its april 2025 and game of the year already came out. it's the BLUE PRINCE thread

use the spoiler tags heavily for this one, it's a spoilery game!

but it needs a thread because this is an all-timer. like what if myst was also a jigsaw puzzle that felt kind of like a roguelike/deck builder/sandbox type situation.

i played about 3 hours, then played later in front of gf, and within 30 mins she was hooked. i have 6 pages of my (actual, irl, pen and paper) notebook covered in mad scrawlings trying to solve various aspects of its puzzles. so far everything has felt challenging and nothing has felt unnecessarily arbitrary and stupid, a needle so hard to thread i can't remember the last time a game has ever done it for this many hours? (i expect it to get esoteric and annoying eventually, and it keeps surprising me!)

come and discuss and one more time, the spoiler tags are like bold tags except you use an H instead of a B

also the only game i can ever think of when i shouted YES out loud at the TV because a fuckin HALLWAY showed up

Is this just for the newest console generation or is it available on PS4 or Xbox One?

looks like it's PS5, Series X/S, and windows for now! but i reckon it'd run on a modest computer. there's nothing in it that would significantly ruin your day if the frame rate was choppy anyway, there's no timing/twitch/etc stuff

Not quite hooked me yet because I was expecting more puzzles on the order of Lorelei. Probably just need to keep putting away a I've heard it opens up quite a bit more.

i haven't played lorelei but i imagine if you mean like, a collection of small puzzles, this is not that game -- the appeal imo is the many very big puzzles that you're picking away at over time! i can only think of two "smaller" puzzles off the top of my head. a lot of them you'll look at, and not be able to solve until a lot of other pieces come together later

I played the demo during that Steam demos thingy and I did really enjoy pottering around trying to make my routes longer etc, but I wasn't entirely convinced to buy the full game. There's never enough narrative in Myst-likes for me, so I end up losing momentum and eventually dropping off completely.

it hasn't fully got its hooks into me yet but i've enjoyed enough to not delete it yet either

there's a lot of narrative in this thing, a shocking amount of world building is crammed into the crevices for those who look for it (and the game encourages you to do it, it's not just a "it's there for you to ignore" kinda way, if that makes sense)

sorry if vague i am just trying to say as much as i am comfortable saying without starting the spoielr tag parade lol

Ah, that's cool - I did wonder if there might be, the set-up was immediately more narrative than a lot of those types of games, but I've been burned before! I suspect this might be one that I wait on for a ridiculous amount of time until a good sale comes up, then I'll come back to this thread three years late.

How do roguelike/randomized elements fit in?

oh i love this. stone cold addicted. day 29. still havent reached the antechamber. had a really stellar (heh) run where i got flummoxed and blocked by keycards. ive only run out of steps once, but i blockcade myself on the reg.

Surprised to discover this is free with a PS Plus sub

If I hated the Witness will I hate this?

How do roguelike/randomized elements fit in?

every day you enter a mansion. You have a set number of steps. Each time you get to a doorway, you choose between three rooms to generate, reset daily. The rooms come from a deck that is gradually buily out through successive playthroughs. often rooms are locked, or you dead-end yourself, or you run out of steps and need to reset. some rooms have small puzzles in them, some puzzles stretch across rooms, some puzzles stretch across many playthrough, some of them would be easy to solve if other rooms were generated. there’s a narrative and its confusing, and told out of order depending on the rooms you have revealed.

