Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince?
[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]]
Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
> Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince?
I'm saying that, if you removed the Parlour, the Billiards Room, all the Mora Jai boxes, and all the other puzzles that aren't directly related to finding room 46 (including everything after the "tutorial"), you'd have a lesser but still memorable game. Inversely, if you took just the boxes, and the parlour puzzles, and the darts puzzles, you'd have a fun but unremarkable little time waster. I really enjoy spending hours on some the more insane sudoku puzzles featured on Cracking the Cryptic (even if I often end up abandoning many of the harder ones), but have zero patience for supermarket sudoku books.
"1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.
> "1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.
There's a lot of people for whom what you're talking about is in fact a huge draw. Everyone likes different types of games, and that's fine; I don't really think we're at risk of losing one to the other :)
I'd also put forward that you can still make open-world games with 100s of hours of content that are still truly exceptional - look at Red Dead Redemption 2, for example.
searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End.
Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.
I cheated the Gallery. The art is by one of Tonda's big inspirations, and whereas Tonda thinks he's great I think he's terrible and should knock it off. After maybe an hour I got one answer myself, looked up the rest, continued playing. I consider two of them reasonable puzzles, one is a bit crap and the final one is the worst thing in Blue Prince which overall is an excellent game.
The excellent thing about Blue Prince is that it isn't afraid to keep giving you more clues. I've seen people go "Bridge. Bride. I see what's happening - I will write these down" on day one. But I've also seen people walk into Study, look at the chart and go "Huh. I wonder what that's about" and walk out without any flicker of understanding. Those latter people will, hopefully, one day read the Letter in Herbert's private chest freezer, and maybe that's enough.
The Gallery puzzle isn't actually an exception to that, but it's very close. There is one small clue, and two bigger one, and then it's you versus the artist. The small clue is in a document you've never read because you need all those keys†. That document is just another set of clues, sorry, you don't even get another credits rolls. There is only one Credits Roll in the whole game and it's for reaching 46 the first time on a save, even though that's nowhere near all of the game. There's a deliberate fake out, later, but no other actual credit rolls and no explicit end, just the game starts to point out that you can just stop playing at first in subtle ways but gradually quite blatantly. It is just a game, go do something else.
† Technically you could just guess an answer, but this is after all a puzzle game so where's the fun in that?
I booted it back up for the first time in ages and managed to spawn the Gallery, then found hints on the Internet. Then managed to spawn the room it gives you a key for and that one was amusingly trivial to solve, so that was good.
Also I discovered there are mods for it out there and I may have to figure out how to get them working on my Steam Deck so I can just completely quit worrying about having enough steps/gems/dice/tools and only worry about the puzzles.
Obviously as with Minecraft this is just a game, and so however you enjoy it is fine, but I will say that conquering the resource needs is itself IMO a fun aspect of the game. In Bequest mode (the default, if you aren't aware of modes you're in Bequest mode) the game intentionally gets gradually easier
There are things that are just intentionally crazy hard, Day One Dare Mode is an example, lots of people had no idea that was even possible but it is and so somebody of course did it. But Bequest mode over a period of interactions is supposed to be a fun normal way to play this game and IMO is a lot of fun. Still, do whatever you enjoy.
[[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]]
Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].