This is the third part of the Black Prince series. The previous parts were Marmite Prince and Mora Amore.
Did anyone ever tell you that Blue Prince has a touch of Metroidvania about it? You’ll find sealed doors which can only be opened with some special ability you unlock later.
Anyway, I think that’s enough Blue Prince for today! Instead, let’s talk about Animal Well (Billy Basso, 2024).
Spoiler Level: Blue Prince MAJOR, Animal Well MINOR
Oh my God, Animal Well has a vibe and half. Switch out the lights, slip on the headphones and fall into its brutal embrace. It’s a vibrant pixel platformer set in a hostile, haunting underground world populated with regular, everyday animals who hang out on the chaotic evil corner of the character alignment matrix.
It’s a platformer that is largely non-linear. There are many paths to follow and most of them lead to terrible places. There are moments, like that Stork room, which mimic that Thief or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. quality of spaces that seem to throb with disgust for the player’s presence. Wish you weren’t here.
Scattered across the twisted caverns of Animal Well are places that seem impossible to access: the other side of an underground lake, sealed passages with no obvious key and a plethora of mysterious voids in the game map. You are always on the prowl for some trick to enter these sealed spaces.
In time, Animal Well will offer you a key. Keep going and you will find another key. And another key. And another key. Each key brings with it that Metroidvania thrill, a sense that you have unlocked an exciting new layer, perhaps unseen by many players. You may not be the first to reach here, but you’re one of the special ones to see beyond the veil.
But this was also how Animal Well pissed me off and had me put down the controller for good.
Animal Well continues dropping keys well beyond the point most people would consider decent. And many are keys to doors you didn’t even know were doors. Animal Well hides a lot of its doors in plain sight and even thought you might suspect one exists around a dark space in the map, exactly where may elude you.
Each new key encourages you to sweep the entirety of this dank animal Hell again in pursuit of all the hidden doors your eyes were not previously trained to see. While this is perhaps a tad reductionist, this is how I would describe the Animal Well loop: search for doors to unlock and behind one of them you will find a new key, thus the cycle starts again.
After I picked up the hygenivbyrg yvtug jnaq (oh, these letters are just ROT13, not ROT13 and reversed) and realised I had to scour the entire, massive world of Animal Well yet again, I’d had enough. Discovery was great but I felt like I couldn’t plan ahead and note down the location of the Metroidvania doors I wanted to return to later because they were invisible – until they were not. This was well before I got to the fabled “third layer” of Animal Well. Enough was enough. Thanks but no thanks.
Naturally, I’m not talking about Blue Prince at all. No, no. Nothing to see here. Well, that’s what I thought as I wandered the halls of Mt. Holly. Nothing to see here: the doors are invisible.
There is an impressive and satisfying elegance to some of the locked secrets in Blue Prince because the key is found in stretches of the imagination: I wonder what happens, for example, if I try to use the Tunnel blueprint to travel beyond the boundaries of the house? But Blue Prince does have many types of “invisible door” and revelations often drive you to review something that seemed mundane or no longer important, that you had already seen countless times before. The key to each invisible door was a new context. Yeah, let’s call it a Metroidcontextia, that’ll catch on.
After learning from in-game book A New Clue that I could smash the vases in the Entrance Hall to obtain a microchip, I wrongly assumed another microchip was in another vase in the house. I couldn’t remember where the vases were. The Attic? The Hallway? What about the Vault? I searched the house for smashable vases but all of them were entirely unsmashable. We could say this was my own fault especially as A New Clue told me exactly where to go and what to do. So let me tell you a story about a message hidden behind a wall in the Blue Prince chess room.
The message isn’t difficult to find. A picture of a cracked wall steers you towards it. You’ll grab yourself a hammer and, boom, discover the word CASTLE formatted as an acronym. Each letter is the start of a three-letter word.
For a long time, I didn’t know how to solve this or what it would even mean. I made a mental connection with a picture in the Kennel involving a cat balancing on blocks spelling out CAT. But it was only much later that I made the correct mental leap and twigged several apparently unrelated weird letter arrangements around the house were meant to fill in the blanks. This was far from obvious, but I’m pleased to report I deduced this without help.
A scrap of paper in the Locker Room. A note on the wall of the Blackbridge Grotto. And, in an exciting find spurred on by the original copy of A New Clue, on the reverse side of the door in the Secret Passage.