How do roguelike/randomized elements fit in?

the core mechanic is: you are at the bottom of a house, want to reach the top of the house, and the rest is just "blank". each time you open a door, you are dealt three rooms from your "card deck" type thing, and you pick one to place and enter based on entries, resources inside, and other considerations. it is worth noting that this is not a "deck builder," while you do fuck with the likelihood of some things appearing, this game is not a balatro or slay the spire where the goal is to make a broken deck -- it's to bend luck a little bit and mostly go with the flow. things like, "i don't want this room showing up later i'll play it now", or "i DO want this to show up later so i'm using something else" is kind of the strat you apply to the random, if that makes sense

that said each "run" is pretty much discreet, from a rogue/random POV. playing a closet 2 runs ago has no effect on this run. the strategy of the rogue elements run completely parallel to the main goals which emerge over tens of runs (30ish for me so far)

I suspect this might be one that I wait on for a ridiculous amount of time until a good sale comes up, then I'll come back to this thread three years late.

i suspect 2028 will will be jealous of 2028 emil.y because 2028 will will not get to play this for the first time in 2028

If I hated the Witness will I hate this?

can't say for sure because i was maybe in a different headspace but i can tell you i bounced off of the witness twice -- once when it came out, once a few years later -- but this one got its hooks in me and never let up. so the answer is... actually... you might like this???

sorry xpost i was doing an entire omnibus of replies lol. soda nailed it better thna i did

I played The Witness once and was never tempted to go back to it again, whereas I've played BP... twice. (Actually more than that.)

I'm on day 31. I have gotten to that white room that's on the map, and a bit beyond it, and that's my current progress. But I remembered a lot from the demo.

I solved some of the big multi-room puzzles too (Spoiler: the paintings (which were solvable in the demo but i didn't manage it then), the 4 flames, the fountain). There's one thing I remember from the demo that I've been unable to get yet: where's that damn lighter?.

The combination of Carcassonne and Myst is one that I really like, but I understand that it's not for everyone. Figuring out the solution to a puzzle but then having to wait for the rooms to come together the right way -- it's a good feeling of anticipation for me.

enjoying this a lot. day 20ish currently and i've gotten several of the permanent upgrades but still have no clue how to get into the antechamber.

i'm on day 56 or something like that, 30+ hours in, and this is one of the best games i've ever played, really scratches that la mulana itch. there's nothing about it that's really mindblowing but it's just so densely layered with puzzles and secrets to discover and i'm still finding something new nearly every run after so long. it's crazy, most games of this sort would have run out of steam long before now

it's not really that similar to the witness because while they're both puzzle games centred around gaining knowledge in order to progress, the witness is much more abstract in terms of its puzzles which are all centred around that line-drawing mechanic, and that's just ultimately not as engaging even though it wrings a lot out of that concept. blue prince is much broader

I played the demo during that Steam demos thingy and I did really enjoy pottering around trying to make my routes longer etc, but I wasn't entirely convinced to buy the full game

the demo didn't really sell me on it either but it absolutely delivers, the demo just doesn't give you quite enough time to start to really discover things. there is indeed a fairly elaborate narrative too, it's well done

for to people who have played more than 30 days

1) is it useful to draw out a family tree?
2) why is the pump room so confusing? it is the /only/ time i have used an online guide.
3) am i the only one that really likes the billiard puzzles?

not at 30+ days but i have found a family tree in one of the rooms, didn't need to draw it out

that said, i can't promise you'll find that room anytime soon, thats kinda how this game operates. different players will be tackling puzzles with different levels of explicit information based on which rooms they get to early on

Only unspoil the next paragraph if you know about the outer room:

When you start a new day, do draft the outer room first? I've been going back and forth because that's 4-6 steps I'm burning, but I guess figuring out the potential benefits at the start of your run is generally more optimal?

On Day 37 I reached an ending. But there are still some obvious things that I haven't done yet. There's one big puzzle I think I know how to solve, and one that is still a mystery to me.

Pump room: I figured it out once I realized there were more controls in the back. There's also a pump manual in the library.
Billiards room: i liked them at first but now i have these baseball shapes i don't understand. maybe i should skip the puzzles a few times and see if they gets easier.

Leee: I usually do some indoor rooms first then if I have to backtrack I do the outer room then. I'm thinking of stopping this and just going for it right away because there's at least one outer room that is very good to do before filling in many rooms.

leee that's usually the first thing i do, unless on rare occasion i want something specific from it and want to make sure i have some dice first

i still love the parlor logic puzzles but i'm a bit tired of doing all the maths in the billiards room.

enjoying this a lot. day 20ish currently and i've gotten several of the permanent upgrades but still have no clue how to get into the antechamber.

