Blue Prince, technically I've not finished it yet but I may not and I feel I need to rant about it a bit. I'm a massive puzzle game fan so it pains me to say this, but it's just not good. It's annoying to me because first of all it's got scores way above what it deserves IMO, and partly because it's wasted potential, the idea is really good but it's execution is a nightmare.
Putting RNG into a puzzle game is...it's just so stupid, I don't know why anyone would do this. I get that there's strategy to room placement, getting bad cards out of the deck early, reserving certain ones for deeper into the run, getting gathering ones as early as possible, etc. But it's still horribly RNG based, you can either run out of keys, run out of diamonds, or just straight up lock progression up the map off by drawing cards that constantly loop back on themselves.
There is all these synergies in the game, a surprisingly large amount of them. Find a hammer and you can smash boxes for items, find a spade and get extra dig holes, room synergies, items you can combine, etc. There's way more than I care to list here, but the thing is that's all RNG too, you can draw a root cellar for your shed room and get extra dig spots and never find a spade. You can draw a garage and never get the car keys, I kid you not but 90% of the synergies have never worked for me in maybe 40 runs total.
The puzzles are honestly pretty simple, there's so many clues to solve them, you're outright told how to do them if you pay close attention. There's literally written instructions on how to solve the dartboard, you end up doing the same puzzles over and over, some of the repetitive ones get harder each time but not much, it ends up just being time consuming more than anything.
If you're good with puzzles you'll basically know the punchline long before you can execute it, I'm at the stage where everything is in place to get to the final room but you just need RNG on your side to execute it, and the same with many other side puzzle like the generator and lab being connected. So you're just frustratingly doing runs over and over in the hope the RNG is kind to you.
The only nice thing is that you'll need to get a pad a paper out because there's a lot to track and write down, so I guess it comes with a sense of making you feel clever. Sorry rant over. I'd give it a 6/10, I'd probably give it a 9/10 if the RNG was removed and replaced with something more sane.