But they were not enough. I was missing some letters and I knew I’d never find them. By this point, I must have seen them already, just never clocked them or their particular significance. Was I going to dig through every single room of the house again? Try to redraft all 50+ rooms just once to see if I could find the thing I’d missed? The answer, my reader, is GOOD GOD NO.
Hey, talking of missing something – very late in the game, I found a file cabinet key in a dark tunnel. I’d walked past it countless times until I decided to take a closer look in the right area and voilà: a little baby key. But which filing cabinet was it for?
So, sure, I went through every room I could remember had a file cabinet. The Archives were the obvious go-to, but I drew a big fat nothing there. The Office? Again, nope. Still, there is actually a method here. The key was located amongst some old mining equipment thus it might logically follow the corresponding cabinet would be found in the mining areas. But, no, I had to go draft every other room with filing cabinets first, and some others just in case I misremembered the rooms. This is a puzzle game, yes?
It didn’t help that I was beginning to lose faith in my puzzle spidey-sense because not everything in Blue Prince “makes sense”.
One example. You can upgrade the Planetarium by using a rare item inside it – the Telescope. I get it. Telescope plus space equals things happening. But the Planetarium is an enclosed structure. Why would I ever think of using a telescope in there?
Another example. The password to the terminals is easy to figure out, it’s SWANSONG. But there are a couple of nudges towards the monitors in Security from which you can deduce the phrase SWANSONGHSS. It never occurred to me this was an alternative password, one that would send me to a different computer network. That’s just not how computer systems work? And the Blackbridge Grotto has some similar system bullshit: no passwords just usernames! And different usernames have different permissions, don’t they, Jean Ribbon?
Consider the Case of the Confounding Contraption. In the Workshop, you can combine items to make new items called “contraptions”. Now, I was one contraption short of the “figure out every contraption” trophy but I could not work out what it was. I ended up creating a massive grid of every possible item combination and as it filled up, I still couldn’t fathom the missing link.
I threw in the towel before I had tried everything and it turned out the missing contraption was Rabbit’s Foot plus Coin Purse. Fucking really? I’d like to ask how I was ever supposed to guess this combination but… one of the drafting periodicals hinted that one contraption involved the purse. I’d seen this early in the game, far earlier than the first time I even saw the Workshop, around 20 days in, thus this sneaky clue was completely forgotten by the time I was on the contraption hunt.
Let us end by returning to that beautiful book, A New Clue, which generates an erotic response in the true Blue Prince enthusiast. This is the puzzle shit they’re here for. Look carefully in its pages and you will understand the solution to one puzzle is contained in the pages of many other books. These references are absolutely precise, down to the word. If you had been summarising and not copying word-for-word each of these books in handwritten notes, you were going to have to consult each book again.
Sound simple? No, because the game was a knob, forcing the player to draft the Library, request the book, call it a day, and draft the Library again to read the book. That’s two game days needed per book. All I can say is thank God for screenshots! Although screenshots are not all they are cracked up to be – as we’ll discover next time.
Correction 05 Sept 2025: This is slightly unfair as the design team had thought about this. Only one of four books need to be dug up from the Library. Another is in your hands, A New Clue itself, and two others are in rooms you can draft. It is nowhere near as painful to resolve as I’ve intimated here but the general point about two days being needed to revisit any book to check on a detail stands.
Putting aside the “how the fuck was anybody supposed to work that out” level of bullshit that inevitably befalls these games, I can’t help feeling that ‘late game puzzle solving’ in Blue Prince, Animal Well and games of their ilk is just a shitload of busywork. They’ll ask you to make a database of all the things and require you to run back and forth, again and again. Put in the miles because the prize awaits. These games will pretend the needles you find in a haystack aren’t important until they are, sending you into panic trying to remember where all the fucking needles were.
Some players will eat this stuff up as it’s more mystery bang for buck than expected. But for others, it’s a tragic waste of time. Where you fall on this spectrum will make all the difference in the world.
Next: Break Glass
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As I recall the Library was the first thing that made me start to feel Very Grumpy with this game. I cannot think of any legit reason to make the player visit the Library twice just to look at one book…and then do it again (twice) to look at it again. Would anything have been lost if you could just keep any book you’d already checked out on the shelf, to look at it easily any time? Door Chore indeed…grumble grumble
Hello Kat! I was wondering if you were helping to crawl out of the woodwork after our brief Blue Prince email convo some time ago!