― ciderpress, Monday, April 14, 2025 10:59 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i had 25 questions written out on my list of notes/hypotheses before that run, i still have 15 so i'll keep playing. lots of stuff left to check out

oh the postgame stuff is more structured than i thought. it's basically blue prince 2

it's absurdly expansive

one of the great things about it is that it just keeps going and going and going

reaching the credits is really just the tutorial

I figured out the darts baseball symbols from doing the classrooms. It's neat that the game gives so many clues to everything.

So this post-game stuff. I assume it's mainly the stuff that gets added to the map screen? specifically the red envelopes and the sigils.

lol

I've been playing on Steam Deck and used its built-in screenshot function on stuff, except I noticed that almost all of my screenshots have disappeared -- I could only find the two most recent ones that I took. :(

Another question (I'm on day 20ish): I've seen/heard some stray comments about certain gameplay features that in my game I haven't been able to interact with so far -- am I right to assume that I just need to keep playing and unlock certain things, or have I been ignoring an entire dimension of stuff?

that's kind of vague so i don't know what you're referring to but yes there are a lot of permanent upgrades that need to be unlocked or else maybe you just haven't drafted the room where you do that thing yet

i think steam defaults to only showing you the screenshots from your most recent play session but there should be a full gallery somewhere. on PC it's under View -> Recordings and Screenshots

my screenshots disappear and reappear on steam deck too. i dunno what its deal is.

Yeah my screenshot were back, I'm going to work on moving the important ones to another device though.

A concrete example of what I was asking: I've drafted a few classrooms now (up to rank 2, I think) and while I have an idea of what the school assignments are about, I haven't found anything I can actually do with them.

BTW I was not expecting Swim Bird to be so emotionally devastating.

there isn't anything you can 'do' with the school assignments, they're just information that will be useful later eventually in some way, like pretty much everything else in this game

looks like steam deck screenshots are a common problem. here's a possible fix, but it requires desktop mode, yuck.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/1/6895657216189910621/

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding, but am I right in summarizing one aspect as "There are puzzles there you won't know if you can solve them due to rogue/deckbuilder stuff?" That sounds like a nightmare to me - was the demo only during Next Fest, I can't see it on Steam right now?

s/there/where

depending on how you draft the house each day you'll have access to a different subset of the game's puzzles. the game is very dense so you'll always have something to make progress on, the people getting frustrated are the ones who like to focus on one thread at a time, this game doesn't let you do that. as you progress you gain more and more tools and knowledge to control the draft though.

Think I'm hooked now, also god do I hate the fucking pump room

There are puzzles there you won't know if you can solve them due to rogue/deckbuilder stuff?

not really

there are many things that you initially won't know what to do with because you don't have the necessary information. broadly, the game is about piecing together information. this starts out very straight forward (finding a note in one room that explains a puzzle in another room, for instance) but gets increasingly elaborate over many many many hours.

it is truly absurdly dense

i think I'm seeing the post-46 organization now. I dread piecing together all the lore. Also I haven't thawed that damn freezer yet.

current to do list:
the freezer
one wall the greenhouse, it never comes up in the draft
1 of 8 red envelopes if there really are 8
the later classrooms

postgame spoiler tasks below

a ton of stuff in the sanctum. 3 keys and 6 sigils to go.
two puzzles in a new clue.
wherever the third microchip is. also the archive account name.
the map in room 46 which i think is the main focus of the post-game.
a few loose ends like the message in the chess room.

