Recent reviews by Blook

Disgraced Chef Luigi

It's got the sauce

Loved this one, very nice how everything from all the cases came together, loved intuiting subtle motivations of characters in this one. First dlc had more fun ideas but this one is very polished. Also love the music, it's very freaky.

This game (after the first 15 hours or so) requires an ungodly amount of patience without receiving much in return, and it relishes in absolutely wasting your time. The game is like 9 hours of puzzles, 9 hours of enjoyable luck based roguelike gameplay, and then 72 hours of padding, playing the same house drafting game long long after it's worn out its welcome, hoping the next thing you get is a neat puzzle and not a cardboard sign telling you to go play 10 more days of room drafting. And also the late game puzzles (one in particular) become so obtuse and horrible that solving them brings no joy. Still giving a positive review because there's so few games like it and I love the stuff it does well but it's the most love hate game ever.


I left the below review pretty early on with a more positive review, yea my feelings toward the game definitely soured after this but here it is anyways.
OLD REVIEW:
This game is incredibly niche. I love it but I 100% understand everyone who leaves a negative review, and I think that the universal praise and the recommendations to play it blind probably left a lot of people playing it and not enjoying it at all. So here's a list of qualifications for recommending this game:

1. For people who were recommended this because it's like Outer Wilds (or other Knowledge Progression games): Yes this game is like outer wilds, progression is similar and the concept-based puzzling is similar, I don't think I could name many games that are a better fit for people who want stuff like Outer Wilds. However, Outer Wilds is very accommodating and friendly in its puzzle design, it doesn't hold your hand but it does guide and direct you and never requires too much. Blue Prince is not like that at all, it's much more uncompromising and expects a lot more from you.

2. The "base game" is really not that interesting: Unlike Outer Wilds, this game has a surface level that makes it seem at first like it's a kind of roguelike strategy game. And it is, but if it were only that, few people would probably be recommending the game. The issue is, it's not trivial at all to break into the parts of the game that make it amazing, and so a lot of people probably play the game, don't engage with it on a meticulous Sherlock Holmes level, and are left thoroughly underwhelmed. There's not really any way to address this though except to say "try harder to do/notice a bunch of unspecified nebulous things". It's kind of like if Animal Well's deep layers were way more fleshed out and bigger and well developed, but instead of the surface level being a cool metroidvania it was a kinda uninventive platformer - makes it a lot harder to universally recommend.

3. You have to be very very patient: This is a very slow and methodical game. You have to be willing to meet it where its at, it's built on this foundation of chance and roguelike stuff and a lot of the time it can be really slow and frustrating. You might want to follow up on a lead or an idea but not get the chance to for hours and hours until things happen to slot into place correctly, or you might almost solve something but miss out because you ran out of steps. I don't think these things are faults though, if it was an experience where the content was the same but you had absolute control over everything, it would be faster and less frustrating but it would also definitely be a completely different experience and a lot of things would feel less earned and satisfying. The vibe of it is kinda similar to the Weather Factory games, Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, in that it has these mechanics that seem to only obfuscate and make things slow and frustrating, but that friction turns out to be necessary for the game to function.

4. You have to be willing to take a LOT of notes: If this is an issue for you, simply don't play the game, it's not for you. In fact, if the idea of taking copious notes doesn't actively make you want to play the game more, it's probably also not for you.

If you're still interested in it after these caveats, you will probably love it, it's very lovingly made.

Rip

THE MYTH OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Jack Nowak: I approve!
Marie Westlake: I approve!
Tesa Nevari: I don't!
ISN'T THERE SOMEBODY YOU FORGOT TO ASK?

I enjoyed it alright but I don't think I'd enthusiastically recommend it over a lot of other games. A lot of people are comparing it to Outer Wilds and I think that's not very accurate, it's more like a point and click adventure game in first person. There's some open-worldness and a time limit but the gameplay is all pretty much take an item and use it where it goes to get more items, complete with a fair amount of moon logic. That said it's usually pretty easy to know what to do cuz of a polaroid system that kinda tells you how to do stuff.

Nice but doesn't scratch a "figure out what's going on here" itch very much which I think is the main appeal of Outer Wilds.

Negative review

Videogamedunkey did a really good job making this, the fact that he not only made the game and the game engine by himself but also sculpted the computer it was built on with his bare hands out of wet clay he dug from the earth is pretty impressive

Extremely tightly designed game