I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface ofBlue Prince, the best scoring game of the year so far,according to Opencritic, but it feels likethe kind of thing that was tailor-made for me. The game is set in a house that rearranges itself every night, and the goal is to find the mansion’s 46th secret room. It’s a slow-boil mystery game that requires players to keep an eye out for obtuse details and requires a fair amount of outside-the-box puzzle-solving.
Even though I haven’t come anywhere close to solving the mystery at the heart of Blue Prince, I can already tell that it’s going to be the type of experience that resonates with me based on one simple detail: When you start playing Blue Prince for the first time, you get a message telling you that it’s probably best if you play the game with a pen and some paper handy.
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Controller
It usually takes me a while to really get won over by a game. The lengthy tutorials that plague modern triple-A titles are a snoozefest, but there’s one way to immediately grab my attention, and that’s by telling me to take physical notes to keep track of information and discoveries if I want any hope of reaching the end.
While that sort of message could be displayed at the start of any kind of game (I specifically remember a handful of journalists talking about how they kept a diary of their emotions while playingThe Last of Us Part 2pre-release), most of the time, the ‘grab some pen and paper’ message means you’re about to play an absolute banger.
The puzzle game genreis my favorite because of the way that many titles ask players to completely engage with their puzzles. Games likeReturn of the Obra Dinnand last year’sLorelei and the Laser Eyesare incredible lateral thinking games because their puzzles are complex and can’t be solved passively. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes explicitly tells players that the game is best played with a bit of paper to jot down notes and, although Obra Dinn never tells you that in-game, most players would recommend having some paper around to fill in the gaps and keep track of information that the game’s ledger doesn’t have space for.
Blue Prince follows Lorelei and the Laser Eyes’ lead, and tells the player that it’s a good idea to have some paper handy to draw connections between the obtuse clues they find and to keep track of the information they’ve put together on their own since the game itself won’t be tracking your deductions.
A New Kind Of Puzzler
When I’m told to take notes by a game, I feel a little overwhelmed since ‘make sure to write stuff down’ is really vague advice. But, as is the case with most games, understanding comes with time. No game is telling me to write down literally everything that happens, but to just keep track of the notable moments and pieces of information that stick out. As I spend more and more time with a controller in one hand and a notebook in the other, I find that I end up having a more cohesive, memorable experience.
Despite sometimes being overwhelmed at first when a game tells me to grab something to write on, the message usually fills me with excitement because it means that the game is taking its puzzles seriously. It’s a message that tells us, “You won’t be able to guess your way through this.”
I appreciate that kind of reassurance since, even though puzzle games are my favorite genre, they tend to have a wide gap in quality. Some games don’t want the player to be so stumped that they give up and walk away, but when a game is worried about that, they tend to overexplain themselves and give their solutions away too easily. Blue Prince, Obra Dinn, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes,Outer Wilds, andAnimal Well are all devoted to being packed with high-quality puzzlesthat aren’t solved the second that the player sees them, and that’s what sets them apart as excellent experiences.
There’s been a push online recently to have these sorts of games spin off from the puzzle genre at large since they require a different kind of focus than games like Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure or Duck Detective: The Secret Salami. That’s not to say they’re better or worse than more casual puzzle games, but they offer a different, more complicated experience.
The difficult part is trying to find a name. Metroid-brain-ia? First-person solver? Brain-le Royale? Logic sim? I might be smart enough to get through Blue Prince, but I’m certainly not clever enough to come up with a new genre name, so I’ll leave that to the professionals.