Just had my first aha, 33 days in!

dat i think i'm roughly in the same spot as you, though i have 7 envelopes.

the freezer is still eluding me too, it has to be the rarest room in the game. i've seen it maybe 3 times in 50 days and not since i learned how to thaw it

yes i have 7 too.

i replaced the billiards room with a speakeasy. it's slightly funny. a tiny easter egg.

every time i'm on the verge of thinking "ok i'm tired of thinking about all this stuff" i make some more progress and that "one more turn" mechanic drags me back

yep. it's the most pernicious timesink game I've encountered in a while. stuff like balatro I'm happy moving on after a handful of good runs whereas this the long tail is all bespoke mysteries and not just mechanical tweaks so i must keep going

I think I figured out the greenhouse. It needs to be placed either on the east side of the house from the south, or the west side of the house from the north. I usually climb up the west side first so I rarely saw it.

If we're not putting things in spoiler tags, I'm going to have to leave this thread for a while.

Too much? I'll try to be more careful.

Day 31: Victory

this is a really beautiful game - the music, the art, the world-building. idk how driven i'll be to squeeze all the juice out of it now, i feel like i ought to have a break.

i like how there are obviously a lot of things you don't need to do on the road to 46 but after a while i kinda forgot which of the things i did were necessary or not

something about the paintings: Alzara tipped me the "missing letter" hint and then i realised that every pair of paintings - which is almost (?) every room - is doing this, and cleverly using the same pictures to signify different words. is this a puzzle that leads to something or just a decorative mystery? i wander if i'll find out

if you think something in this game might be a puzzle, it definitely is a puzzle.

something about the paintings:

yep this is one of the first things i went full Notebook Ghoul about, and it was deeply satisfying

@ dat -- re: the third item in your postgame list. do not open if you don't want to hear the vaguest of hints
just try some stuff lol

err, to clarify, that's the second half of the third item (altho you may have already done this and now you're speaking about a more specific one)

One minor quibble: once you've inherited, the narrative doesn't really acknowledge it - still sleeping outside, still playing by the rules, and it does tarnish the carefully built narrative a little imo but not so much that it wrecks the whole fabric imo

i'm almost done with 'part 2' of the game but i need to pull off something in the draft thats really tricky even with the multiple layers of RNG-manipulating i've accumulated. makes me wonder if theres an easier way i'm overlooking as there often has been e.g. i spent forever trying to draft the furnace near the freezer only to realize you can just bring a torch and manually thaw everything

Mate being angry about the prospect of putting a boiler near to the Lab and then plumbing it in is one of the things that might nope me out forever

i didn't have too much trouble with that stuff. slight spoilers from one of the in-game drafting strategy books: if you draft the boiler first and activate it, then any door that is currently having power sent to it will have a really high chance of giving you the powered rooms (they have white outlines in the draft screen). if you combine that with a couple rerolls from dice or one of the several 4-way rooms with power ducts, you can fairly consistently get there

Will M, that was a good gentle hint. I had tried the name before but with an extra letter.

just finished the second 'phase' of the game, so to speak. "1.1% of players have this achievement" lol. the next phase doesn't seem to be as directed as the first two but i've found some interesting stuff to work on still

well i finally got the freezer done with. The only mansion room thing I know I have left to do is the schoolrooms.

my main goal right now is to translate that language which I am not looking forward to.

I had a crazy idea that's probably wrong but I thought I'd share it. What if all the rooms with duplicated items need to be placed adjacently to form a "definitive" map? Like that weird egg ladder that's in the secret garden and another green room. It's probably just asset reuse.

I just started this and... I'm not entirely sure what I'm meant to be doing but it's also very compelling.

I'm on Day 5. I've found a bunch of rooms and done maybe two puzzles in all? Each Day I seem to find a handful of new rooms and eventually all my routes get blocked off.

I take it you're meant to just end the Day when there's nothing really left to do. That said, it's not clear to me yet how I'm supposed to be progressing exactly.

I'm guessing it just takes a bit of time to figure it all out.

(pretty much) every clue you could need is in the estate somewhere

maybe concentrate on map building at first, think Pipeline, try not to close your paths down

that said, be biased towards drafting rooms you've not drafted before. new room = potential new info

I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing to close down the paths. They seem to just close off eventually. Or maybe I'm not quite getting the hang of mapping yet. A Pipeline, geez I've not thought of that in a long time!

