a sleepless thought on blue prince

This post contains spoilers for Blue Prince.

I'm writing this post after pulling an all-nighter playing Blue Prince with my friend Patrick, so the writing is going to be rough. We got through a solid portion of the game this past night, but frustrations with the game began to arise the further into the game that we got. I have an idea for a new game mechanic that might address these frustrations, which many players have also been voicing online.

Where We're At

I'll start by saying that we've gotten to the antechamber (multiple times), we know where the various levers to it are, we know how to get across the underground to unlock room 46, we've gotten the red envelopes, and we've gotten all the types of new rooms. We also have a good bit of the lore (prior to the sanctum keys) figured out, and we've gotten hints at where some of these sanctum keys can be found. Great!

The Problem

But here comes the struggle: we just can't get the exact configuration of rooms right, because sometimes you need to draw the exact combination of rooms, or you're waiting for a handful of rooms to come up, but they never do. That's plenty fine for the early stages of a rogue-like/rogue-lite/rogue-like-lite game, but once you get sufficiently far enough, there are some things that... we kinda wish we didn't have to go through all the RNG to get back to.

In my opinion, the beginning of the game is fresh and exciting – there are plenty of mysteries to be solved, about the lore, about what rooms even exist, about how to even get to the antechamber. As you progress through the beginning of the game, you need to make careful choices with deciding which rooms to draft in order to uncover these mysteries bit by bit. What do all the paintings spell out? Which rooms can get you the levers to enter the antechamber? What's the deal with the water pumps?

Once you start getting a hang of things, it's no longer about discovery and exploration. At some point, you begin to go: "ok, we need to get the broken lever, and it could be in these places; we then also need to get the greenhouse to put the lever back on; then we need to connect a room going upward into the antechamber." Or, "ok, we need to place the great hall, but we also need to make sure we have enough keys, or we want the drafting room to see where the lever in the great hall is right away." You know what to do, but all you're waiting on is to draft the right rooms.

Now, yes, this is where the arguments online about RNG are typically centered. "The RNG in this game is really bad!" but then people retort, "Well, there are ways around that. Permanent additions. Room upgrades. More stars. etc. etc." And to an extent, these things are true. If you just pray to RNGesus and place your rooms without having a strategy, of course you're going to have a bad time, and you can increase your luck in drawing specific types of rooms.

But at some point... even with all the upgrades, all the new and powerful rooms in your draft, all the stars and allowance and gems... you're still waiting on a specific room. Whether that's the boiler room with the laboratory, or the boiler room and the pool and the pump room in order to drain the reservoir, or... or.. or... at some point, all you're doing is starting new runs just to draw specific rooms. And you stop discovering. You know what to do, and there's no more mystery. Even if you have all the skill in placing rooms, there's still no certainty.

And of course! Rogue-* games typically do have these elements of chance. But they also allow you to get where you want to in a run if you have the skill. There's always a possibility to advance. In Blue Prince, there are some runs where... you just can't do anything. And that isn't because you made a wrong choice.

My Suggested Mechanic

In short: there should be a mechanic for you to select what room you want to draw.

Obviously this has to have its limits, and you still need to allow for exploration in the game, but this game would greatly benefit from a mechanic to allow you to do what you know you need to do without having to re-roll the dice over and over and over.

While I think some other mechanics, such as starting with dice or being able to draw more rooms to choose from, would also help, I actually think Blue Prince should lean into the deck-building aspect of the game. I propose that once you reach Room 46, you can start "building" your deck (of rooms). And when you go through the mansion, you get two options at the door: select a room from your "deck" (and pay the diamond/effect cost of it still), or go through the usual draw process to randomly draw 3 rooms. This way, players have an additional mechanic in the event that they just want to visit a specific series of rooms, and you only get this ability once you've sufficiently explored the game enough (by getting to Room 46).

I particularly like this mechanic because it also plays into the "explore versus exploit" trade-off in games, where sure, you can keep playing the rooms you have in your deck, but these are only the rooms you've seen. You still need to draw regularly in order to discover new rooms, and the element of RNG is still present.

Lore-wise, it's also easy to incorporate: because you've gotten to Room 46, you've gained your inheritance of the house! So as a reward, you can keep a running deck of rooms (collection of blueprints?), because, well, you own the house now, rather than just being a guest.

One remaining question that affects how effective this mechanic is, is how rooms are added to your deck. The naive approach is just to say "every room you've seen, you can pull from your deck," but that might make things too easy, too quickly. Perhaps it could work like this: each day you get to pick a room you've seen to add to your deck (so players must make a choice of which room to prioritize, so it literally becomes a deck-builder). That's just one possible proposal. Another one is that each time you draft a specific room (that gets added to your draft after reaching Room 46, for example), the effect of the room is that you can add a room you've seen to your deck (not including the deck-adding room itself? Or perhaps every time you get to Room 46, you can add to your deck, which incentivizes completing a "run"). Again, this way, selection still matters, skill comes into play, and you don't get all the answers right away — there's still an aspect of choice in exploring or exploiting, and the player can make the decision of either trying to find new secrets in the house (explore), or if they already know what they need to do, they can pull from the deck so that the things you've already done and know how to do aren't made overly tedious because of RNG (exploit). It rewards you for having completed runs, while making sure you're not stalled at a moment when you've got lots of momentum after figuring out what you need to do.