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I think the first co-op game I ever played was Myst back in 1993. It wasn’t technically co-op, but my friend and I treated it that way. We sat side-by-side at my PC, playing through the point-and-click adventure and working to solve its baffling puzzles together.
Blue Prince, a game where you enter a strange, shifting 45-room mansion to find its hidden 46th room, has a bit in common with Myst: it’s about exploring an eerie and mysterious location, you’ll need a pen and paper to take pages of careful notes, it’s perfect for playing alongside a mystery-loving partner or friend… and it’s absolutely packed with intricate puzzles.
Where Blue Prince is a better game than Myst—where it’s brilliant in its design in general—is that despite being filled with puzzles, you don’t particularly need to solve any of them to reach room 46.
In Myst and a lot of puzzle games, puzzles represent a brick wall: a place where you have to stop until you’ve solved the puzzle. Can’t solve it? Then you’re not getting any further in this direction and you’re definitely not making it to the end of the game.
In Blue Prince, if you can’t solve a puzzle… don’t worry about it. You can keep on going and find another way to that elusive final room. I solved a ton of puzzles in my playthrough of Blue Prince, but I’m pretty sure I could have gotten through the whole game without solving almost any of them.
To be clear, I’m not saying don’t solve the puzzles. They’re elegantly designed puzzles, you’ll have an absolute blast wrapping your mind around them, and it’ll obviously make your life a lot easier as you move through the house. All I mean is, if you run into a puzzle you can’t solve, it’s not going to stop you in your tracks. You can try again later, or find another way to the finish line altogether.
A few specific puzzles appear nearly every time you play: the parlor has a logic puzzle and the billiards room has a mathematical puzzle. Each of these puzzles, when solved, will give you either keys or gems. You’re gonna need keys, because the deeper you journey into the mansion, the more locked doors you’ll find, and you need gems to access certain kinds of rooms.
Thing is, you’ll find plenty of gems and keys throughout the mansion even if you can’t solve the math and logic puzzles in those two rooms. I’ve skipped those puzzles plenty of times just because I’d had enough keys and gems that I didn’t need to stop to collect more. I’ve also gotten the answers to those puzzles wrong and missed out on the prize. Maybe flubbing a puzzle ended my run early once or twice, but you could skip those puzzles altogether, on every run, and still make it to room 46.
There are other, more difficult puzzles hidden in the mansion. Most I tackled with glee, including a few that took me quite a while to figure out. (Sorry to be so vague, but I don’t want to spoil even a single puzzle for anyone). I was happy when I solved them, but I discovered later that the places I accessed by solving them weren’t, technically, critical to finishing the game. These puzzles all helped me reach Room 46, but I could have made it without solving them.
There are even a few rooms I haven’t solved completely yet, and at least one I haven’t even attempted to solve. Around 25 hours in I knew I was getting close to Room 46, and I walked into a room I’d never seen before.
It immediately gave off the vibe: Hi, I am a huge complicated puzzle! I wasn’t in the mood for yet another monstrous brain-bender at that moment, so you know what I did? I noped out. I left the room and headed through a different door, and I still finished the run and made it to the final room.
And if you’re looking for guides, there’s no need to search the internet or fire up YouTube: there are guides you’ll find right there in the game itself. In the later hours of my playthrough, I’d occasionally find rooms deep within the mansion explaining how some of its puzzles work, the details listed in a note or on a chalkboard. I’d already figured those puzzles out by that point, but if I hadn’t, the game was happy to lend me a hand.
So, if you play Blue Prince (you should) and get stuck on a puzzle (you will), don’t sweat it. Turn around, go through a different door, and try again later. Or, don’t. Unlike most puzzle games, skipping a puzzle here and there won’t stop you from finishing.
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Kurt Indovina
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