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Weeknotes 26-14: Blue Prince

Monday, truly one of those days that reminds me why I love being in a city. Beautiful day, a little windy but partially cloudy and 65 by the time I left work. Biked to harvard square to meet up with ethan to get dinner before the Tigers Jaw show, ran into one of my coworkers while locking up my bike, then after eating I ran into a former coworker who I hadn’t seen in years, then at the show I ran into two of my friends who I didn’t even know were going. You love to see it!!!!! Also my driver’s license expired so I got the Xs on my hands, truly feeling like a teenager again lmao

Saturday I watched more buffy with olivia, halfway through season 7 still!!!! And then sunday was easter where I spent more time travelling than actually seeing family lmao. I played some Marathon with Ethan and he was talking about his new PC case fans and I was like “huh how do I even check my computer temps” and I opened the steam overlay thing and OOPS my CPU was at 90c!!!! that’s not good! I took off one of the panels on the top of my PC and vacuumed out the cpu cooler and immediately the temps were down to 75c after idling on the Marathon menus for 10 minutes, so that’s a good sign! But I may go to micro center soon and pick up a new CPU cooler! I do not want to have to buy new PC components in the current market 😔

I “finished” playing Blue Prince for work game club this week. Did not like that game! To deploy the Hater’s Gambit, I really wanted to like it! It felt like something I’d be really into (roguelites! puzzle game!) but the mechanics just did nothing for me. I played 13 in-game days, and way too often I’d like, get the car keys in one run and then never get a garage. Or get a garage and never get the car keys. Or get a handle and never get a room that I could use it in. Truly nothing worse in a puzzle game than knowing the solution to a puzzle, but the mechanics aren’t letting you solve it for one reason or another, and that felt like my whole experience playing this game. Like getting the individual pieces for a puzzle across multiple runs but not getting them in the same just felt bad.

It made me think a lot about what I actually look for in the puzzle games I’ve enjoyed, Fez, Animal Well, The Witness (which I did not finish), Inside, and I think for me it’s essential to either:

  1. Feel like there’s a way to really learn and internalize the puzzle mechanics (The Witness, Fez, Tunic)
  2. Get hints and be able to come back later when I’ve discovered new systems (see all three above, Animal Well)
  3. Have puzzles tightly integrated into the game design where, while there’s no systems to learn, they all feel satisfying and well designed in their own right (Inside, Animal Well)

I could see a world where something like Blue Price doesn’t have the roguelite elements and I LOVE it, exploring the house and finding new rooms and mechanics and having those “ohhhhh that’s what thing I saw meant” moments, but the rougelite aspect just made me never want to touch it again every time I had a bad run. Which is exactly what I will do!

Things I’ve been into this week!!!