I learnt a lot in this run through. The Contingency were kicking my butt. But then I realised that you can press the ‘Take Point’ button to call upon allies.
After that, it was quite easy! I did have to heavily invest in winning this war though; using an Acendency Perk to get the damage bonus.
I didn’t go full Angry Mode this time. I decided to do some diplomacy and it was much easier to take control of most of the galaxy that way.
I’m excited to start my next run with a few more DLC. I bought some more in the Steam Summer sale.
Blue Prince came out only in April with a pretty big flash. It seemed like everyone was playing it (and indeed it peaked on Steam with 20,000 players playing at the same time) and everyone was tlaking about i (mentioned acorss mlutiple episodes of The Besties). That peak seems to have died down now, and there feels less of a need to preface every conversation with “no Blue Prince spoilers!” whenever the topic of what we’re playing comes up.
So now seems like an alright time to talk about Blue Prince in a spoiler-lite way, specifically to the people who haven’t yet picked it up.
Like Animal Well, much of te fun of the game comes form the initial diving in and trying to understand what’s going on. Going in blind is the best way to Play Blue Prince, then toiling away at its puzzles by yourself for a while is highly satistfying. Before going any further, if you haven’t played it yet then I suggest you stop reading and go and see if you like it. It will be worth your time. I’ll be talkinga bout some fo the mechanics here which might steal a bit of joy. On the ohter hand, if you’re after a nudge to play it without all the uncertainty (without any strong spoilers) then read on.
The main aim of the game is to reach Room 46, a condition of your inheritance of the manor the game takes place in. I’ll mention this now, and again later, but there’s no time limit on how long you have to secure your inheritance. Go at your own pace.
The game is ostensibly a puzzle game, whose short-story you’re learning from artifacts rather than exposition. You’ll find notes around the house which will make little sense until you connect them with another note or portrait or photograph. If you like ergodic literature like S. (Doug Dorst, a book I never pass on an opportunity to mention) or House of Leaves (Danielewski) then you’ll find this scratching the same itch.
Some of these notes are out in the open and some of them are hidden behind well crafted puzzles. Very much like escape rooms where one immaterial letter from on part of the house suddenly becomes quite important when you realise its true use. This is definitely a note taking game; I made heavy use of Steam’s screenshot feature. The puzzles range from being quite obviously solvable (there is a room with a literal logic puzzle), to rooms where the puzzle seems impenetrable. The delight of the writing in this game is that those impenetrable puzzles will become explain within the game if you’re on the look out for them. Before looking up the answer to a puzzle, I found that focusing elsewhere for a while usually meant its solution is explain to me somewhere in the house.
The core mechanic of the house itself is a mixture of the deck-building of a Slay the Spire style game and the semi-random map building of a Carcassonne. As you enter a room, you’re shown three options for what room could be ahead of you. Each room has a quirk or reward and (most importantly) a varying number of exists to the next room. You’re to place these room tiles in such a way that you don’t block yourself in by closing off your path to get to Room 46. Or, maybe you want to risk blocking off this path because this dead-end room has a few items that will come in handy later.
Like Slay the Spire, it’s hard to know exactly what kind of play through you’ll be doing on a particular day. It depends on the cards you’re dealt. If you’re drawing lots of green cards, you may want to focus on methods of making those more lucrative. The randomness is considered a large fault of the game by many – including me when it felt like I was fighting the RNG to achieve of combination of rooms that never seemed to come up.
It’s not as bad as just rolling a dice though: your deck is largely fixed, with only minor adjustments being made to it throughout the whole game. There are also ways of tilting the TNG in your favour. The “West Hall” for instance only appears in the west of the house. As you play, you’ll want to watch out for patterns like that – there are a number of them. As mentioned earlier, give it enough time and the game will let you into these clues if you don’t manage to solve it yourself. (It will do this quite obviously – so don’t worry you’re missing a clue.)
The game is played in ‘days’, which end when you get blocked in or you run out of ‘Steps’ for the day. At the end of the day, the house resets, ready for you to lay it out again. Only this time you’re hopefully equipped with a little more information or maybe a perminant perk that changes how you’ll play. It’s the iconic “one more turn/day” loop that’s so addicting in Civilisation games. Each day probably won’t run you more than half an hour – unless something is going really well for you on the run.
Like I’ve said already, the game makers will sometimes hint at some time constraint or peril. I described the game to two ergodic books earlier, and those both have some mild peril lingering throughout. This game wanted to have that feeling too. Unfortunately, the feeling doesn’t add to the game at all and from what I’ve seen never actually come to fruition. There’s a particularly spooky thread that doesn’t go anywhere and feels like the writers may have just forgotten to remove it from an earlier version of the game. The game lives in a place of revelled curiosity, and certainly not stress. You can set the controller aside, unpaused, with no impact. You can play for many in-game days and never be locked out of a puzzle or story through line. Play at your own pace. The game is one of the few games I play which works both as a “podcast game” – where full focus isn’t required to continue having fun – and as a “thinking game” where you’ll be taking nots and mulling them over.