The funny thing is the library example barely bothered me as I had been taking screenshots of practically everything by this point although I still needed to dig out one book to solve that particular puzzle. But if you had just been taking decent notes? Well, that’s something for you to do for them next few Blue Prince days. I guess if you’re just doing it in parallel with many other tasks it’s not so bad. But I can’t imagine people not screenshotting the pages after this – what if you’ve made a mistake? Are you going to get all the books out again??
Aside! Technically getting hold of a *new* book is a three day operation – Bookshop first! And to get the Bookshop means drafting the Library, so it’s three Library drafts…
well *technically technically* you can check out a book and read it the same day if you have the reading nook: draft library first and request book, then reading nook, then second library which now has the book available. or if yoy have drafted the chamber of mirrors. or if you monked the library and then draw it a second time indoors (though if you monked it, far quicker to just call it a day after doing the request form and then immediately draft it again). are these all too much work? probably. i, too, simply screenshotted all the books (and all the interesting magnified bits i could find in them).
vfig I stand totally corrected. There were plenty of mechanics I felt like I didn’t use enough to get what I wanted although having the Monk in this situation obviously speeds things up no end. For example, I think I drafted Chamber of Mirrors a handful of times as it tended to destroy any existing plans I had (just like the Chronograph bringing in tomorrow rooms generally meant being spammed with dead-ends). There were also mechanics that felt perfect in particular situations but setting them up required heroic work – alternatively, you could just wait a few days for RNG? I never felt I was skilled and self-harmed sometimes – I’m not sure all the changes I made with the Conservatory were really for the better.
Just watched Aliensrock finishing Blue Prince. I was wondering how it would go because resolving the late-game stuff is tricky for most people. And, yeah, he had to walkthrough a chunk of that.
Oh, in addition, I was a Breakfast Nook kid.
ACXHSUHALLY i had lucked into the correct upgrade so i had no problem at all getting all the books i needed
it looks like a, *snort*, “skill issue”
I totally agree about the ‘bullshit level’ of a lot of the latter puzzles, which become increasingly real world time and labor intensive. Realizing you really needed to be taking screenshots of the various books did me in as well. I started cheating solutions to the endgame stuff once I realized how much tedious replaying I was in for, and seeing the answers there was nothing I regretted not solving myself.
But… is it maybe wrong to judge some of these puzzles in terms of a single person figuring them out? I don’t know if they were intentionally designed this way or not, but they have the feel of puzzles that are knowingly crafted for a *community* to solve collectively, not by a lone individual.
I remember a puzzle in Kingdom of Loathing, there’s a bit where you can direct a pirate ship to a specific map coordinates, but it’s expensive and you can only do it a few times a day. The ocean you’re charting has 24,000 grid squares, the overwhelming majority of which are empty ocean. A single player could tediously chart it all over years maybe. It took the KoL community two weeks. I was thinking of that recently because the rabbit mural in Animal Well functions like that, except even more explicitly it flat-out cannot be solved by an individual. And if one secret bunny is strictly impossible to solve alone, it sort of suggests working together on the rest of them too.
In that case, it feels like wholly different class of puzzle design, closer to ARG design or something. “Is it interesting and rewarding for a community to solve?” is a very different sort of yardstick. I don’t think Blue Prince is at all flawless even in terms of that, but it is less bullshit when looked at that way I guess.
@Alexander: even apart from explicit statements tonda ros made in interviews that there are no arg-style puzzles and there are no puzzles intended for a community solve, the puzzles found in the game itself just do not have that kind of obtuseness. a few things might require persistent experimentation and repeated efforts to catalogue thoroughly, such as shrine prices, or finding all the special blue memos. but these are on a scale of tens of runs to enumerate, easily within any single players capability (if not necessarily patience).
part of the issue is that late game (e.g. post-credits) puzzle solving becomes MUCH easier and less tedious if you game every system you can so that you have the ability to buy anything you want, to prioritise any kind of room that you want, and to reroll room draws as often as you want. if you are the kind of player who, on discovering some new system, immediately sets to systematically mapping out its breadth and looking for exploitable weak spots, youll have no trouble with the late game (and note that, as a rule, “community solves” for any game tend to be the result of single-digit numbers of players of this kind mapping things out, and not a wider diffused effort).