You could google tips as there's quite a few non spoiler ones out there that give advice on drafting rooms, especially early on

I’d just keep going DL. You’ll come across info in-game at various points which is more satisfying than googling. The joy of the game is piecing everything together in your own order rather than doing it ‘properly’

i'll figure it out :-) i like these kinds of things. the puzzles I've done so far (the gems in the box, the dartboard) I've managed to figure out not entirely through IQ logic but a kind of guesstimate work which I've beeen surprised has actually worked!

layer 3 is getting obtuse to the point where i can't progress without hints. props to anyone who managed to solve the CASTLE puzzle completely solo but i am skeptical there's many who did. i'm probably done next time i hit an ending point even if there's more

Trying to deduce the parlor puzzles in my head is becoming a losing proposition lol.

Re the parlor puzzles is it always possible to deduce a definitive correct solution? I've always got them right so far but the logic seems to leave me with a 50/50 guess each time

yes though there's eventually some cheeky ones where theres multiple true/false combinations that are internally consistent but only one guarantees exactly one box having gems

i went back to read the Parlor Puzzle rules and either it changed or i hadn't noticed, it specifies at least one box is only true statements and at least one is only false statements, which clarified things a little

yeah that doesnt change, that restriction is how you solve most of them

I knew that but must have missed the 'guarantees exactly one box having gems' bit

thats not in the rules but i've encountered at least one puzzle that makes you assume it further down the line

idk how others are treating the upgrades but i am consistently picking the ones that seem Most Interesting vs. Most Best in pretty much every case. like the parlor lets you make it 3 gems, or get 2 wind-up keys, or... funeral parlor, which makes it a red room, adds an empty coffin, and makes the number of gems equal to your current number of red rooms -- but you lose 30 steps if you're wrong...

of course i picked the last one lol because i am a sicko. i don't even always have 3 red rooms when i decide i need to solve it lol.

you know what room stumped the hell out of me last night? The Gallery

Hah I just got that last night and was likewise baffled.

regarding that room: I solved one right away then got the others by writing down every possible letter.

they're very cryptic crossword. there are clues planted elsewhere if you can't get them just from the image but you probably won't find them until later

yeah i've been trying to trust that clues will always eventually show up for the things i'm still not getting

think i might be getting to the point of taking a little break from it tho

ok i'm definitely on the final boss now. i'm going to become the blue prince

Bought this last night. Third day and I've only found one puzzle room - the parlour. Two slightly annoying things, I know it was a roguelike but I guess I didn't consider that meant no saves - what do you do if you have to stop playing? And playing on a steam deck the cutscenes don't work for me, I get a flash of white then a test card pattern (!)

What do you mean by no saves? as in part way through a day?

That's slightly annoying (although you can just leave in rest mode on PS5) but it saves at the end of each day

yeah part way through. i can just leave the steam deck on standby though - as long as i remember to plug it in.

You can save and quit during a day but it ends your day. The way the mechanic works means you don't really lose out by that unless you're having an exceptionally good day.

I've read that saving mid run isn't supported right now but the developer is working on a patch, though it isn't likely to come soon. L

Meanwhile: Day 50 or so, and I only just figured out the terminal password. It's not like I never had access to a magnifying glass, I just never thought to use it on the scratched out document.

i don't think you should be able to save mid-run tbh, love a bit of permadeath

and how would it work with drafting? save scumming wd seriously deplete the experience

if the balance of a game is good - if playing is as rewarding as winning - then "save scumming" (awful term) shouldn't be tempting to most people; and if some want to do it, why not, it doesn't hurt anyone.

i don't love the term but it exists. if you could save your game at any point in Blue Prince that would break a core mechanic of the game: each run a set of strategic decisions with elements of chance and probability. maybe they will offer it as an option but that seems counter to what kind of game it is, to me.

its fine to have temporary saves so people can turn the game off and then resume (the save gets deleted at this point)

plenty of games do this

anyway i just solved the breaker room puzzle (that opens the diamond mine), not really sure how - I had the clues from the emails but I'm definitely not 100% on the mechanism and it was a great fist-pump moment.

just failed my first attempt at the final boss run then realized i misinterpreted something and would have had it augh. dont have time for another attempt today

hugely frustrating when you have only one room left to draft and it offers you a dead end and two other rooms - oh but they require gems and you don't have any! sorry!

i'm a bit confused about bedrooms, i thought they all gave you bonus steps but apparently not...