I was deeply into this game, and still think every hour was joyfully worth it. I will say that once I got to Room 46 it felt a bit like an end for me, even though the game can continue to be played. I’ve had my fill, for now at least. I’ve heard from many people who are still playing it though, long after they reach the story’s conclusion. There are plenty of puzzles to unlock and keep working on. Justin McElroy said it best: “Play til the end, then one more day, and you’ll know if you will keep playing.”
I think I’ll go back to it eventually – especially if my friends keep excitedly talking about it.
This is a rogue-lite puzzle game, where you pick what’s going to be in the next room as you’re entering it (like Hades). You collect items which help you do slightly different things each run. There’s no combat and you can leave the game sitting there are ages whilst you eat some lunch and come back to find it exactly as you left it, even unpaused. It’s a very good podcast game, with the occaisional puzzles which might require you to pause to pay slightly more attention.
Like all these “play and play again” games, it’s slightly different each run through. A new thing is added each time you start, so the feeling of “just one more round” is very present.
Tonight was the third session (which included two cidres, so bear with me) of Stellaris, playing with some friends in the same game.
The first two sessions I was madly clicking around. The game happens so fast, and there’s so much going on. I was randomly clicking research and just throwing buildings onto planets.
This session, I thought I was about to lose, so decided to take it slower and try to claw something back.
It’s getting better for me!
Since I was randomly selection research, there were loads of very low point research projects for me to do. I think I’ve caught up a bit because of that. I’ve paid more attention to the perks of each leader. Fine tuned things. Doing well, I hope.
Tonight our normal DM was away from the table, so another of the group ran a Pathfinder one-shot that shocking took on session!
I ended up making a Chapion for it. In the course of trying to figure out what magic items he should have I came up with a long backstory for him, with mini adventures along the way. One included a roll in the hay with a sea witch that she was so pleased with she gifted him a necromancied horse. Wonderful.
So this is a fun game, but I’m not sure how long for.
I just closed it down thinking “ah, maybe that’s enough”. Which isn’t a bad thing for a game but… I might have had my fill after my third playing session.
It’s using the same engine as Oxygen Not Included, which if you enjoyed and want it shaken up a bit, then you should play this. It did get me thinking: why build this game though? They’re still releasing updates to Oxygen Not Included. I think it’s because ONI just got too complicated. Too many systems that it’s getting harder to build on top of.
I can imagine the developers, in a meeting, saying “if we deleted 50% of the code base we could add in loads more interesting mechanics to the engine”. That isn’t a bad thing! However, there’s no many new mechanics. It’s very true to ONI’s gameplay.
I’ve not run into a situation, like in ONI, where I’ve made a crucial mistaken ten hours in and the only solution is to start again. (No one accidentally vomits in your fresh water supply in this game.)
My own impatience is one of the worst things about this game though, which is the same as ONI. I’ll find myself waiting for the various tasks I’ve queued up to get done. I need some wood, so I’m just waiting for it to get chopped. Or waiting for the fog to come in, so I can send it back, and get a refreshed resource pool.
I can’t get the frigging roofs to do as I want, so I’m really not show to I’m supposed to be making these “wonky” rooms.
This game is in the same genre of Obra Dinn, where you’re given a manifest to fill out (in this case a family tree) and a whole load of information that needs to be dug through to fill out.
The mysterious quest giver starts you off with some information, and then you’re left with your available tools to find out more: a text lookup service (the “Internet”), a book lookup service, and magazine archives to look through. It’s a lot of reading compared to Obra Dinn’s videos, but I’m having fun with it so far.
Don’t zoom in too much: there are spoilers for the first hour or so on the cork board.
I’m playing this with my partner actually. We’re both reading along and coming up with theories. I’m foreseeing a few discussions on what second-cousins-twice-removed are.
The soundtrack is pretty cool too. A nice jazzy number.
I’ve been playing a bit of Cyberpunk 2077 again the past week, after not playing since it came out.
Before I was able to play on a pretty high graphics spec. Recently though, I realised that my monitor was ancient (not upgraded when my computer was) and was only running at 1080p. Which I’ve been happy with for a while, but is not ideal for programming on which is something I do rarely from this workstation but enough to be snagged by it when I do.
Anyway, I got a much higher res monitor, and that can’t run the game as such high settings. So I’ve had to come to a balance of not-max-resolution and mostly-decent settings. The screen size increase is quite nice though.
I took this screenshot using the Photo feature of the game. That’s quite full featured and fun! However, it saved the image to my ‘gallery’ and I’ve no idea where that is. I took a screenshot. :shrug:
It’s been years since I’ve played WoW, and still this quest giver thinks I’ve been quick.
I really loved World of Warcraft for a while. I definitely feel the sense of chasing the dragon. This character, for instance, I clearly created it barely got out the starting area, and got bored. Not to return for a year or two.