Spoilers – but if you’re reading this, you don’t care, I think.
Yeah, I think the late game really shows that the problem with Blue Prince’s puzzles isn’t that they’re obtuse, exactly, but that the amount of time and labour you need to try out an idea becomes really off-putting.
In a typical puzzle game (a point and click, for instance) if you have an idea you can go to the puzzle, try it, and see whether you were right. It takes less than a minute. In BP, that loop might be as high as two hours if you get unlucky with the RNG.
And yes, I know you can game it to some extent. I have items and powers that let me prioritise certain room colours, and rooms that give me rerolls, The house is now at my beck and call. But yesterday I needed to get the watering can, trading post, secret passage and coat check all in one day, to set up a puzzle solve for the next day. I got the watering can from the greenhouse (lucky, but helped by the Power of the King being set to green), but I wanted to make sure I had lots of rerolls for when I tried to spawn the trading post – and I didn’t want to just try it early on and risk not getting it, because if I didn’t get it I’d have to start a new day, and my Monk blessing was running out, so I only tried to spawn it once I’d filled out half the house. And yes, I COULD just get the shrine again to restart the blessing, but that ALSO requires me to get reroll items before I spawn the outside room, which is a whole other tedious thing.
This whole thing took me about an hour.
Look, it’s fine. Solving these problems is satisfying. But, note: I was only willing to do that once I had already looked up the puzzle solution online, because I’m just not really interested in bashing my head against a wall for an hour and then getting nothing out of it.
I don’t look up ALL the answers online these days: if I give it a think, and it seems like there’s a solid reason to try something, then I’ll make the effort. But an hour is a lot of setup time.
But I do think that if BP gave you a LOT more control over room selection in the late game (maybe giving you 4 rooms to choose from with each draw, or giving you access to a more advanced Conservatory, so you can tweak the deck balance on the fly), I would be having a much more pleasant experience.
I’ve found the Atelier. I never want to see another Mora Jai box ever again.
@James: “I never want to see another Mora Jai box ever again.” i have bad news for you. but its only a very small, singular bit of bad news 😀
Right, I’ve put in a correction around one of the snipes at A New Clue. Hit me yesterday when watching another JoePlaysPuzzleGames installment!
@Alexander: That’s always at the back of my mind, the community solve aspect, but I have complicated feelings about that. I might be able to get into that next time. Although @vfig suggested Blue Prince doesn’t have prime beef cuts of community solves (a la Animal Well late game or Asemblance) I’d say I was unlikely to solve without help which I’ll get into next time. Is that a community solve? Dangerously close to a discussion on definitions…!
James– I would also agree that people are drawn to more crazy experimentation later – oh should I draft this next to this and wait until this time and have this object – which starts demolishing your free time.
Ah, the Atelier. Well.
I want to push back on your correction and the idea that this point (you have access to all the correct books for the New Clue puzzle without needing the Library) makes criticism of this puzzle unfair. I’ve heard people making this point as a defense of this puzzle but I still think it is bullshit design. This puzzle has what seems to me a deliberate red herring (there are books with each of the correct cover colours available in the Library, although they are mostly the wrong ones) so many players (like me) will at first think that these books are the right ones, only to bang their heads against the Library wall for an hour or more drafting and reading decoding before realising they were on the wrong track. It’s easy for those who solved it first-go to say, “well you *ackshually* don’t need the Library books at all”, but this is inching too far into ‘git gud’ territory for me (that wasn’t the way to solve the puzzle, don’t you know! Well, how was I supposed to know that without having tried to solve it?!). Sometimes players take a wrong route in trying to solve a puzzle. It’s still on the game’s designers to account for not only the correct route, but the incorrect routes, and ensure that the incorrect routes are either closed off somehow or otherwise doesn’t waste huge amounts of players’ time before they realise how off they are.
Kat, I am much torn on your response – possibly because I figured out the books without having to guess. But I also recognise your criticism about inadvertently creating wild goose chases everywhere. And, boy, we’ve all been down a lot of those in this game. And perhaps by giving up some of what I want to discuss in the final part – I think it is inevitable for a game of this type and scope, there is only so far you can test such a grand, knotted design which was still being iterated upon in the final stages. So it’s horrible but also forgiveable. It won’t stop me complaining about everything I misinterpreted though 🙂
On the other hand, I’m reading your last comment on Break Glass and POST ENDS