Preemptive Retaliation

I am annoyed with a videogame. Again.

I played The Blue Prince last year when it came to Gamepass. The idea is that you’re exploring a house, but every room is randomly drafted from a pile. You might get to where you need to, you might not, but you’ll make some kind of progress. There’s a mystery in this big old house, and you get to explore it one room at a time and find out why you’re even here in the first place. It was compared, frequently, to the Outer Wilds my favourite game of all time, and so deserved my attention. I dropped it after four hours or so.

A few weeks back I picked it up again. I enjoyed slipping back into the lore, finding puzzles upon puzzles upon secrets upon puzzles. But here I am, sitting at almost twenty hours playing, and once again I am done with it.

There’s an aspect of the game that is hard to reckon with, and that’s its RNG. Each day you enter the house, each door you open, there’s a randomly generated chance of drafting one room or another – a bedroom, a closet, a hallway, etc – and it just slows the game down to an absolute crawl. I knew the solution to a particular puzzle, but to solve that puzzle I had to jump through so many hoops that it became a Herculean effort. For example – I knew that a solution to a puzzle was behind a breakable wall in a certain room. To do this act I had to; 1. Get the Sledgehammer item, 2. Get the Battery item, 3. Get the Broken Lever Item, 4. Draft the Workshop room to find them, 5. Pick up a Garden Key, somehow, 6. Find my way to one of the outer edges of the house, 7. Click on a door that requires a key to be used.

That’s seven randomly occurring events that have to happen to find out a piece of information which may or may not be relevant to what you’re trying to do. But you’d better take a screenshot, because it might be relevant later!

The way I keep thinking about it is as if I’ve been given a great big 1000 piece jigsaw, but I’m only given 50 pieces at a time. I have to complete this jigsaw a third through skill and two thirds through memory. I have the corner pieces, sure, but everything else is subject to chance and recollection. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t keep giving me huge plain sections of sky to piece together. Just loads of shades of blue and cloud white, and maybe the edge of a building to add on. Or maybe I’m thinking I’ll focus more on one particular building of the jigsaw (this jigsaw is suddenly the the landscape of a city, for some reason) only to get somewhat halfway there before being told abruptly that, no, you’re not going to fill in this section yet.

So why am I still playing this? I had this same conversation with myself when playing Silksong last year. If the game is actively working against me, why do I still play? I am a busy person with a busy life, and I don’t want to waste time on something I don’t enjoy. Part of it was the mystery of the game – there’s an ever-present ‘What does all this mean? Why am I doing this? Who is this person?’ that moves the game forward. It was interesting to unravel the history of the house and its inhabitants, as well as the larger story of the world it loves in. But this backstory is provided the same as the puzzles – in dribs and drabs that don’t quite make sense unless you take the time to pull them together, and when you do you’ve forgotten the context of them.

The real reason why I’m still playing this is a frustrating one for me to admit. It’s because I should love this game. Not only does this game seemingly tick all my boxes, it’s critically acclaimed and well loved by its community. It is, by all accounts, a Good Game. And – you know what? – I want to be someone who enjoys a Good Game. I want to be part of the crowd. I want to be someone who gets the game. Because if you get the game then you must be a smart person who loves little puzzles, and can spot hidden details, and can notice when something isn’t quite right and piece together a story like you’re Sherlock.

And I like to think that I am that type of player. I love Outer Wilds, I’ve completed Obra Dinn, and The Witness. I love these little investigation games with their little puzzles because it make me feel smart, and I like feeling smart. I like feeling smart and I like playing games, and when I see people online talk about how much they enjoy The Blue Prince it makes me feel dumb, because I don’t get it. And that annoys me. Because I’ve played this game for almost twenty hours over the last few weeks, and it wasn’t because I particularly loved it, it was because I wanted to love it, because other people told me I should love it – or, more accurately, I wanted to love it because other people did.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with persevering with something you don’t initially like. But doing it for twenty hours for the wrong reasons isn’t the best way to go about things, Joe.

What’s the lesson here? Trust myself and listen to what I’m feeling? Understand that my likes don’t need to be crowdsourced? Whenever I write one of these posts the solution becomes so obvious. Most of them boil down to; stop being a dummy Joe, stop letting your weird thoughts dictate whether you have a happy life. But, then again, those weird little thoughts are what make me me, right? I wouldn’t be the rapscallion you know and love if I didn’t spend twenty hours worrying whether or not I liked a videogame the appropriate amount.

Still, onwards and upwards. I’ve closed the book on The Blue Prince. Whatever it was, it was not for me. Maybe the next one will be.