
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I kinda wish I hadn’t gone funeral parlour as my parlour upgrade
For safety sake I’m going to wait to read the second half of your comment until I understand what the
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angels
are for.
As for the wrench, every time I’ve gotten it, it was
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in the outside tool shed.
Trying to be vague as heck in the spoilers, totally get it! Don’t think there’s anything there that’s super spoilery (I hope!) But definitely play it safe.
Fingers crossed next run, as for the item there’s a
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Contraption that’s supposed to do something similar from the description in one of the guide books, so might try that
This game has been getting universal acclaim, but no one in my friend group (including myself) liked this game. It is interesting to see non-games industry folks like the game. I’m glad you enjoy it!
I also need to leave this instance. My Steam Deck 1TB OLED died, the repair onerous and expensive, and Valve told me to kick rocks (the unit is 18 months old/6 months out of warranty).
Bye everyone!
Valve told me to kick rocks (the unit is 18 months old/6 months out of warranty).
I assume you are from the US? The EU and some other places have 2 years of warranty.
Indeed I am from the US.
That’s a shame. Do you know what’s broken?
That’s unfortunate, sorry to hear about your deck.
The game was a bit of a slow burn at first for me, but the more I’ve played the more I’ve gotten hooked by it. Now it’s all I’ve thought about for days.
Yeah, I was excited for the Steam Deck because of the “pro-sumer” aspect of it in terms of repairability and customer support. I know the economic landscape has changed, but a 3 hour long difficult repair with $40 of tools and $80 of parts doesn’t feel particularly pro-sumer to me. Valve is charging $185 for the same repair, and I can’t get them to confirm that the repair would be warrantied (meaning, if it broke again in the same way they’d cover the cost again). Kinda frustrated with Valve right now (and, obviously, Nintendo and Sony aren’t any better).
I have been going back and forth on whether to buy this one. Looks like it is right up my alley but reviews seem to be all over the place.
Since it runs well on Deck I might just give it a try.
I’ve been loving it. You’ll want a journal or something to make notes as you go. Steam notes work great if you have a keyboard but for the deck you’ll probably want something physical.
Always got a notebook handy for my puzzle game needs.
I’ve been typing a lot of phone notes and taking a lot of screenshots.
I wish there was a good way to edit my steam notes for a game from the steam mobile app.
If you enjoy games like Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn, where you basically can only play it through once to figure out the secrets, it feels like this is going to be something you’d love. The downside is the roguelite element can be really punishing and make you feel like you’ve wasted a day, especially if you’ve found the secrets in those rooms. The good news is that there’s been at least a couple times where I found out items were puzzles days after I saw them, so it might not entirely be a waste.
If you enjoy games like Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn
Definitely right up my alley then.
Hope you enjoy it! Fantical has it for about $5 off if you want a bit of a discount.
The experience did steadily grow on me the more I played, so don’t expect to be blown away on your first couple tries.
Thanks, that’s exactly where I bought it from.
I loved the demo and would also highly recommend the game solely based on that.
I’m just waiting for a free weekend to pick up the game now that it’s out.
