Recent reviews by GNeutrality

Solid nonogram puzzle game + visual novel, with a good story! The worst problem is that it doesn't have an undo button, which definitely gets annoying, but it's not too bad.

I think I want to pull the review score more toward "Mixed"

I'll start with positives. Blue Prince looks amazing, they did a great job with the art style. The rogue-lite mechanic was well thought out and the rooms themselves are really neat. It's really satisfying to get the right combinations of things and get a really good run in. Some of the puzzles are manageable with the RNG and getting to solve them was a blast. The permanent unlocks are genuinely useful, and super rewarding to discover.

Now for negatives.

Blue Prince is far more a rogue-lite game than a puzzle game. The biggest hurdle to getting through the game is waiting for the RNG to give you a good path through the house and useful rooms, even when you know what you need and multiple ways to get it.

As far as puzzles go, it doesn't actually have that many puzzles. The major puzzles in the game are "guess the meaning" puzzles which many people love, but they're not for me. I like logic puzzles; there are two rooms in the game with logic puzzles. Those were fun. I wish the game were better with approachable puzzles.

If they separated the puzzles from the rogue-like bits, the game would honestly probably be a lot better. You could solve puzzles properly and then go back in for the randomness for the enjoyment of it without worrying about wasting puzzle opportunities.

As many other reviewers have pointed out, it doesn't respect your time. The main puzzles involve trekking through the house just hoping you get the right rooms in the right place for a sliver of a clue and/or the right resources to solve it. The main reason people have so many hours playing the game is that they love the crumbs being fed each run and keep going back for more to be able to solve everything on their own, which is fine but it doesn't mean the game has that much content. For example, one puzzle can't even be attempted until you've gotten a certain room combination and option set like 10-20 times. That alone is like 20 hours of playtime, just to be able to start one puzzle. A lot of puzzles are like that, where you need a lot of luck just to be able to attempt to solve them. If you were wrong or you make a mistake, that means another many hours at your next shot.

There's some story in there too but playing through was too annoying to really care about any of it.

And lastly there's no way to save and quit in the middle of a day. That's such an easy quality-of-life feature you could add to accommodate people who can't or might not want to dedicate an un-interruptible hour or two into playing.

If playing through to solve puzzles wasn't so annoying, like if you could manipulate the RNG better to get what you needed consistently, it would have been really fun.

This game has potential.

Not quite what I thought it would be going in; I thought there would be more math to it, more puzzle aspects, more strategy, more variations on things. You quickly find that the optimal strategy is generate 1 bits as fast as possible with Copy/Mirror+Not (3 node types), and then concatenate them with Merge/Buffer (2 node types), and then dump them into the highest level ConvertXXXX you can afford, only 6 unique node types in total (8 if you count the 2 for the input bit generation, OnTick+Split) once you've reached ConvertWord. There isn't much strategy beyond that; this is the fastest way to produce "Work".

Giving a thumbs up and not refunding because I like the uniqueness, the idea behind the game, and I want to see more games try things like this, although the execution isn't really there.

I would recommend to the developer:
- Achievements are nice, but add goals in-game so that we have something to work towards
- Change the nodes available and how they work. Give them more variety, more kinds of functions/abilities than just simple logic gates. Most of the given nodes are simply not useful because they are less optimal than the strategy mentioned above. It would be interesting to have something like "generate X pattern to produce Y Work" or something totally different, I don't know. Something puzzley. It feels limiting that the only optimal strategy is "fill the converters with 1s". Maybe even completely delete Copy/Mirror and force the player to do clever things with a fixed rate of result bits.
- Please allow players to delete or downgrade nodes, I had to just dump my useless nodes off to the side
- Take some inspiration from games like The Gnorp Apologue or Idle Colony and their progressions, with production rates that scale over time over many magnitudes, different ways to increase the number, enable-able bonuses, and victory conditions

It was fine. The mechanic itself is cool, but it gets repetitive pretty quickly. Most of the achievements are "finish the level in X moves" which, again, is cool in the beginning but gets annoying if you're trying to go for all the achievements

A real unique, mind-bendy take on the Sokoban genre. All the levels try out different ideas, and if you can wrap your head around how to move things around, you really get the "wow!" feeling a lot. Probably the second-best Sokoban game I've ever played, behind Baba Is You.

Baba Is You is the most impressive puzzle games I've ever played. The mechanics of the game lead to such differing, unique interactions that each level feels wildly different in their solutions, even levels that intentionally look similar to each other. It perfectly captures the idea of "think outside the box", especially in the later levels. For such whimsical graphics you wouldn't expect such a hard game.

It's been years since I played this and yet I don't think I'll ever find a game that replaces this game as "the most amazing puzzle game ever" in my head.

Great co-op adventure game. The artwork is stunning, and you travel through so many different kinds of locations. Where this game really shines though is all the varied genres of challenges you face that they incorporated beyond the main 3D action platforming, from top-down RPG to racing to rhythm, each level has something new to do. There are lots of minigames along the way too, you can take a break from working together to compete with each other. And there were so many delightful easter eggs throughout.

The biggest downside would be the characters' writing. You play two parents who intend to get divorced, sucked into a fantasy toy world to save their relationship. Except, the attitudes of the characters take huge swings to fit the moment, so they don't really feel like they have consistent personalities, or receive much character development. Which is a bummer, because the developer's previous game, A Way Out, had amazing writing and character development.

With that said though, it was still good. Hazelight Studios really know how to make fun co-op gameplay. I look forward to playing their next game, Split Fiction, and anything else they make after.

Good puzzle game about combining objects across different scenes like in Gorogoa, with some caveats.

It suffers from introducing mechanics you didn't realize you could do, a few times:
- In some scenes, certain objects go together but the colors don't match so you have to manipulate the time or position of the scene to change the lighting
- In a couple scenes, you have to combine two things in the same scene instead of across scenes like usual
A lot of times you only discover the solution by accident; overall there's a lot of things that make for annoying puzzles.

But otherwise, discovering the solutions to the other puzzles feels great. The hint system can tell you what objects to pay attention to, which at least lets you try to figure out which things to try to combine without directly skipping the puzzle.

It's been a long time since I played this, but I remember the novelty and thrill of this unique kind of management, where it's simple overall but you're constantly expanding your village and completing all these milestones. The fact that many other games have tried to copy this one stands as a testament to how much fun it is.

It's been so long since I've played it (which I did outside of Steam) but I still remember how amazing it was. Move the panels around to split the world within the panel and connect different panels. The artwork is stunning and the panel connections are so unique and different from each other. There a whole lot of story, but the strange journey through the game's environment is still wonderful