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.
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