I got all the way up to a room next to the antechamber the other night and was like "that's it", only to find the room blocked off. Not sure why that was

Think there's a card - Nursery? - that then gives you bonus steps every time you draft a bedroom xp

I really enjoy the gentle brutality of those "so near but so far" moments, fun to see others hit them too

I just got into the antechamber for the first time, used what was in there, got through the first bit of the basement... and then ran out of steps

that's not too crushing since progress made outside the house persists

Just completed Day 4 and I can't believe it only just occurred to me to turn around and go explore the grounds

Thanks ciderpress! I did not realise that would apply

i did it. i became the blue prince. i know there's a 4th layer after this but i'm calling it here since i'm sure this is the last satisfying offramp, the game even implies as such

Ugh found a platforming area and I realize I've never done anything like this in 3D and it's hitting my motion sensitivity hard. I can do one run and then have to look at something else for a couple minutes before another attempt.

Day 5 and got right next to the Antechamber but then ran out of keys

Also got all excited solving the Periodic Table puzzle but then realized I needed the Bolier Room drafted too

For a game where I've still no idea what I'm doing, this is remarkably compelling I must say

I'm taking a break. I cheated my way through a phase two puzzle which I didn't see multiple clues for, but maybe they were to come at a later point. spoiler: it was the satellite, specifically the xyzabc part. the only clues i know of are all in that one book. I need to slow down and focus on what I have to do instead of running through the house day after day.

Where I'm currently at: 7 sanctum doors open, 3 sigils solved, still need to learn erajan

h2o in its gaseous form is called mrs peterson - solid gag, I lolled.

Cheated thru a couple of puzzles and gotdamn there is no way I would have ever gotten that and some of the pun-based ones make me want to throw a bottle

Game addicting as hell, as I did the narrative being spun and fragmented way it’s being spun

hmm, not sure i've found any pun based puzzles yet. currently struggling over what count small gates could mean (not fishing for hints!)

the pump room is a piece of piss compared to the boiler room.

Yeah the boiler room is a teeth-grinder

idk if i'd call them "pun" puzzles so much as "homonym" puzzles tbf

small boiler room related hint that you learn somewhere, but tbh i wish i knew sooner -- if you power a door, the odds of it being a room that accepts power on the other side goes up drastically

anyway i can safely say that i am at the point where the puzzles are too much, so everything else left in the game is either gonna go unsolved or get done via a guide telling me exactly what to do because there's NO way i am dealing w/ this like... enormous 25-word cipher

The pun that got the biggest reaction out of me when I caught on was one related to a later bought item... the swim trunks

i've tried very hard to not look up hints but i caved on the drawing room safe and frankly having read the solution it can fuck off

yeah i had to look up a clue for that one as well. based on the clue my gf got it (actually tbh i think she got all of them before i did except for maybe office). we must have spent over an hour in-game, and a day or two pondering out-of-game before caving and seeking hints

Same here today, happy I looked it up because it just doesn't work as an elegant solution like some of the others

xp yeah i stopped before the math cipher stuff, as far as i'm concerned the blue prince book manuscript is the 'true ending' of the game the same way room 46 is the regular ending and everything after that is for people who want to go psycho looking at spirals

Feels like I hit a wall, two of the guesses I have for the gallery turned out wrong and I haven't been able to draft it again to try other guesses, I decoded the paired picture puzzle but have only opened 3 safes out of the 6 that I've found, I still have two rooms I've never unlocked (been this way for a few days now), and last night I kept hitting dead ends around ranks 3 and 4.

small hint for the safes: for MOST of the safes, apart from the picture puzzle, you don't need anything from other rooms to solve them
pun i just noticed: red letter days

This is my GOTY I'm pretty sure, even if most of phase 2 is stumping me.

