Blue Prince Has A Toe In Excellence And Frustration

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Peter Hunt Szpytek

Published Apr 17, 2025

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I’m baffled by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blue Prince. I’ve spent every night this week staring at picture frames and writing down the placement of basketballs on a ball rack because they look like they might be something. Or maybe they’re not? Or maybe they are and the game wants me to overlook them? Blue Prince is the kind of puzzle game where you walk past something for ten hours, have a revelation, and then say to yourself, “Wait, that was there the entire time?”

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It’s full of the best kind of puzzles that require🌠 lateral thinking, using concepts that aren’t always immediately obvious but come together 🔯after finding clues hidden throughout the Sinclair mansion’s many rooms. It’s packed full of puzzles you won’t be able to get through by simply guessing, and I love them.

Blu🌳e Prince also h👍as some incredibly asinine puzzles that are frustrating because they don’t require lateral thinking. Instead, their solutions are the sorts of things that the player wouldn’t be able to intuit on their own, and I’m not sure how anyone was able to solve without guessing their w𒐪ay to their underw💯helming solutions.

The Impossible Task Of Balancing A Puzzle Game

Three rooms on the blueprints: Lavatory, Utility Closet, and Hallway.

Puzzle games require a fine balance. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The best walk a very delicate line of giving the player enough information to be able to solveღ the puzzle but not holding their hand through the solutions. A puzzle game has failed if the player is able to find the solution as the information is being dolled out or if the solutions are so unintuitive that the player needs to look up a guide.

What’s difficult about finding that balance, however, is that the player’s intelligence is going to vary from person to person, meaning that what one person finds incredibly difficult, another might find too simple. A good puzzle game like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Return of the Obra Dinn gives the pla😼yer all of the information they need, and if they end up needing to Google a solution, they should be able to see where they were going wrong with their logic. A bad puzzle game requires players to think illogically to solve its puzzles.

The frustrating thing about Blue Prince for me is that it featureꩵs both kinds of puzzles: some where you’re given the proper information to solve them with time and experience and some where you aren’t, and I’d recommend you simply look up the solution to save yourself the time from thinki🌺ng about things too deeply when the game isn’t asking you to.

Blue Prince’s Good Puzzles

Magnifying Glass item pick up screen in Blue Prince.

In order to discuss this properly, I’ll need to give 🌸a puzzle solution spoiler warning for Blue Prince. Specifically, I’m🐓 going to spoil the solutions to the Boudoir and Office safe puzzles and the Dark Room puzzle.

You’ve been warned.

I think the Dark Room puzzle is an incr🐬edible puzzle in Blue Prince. It requires several things to be done all at once across the entire mansion. First, the player needs to draw the Dark Room and realize that there are bits of information within it that they can’t see on account of✨ the lights being out. Then they need to draw the Breaker Room to turn the lights back on and acquire a magnifying glass to be able to actually read the information that’s on each of the pictures in the Dark Room.

The puzzle requires a lot of intuition on the player’s part and forces them to think logistically about how they can acquire the tools they need to see the information hidden within the Dark Room. It’s a solution that might not come immediately to them, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:aft♎er enough time and ex🐈perience with Blue Prince, they’ll eventually be ab🔴le to piece everything together. No notes f💛rom me.

🐎The Boudoir and Office safe puzzles are a different story. Both safes have number locks with solutions hidden somewhꩵere in the room with them.

Blue Prince’s Bad Puzzles

In the Boudoir, there’s a photo of the safe being unwrapped as a gift on Christmas. This clearly is a major clue for its combination solution, so I tried examining the photo with a magnifying glass, I tried counting the colored lights in the photo to piece together a 💙code, but I couldn’t figure anything out. I tabled my attempt to find the solution and figured that I simply didn’t have enough information to solve it yet, but I’d keep my eyes open for more clues. After several more hours of searching, I found nothing. I went into the room and, for the first time in my playthrough, I looked up the solution. Turns out the safe code is 1225, the date for Christmas.

The problem with this puzzle is that it’s too simple and clashes with the logic that the game requires you 🌃to think about for the rest of its mysteries. Blue Prince asks the player to consider why the former residents of the mansion would act t🔴he way they do in order to solve many of its puzzles. You’re required to think about the logical steps the people would have taken to understand their motives for leaving things the way they have. There is no reason why the safe code would be 1225 other than the picture of the safe is from Christmas.

I faced a similar issue with ꦗthe Office safe puzzle. The solution to finding its code requires the player to count the busts of a character found throughout the room and subtract one from the total number. There’s no indication that the player should subtract any of the numbers, they’re just meant to kn🐻ow that based on…nothing. A guess.

The problem with these solutions is that they askಌ the player to make up some kind of unituitive logic for how people behave. Why would the solution to the Office safe be based on a shopping list found in the desk combined with the number of all but one of the busts in the room? Why would the safe combination be set to 12-25 other than tꦿhe simple fact that it was given to the owner on Christmas? They’re simple solutions, I suppose, but when the game is constantly expecting these giant, galaxy-brained deductions from the player, they feel completely out of place.

The Fine Line

Music Sheets Pages With A Piano In The Background In Blue Prince.

I am simply not following the logic that Blue Prince is laying down for me with some of its puzzles. Plenty of people were able ꧒to solve the safe code puzzles just fine without any help, but I don’t understand how they could have possibly come to the solutions they came to without guesswork playing a major role. I fin🅺d that to be unsatisfying.

All of this speaks to the trouble that comes with balancing a puzzle game. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:my faith in Blue Prince’s puzzles has been a little shaken, I find puzzles like the safe combinations to be th💟e exception rather than the rule when it comes to the game’s puzzle quality. The disappointing part for me, however, is that as I continue playing, I’ll likely opt to look things up if I ever get stumped for too long now that I know that the puzzles might be out of the logical line for me.

It’s also possible that I’m just dumb.