When I get really into a game, I can feel the obsession. The obsession manifests as a kind of light pressure just under my forehead. Nothing else in my life other than video games has generated this reaction in me: not any job, not writing, not movies, not any relationship, and certainly not jogging. My stomach will tell you I don't jog nearly enough, but it does have the shape of a man who has played at least 10,000 hours of video games. This pressure headache is actually not altogether unpleasant. The obsession is a purpose, a task to complete. Most of life is just the space between the things that matter, so a core drive, a direction that I can feel at all times, it isn't bad. This must be why religious people can get so freaky. Only instead of rebuilding the Temple my task is to solve the mysteries of Blue Prince, apparently. Only Blue Prince will not let me solve the puzzles I can literally see the solutions to already and that... that is infuriating. I have a divine will in my skull driving me forward and the game will not play along.
I like these puzzle exploration games to a certain limit. Last year I loved Animal Well a great deal, which was a Metroidvania with very little action, instead using the platforming as a kind of expanding series of locked room puzzles which you can solve outwardly. I devoured that game in a week, making it my whole existence. There is no joy in gaming greater than discovering you can use the Frisbee as a spinning platform and your little guy can ride on it back and forth to gain access to new spaces and things. There's tons of games like this: Fez, The Witness, Zero Escape and Danganronpa to an extent. I really like these opaque mystery realms of shadows and puzzles, all in the long lineage of Myst. And ultimately don't really care what the puzzle means (the answer is irrelevant to me and in the case of The Witness, painful and obnoxious), I just like solving things.
Blue Prince is a uniquely agonizing example of these... I've heard the term 'Metroid-brainia' on a podcast and it made me want to unsubscribe to that feed after hearing the term. Let us never speak of that word again. The twist Blue Prince puts on this subgenre versus say, any Zero Escape game, is that the game is also a RogueLite. I was just talking about my feelings on RogueLites a few weeks ago in when writing about Balatro, but in case you forgot, usually my feeling is "this game is great, shame it's also a RogueLite". In Blue Prince, the Rogue-ish elements are especially painful, especially ruinous. You're trying to solve the puzzle while also fighting against the cruelty of random chance. Rooms are never in the same places, your runs can be scuttled early if you get bad rolls. You can get all the way to the very top of the map, and then get fucked since you roll up two dead ends and a room turning the wrong way. Game Over, start over. I hate this. I have come to truly hate Blue Prince. I came here looking to serve a buzzing in my head and do happy puzzles. Instead I want to burn this house down.