I had a pretty shitty few (game) days, running out of keys or being given dead ends and having to call it a day with 30+ steps remaining. Then I managed to construct the power hammer! and blasted my way into the basement and the reservoir, which was great. It felt like discovering Blackreach in Skyrim. So now I have an idea how to get into the antechamber and beyond. But the gear room is perplexing. And I lost the power hammer :( - and then I had another couple of shitty days.

I'm a bit conflicted about this game. It is very good, and I'm only going to criticise it for something it is not. But I loooved the witness and the talos principle, full of puzzles you can solve using your brain. This seems full of puzzles you have to solve using stamina - traipsing around trying to find the right clue or explanation. E.g. I've only just drafted the tomb, and obviously (I think!) there's no way to figure out which statues you have to pull or in what order, so I have to find something to tell me. But where? That and the fact that it's chance based is a really frustrating combination.

I've had the piano tune from the Music Room looping round my head all morning

I agree the game isn't without flaws that reveal themselves more as you progress, but it's so very moreish

Imagine my chagrin after finally draining the reservoir only to find none of those fucking chests open with a sledgehammer

how did you drain the reservoir? i can't even drain the pool - not enough empty space. Did you connect up the boiler room to the pump room? I can't imagine being able to do that in a month of sundays (real time)

I did connect the Boiler Room to the Pump Room, which brought the extra tank into play. You can give yourself an edge on being able to do this by where and when you place the Boiler - set the flow in the direction of the space you want to draft in before drafting. And try to collect some Ivory Dice or unlock a specific perk which gives you redrafting options

I found this interview with the game's creator Tonda Ros, from a podcast about Christopher Manson's MAZE: https://www.mazecast.com/2025/04/interview-with-tonda-ros.html
I had to look up The Practical Alchemist after reading that. It's out of print but it's available on 4nn4's 4rchive. It's definitely a direct inspiration for some of the puzzles. it's a big word ladder puzzle. it uses images that can be described by different nouns, like the paintings -- plane/flight etc.

that's cool, I know of a few prize puzzle books e.g. masquerade, and this one we owned - https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/ultimate-alphabet-book-mike-wilks-9781851451814 - but hadn't heard of that one.

i had the Maze book, it was neat. i remember the solution i found being kind of a BS trick and believing that there must have been a more rigorous solution but never finding it

I looked up the solution to Masquerade recently and that was kind of a BS trick too. Plus the guy who won it turned out to have cheated and got the info from the author’s ex-girlfriend?

Anyway I got Blue Prince via ps+ on release and played for a couple of hours and quickly realised it was a game which wanted to waste a lot more of my time than I was willing to give it, so dropped out. First time checking this thread and haha you’re mostly all making it sound dreadful while also proclaiming it’s the best thing you’ve ever played!

It's very good and beautifully executed, I think my two quibbles are

- It's in the nature of puzzle games to end up falling back on stupidly unfair puzzles

- the longer you play the more time it demands for fewer rewards

But those aren't full blown criticisms, if you buy in it's a unique and brilliant experience

The Maze solution had several flaws, and if it's solvable, then it's only barely solvable. The final word in the main riddle (shoulders) is impossible to find. And the single room puzzle (room 45!) has so many possible sentences that it's no help at all. Working out the path is still fun.

Masquerade plays fair. That and the bee book (the wikipedia title is a spoiler!) by the same author are the best armchair treasure hunts I know of. Daedelian Depths from a few years ago is another tribute to Maze, but its art is ugly. Most other hunts focus too much on real world knowledge.

Blue Prince progress update: I wish I had taken better notes -- I kept taking screenshots but they're such a mess that I rarely use them. I got 6 sigils then didn't feel like looking through every room again, so I used the guide on steam that contains pictures of every document in the game. Now there's another thing I need to rummage through documents to find.

Small hint to players hoping to play past phase 1 of Blue Prince: keep lists of related things.

pretty vague hint :)

I made a thread for puzzle books like maze: Unsolvable riddles and horrible rhymes, gadzooks! This is a thread for puzzle books

Got annoyed with the a couple of the safes and brute forced them once I narrowed down the months, which would normally make me feel a bit dirty but I've been feeling kind of frustrated with the game lately.

Progress: I've managed to enter the ante chamber through a bit of dumb luck because that happened on a run when I was hoping to do simmering rise. I've opened all the chests in the reservoir so have access to sanctum keys, though no sancta in sight. My allowance is up to 23 coins. I've bought out the bookshop and just need to read the new books now. I've figured out how to get into the central thing of the Cloister. Opened two safe deposit boxes. Three of the listed permanent unlocks. Been getting letters from Raymond and I'm like, "Buddy, please give me something actually useful."

Still stumped: the last two puzzles in the gallery. Still missing two rooms. Trying to power the lab has been a real pain, since I've confirmed that the ducts need to actually line up and that mere adjacency isn't enough.

Also, I know there's a thing called chess portmanteau and they're probably related to the novelty sized pieces all over the place but beyond that I know nothing about it.

i completed a Dare run today, 6 days I think, cos i'm running out of interesting stuff to do on the regular game

got into the antechamber! and on the next run pulled the north lever. everything I've read says it's not permanent, you need to pull it again each day - or each day you make it to the antechamber - but when I visited it again the next day it was still down.

and I'm kicking myself because I got a clue that there's a secret lever in the weight room, I drew the weight room but didn't pick it because I forgot I had the secret bunker.

Also, I know there's a thing called [show hidden text] but beyond that I know nothing about it.

― Baroque Obama (Leee), Saturday, May 3, 2025 7:33 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

i can almost 100% promise you you can ignore that clue, it exists somewhere between useless and maliciously misunderstandable

I haven't seen any reference to chess portmanteau but I do know what the novelty chess pieces relate to. I've been trying to achieve it for a while.

afaik the thing leee is talking about is... a blue memo hidden in, i think, the study?, after you get blue tents + drop it on rank 8. and afaik it is just a poor explanation of how to open the safe in the study

I reached room 46 on day 50. I lucked into a lever in the machinarium, I don't know if it's always there. I did have to go and pull the north lever again. Still lots to do that I'm aware of (some rooms i havent seen at all, some safes I haven't even found! and some big puzzles), probably even more that I'm not.

And obviously I'm desperate to know what exactly is in room 46.

well as far as luck goes the number of doors in the Machinarium depends on how many Mechanical rooms you've already drafted that day. I think (?) it generates viable room doors first and then the East and West levers

I got into room 46 again the next day but one, and solved the chess puzzle, i picked the armory obviously, though the chapel upgrade was tempting, and found the gallery - I solved the easy one that says THICK. Sometimes the game plays nice.

Day 83 I think and I still haven't gotten into Room 46, and only just managed to draft the Trophy Room. Still missing room 8, too.

DAMN I feel good, I just solved all four pics in the Gallery

Nice. I've got one to go. questions about thicc... are the handcuffs and comet/hand completely irrelevant? The other two I've got are pretty solid though, lol at genu-wine.

I know what I have to do in the inner sanctum and it's ridiculous. I don't know what I have to do for 8 realms in 8 months. Still missing three safes.

as far as i can tell re question: yeah the handcuffs and comet are just distractions

my interpretation of that 5 letter one is on the top, COME To FISTiCUFFS. and part of the bottom one is light=thin.

also the 8 letter one is actually room in (row) 8 lol

this latin from manson's the practical alchemist -- did I see it in blue prince too? i got deja vu
https://i.imgur.com/QFeZ0TU.png

also here's another manson woodcut from that book -- right now I think the only important part of it is the word "bit"
https://i.imgur.com/mZRq3jV.png