Break Glass

This is the fourth part of the Black Prince series. The previous parts were Marmite Prince, Mora Amore and Door Chore.

If you’re not a regular visitor to Electron Dance with the frequent flyer air miles that entails, you might not be clear on where I stand regarding frustration as a tool in the game designer’s utility belt. So, to be clear, I stand just over there, between a rock and a hard place.

If you want a more concrete example, after reaching Room 46, I realised Blue Prince was about to troll me hard. And I laughed.

Spoiler Level: MAJOR

I love the Room 46 cutscene. It presents a sequence of vignettes featuring little Simon and his mother, all while you listen to her reading her children’s book The Red Prince. And then you realise, ohhh, this is the original version of the book that has a political slant not the self-censored version that was published! Music swells. Door opens. You see a bunch of cool-looking shit. Credits roll. The day ends. I understood immediately that Room 46 was meant to be explored and you were only going to find out what was in there if you carried on playing and did the whole unlocking Room 46 routine a second time. Oh, the developer chutzpah! I loved it. Great joke.

In the well-designed game, the player and developer have a good relationship in which the developer is free to tell jokes at the player’s expense. But how many jokes can you tell before player goodwill evaporates and it feels a touch toxic?

You know, the Room 46 troll is another way the game makes trouble for the player because they are not literally the game’s protagonist. As a player from the planet Earth, you know nothing of Mora, Eraja, the history of Fenn Aries, or its inneclipses and isseclipses. As Simon, you would have no problem recollecting the well-told tale of The Curse of Black Bridge or exploring Room 46 when you found it. But here it’s like a show writer spinning mystery by having critical scenes occur off-camera. Sure, we could show you the murder, but where’s the mystery then? I don’t know, Columbo, I’m sure you’re going to tell me.

It sometimes feels like role-playing an amnesiac. I can only imagine the reactions of the Mt. Holly staff. “He’s quite slow at arithmetic, isn’t he? Are we sure he’s going to find Room 46? It’s like he’s never seen a pink number before in his life, Randolph…”

One thing I’m sure Simon would not have experience with is drafting and that whole part of the Blue Prince experience was spellbinding. As discussed early in this series, the correct approach is to juggle objectives and wait for the drafting to nudge you towards one of your goals (or more if you were lucky). That way you don’t have to bitch too much about the Boiler Room puzzle. (Spoiler: We all bitch about the Boiler Room puzzle.) But my juggling was often too good – I’d often tank all of the objectives trying to keep the others in play like a dog with ten bones.

There was an art in knowing what was possible and precisely when to go for it. For all the complaints of RNG, during my entire game I had few problems. Most failed runs would still have some redeeming feature like book reading or checking out a new blue memo. But I did have an issue with… the puzzles.

I see Blue Prince as a cryptic crossword. It carries many of its clues in funny puns, some of which echo on and on throughout the game. And if there’s one thing I’ve never spent much time on, it’s the cryptic crossword. I’m just not very good at this sort of reading around the words to see a different meaning. If the clue reads “sort your shit out” it means rearrange the letters of shit to make another word. This was all sorts of trouble.

Most of Blue Prince’s lore is poisoned with double meaning, which is enormously distracting. In the first article of this series, readers may have noticed bold letters strewn throughout the paragraphs and it feels intrusive: are you reading an article or solving a puzzle? That, there, is the entire Blue Prince conceit. An epic, bold story, the history of the world, with secrets smudged into the words. Understand some prick’s life story so you can open a fucking blue door.

Sometimes I’d read a passage and parse it as story, only to realise later I had missed the point. Other times, I’d be scouring for instructions to solve a puzzle and not pay attention to big news being dropped in plain sight. I didn’t think too much about any of this until I was making my way through the late game and realised I found it maddening. I’m sure not everyone will feel this about Blue Prince, but it’s what happened to me. I almost wanted a friend on hand to let me know whether each note was a clue or just historical detail.

Why is there a blue memo telling me about whether HSS or SHS was born first? Why do I have to read the chunky volume The Curse of Black Bridge – is it merely an expensive way to drop the phrase ‘Deadly is the stone’ which is vital to unlock the second major Blue Prince milestone?

The riddles of Blue Prince are everywhere. After completing the “eight realms in eight months” puzzle, which has you plot the route of the Baron’s global tour using a bunch of postcards and knowledge you’ve gleaned about Mora, I obtained access to the will. I scoured it for clues and was disappointed that it was a long document with nothing to light the way apart from some hints for the Gallery puzzle. What I missed was an instruction regarding the “natural order of things” and linking it with a list of statues. Oh dear.

Each statue in the Tomb is really a hidden lever and by throwing the levers in the order suggested by the stained glass windows in the Chapel, you can unlock the Catacombs. But it turned out the will was telling you there was a second solution to open another secret room. That room contained the original draft of A New Clue which clarified not just a lot of A New Clue’s puzzles, but hints to things I hadn’t even thought about like looking behind the Secret Passage door. I could not run fast enough to check that out.

But Blue Prince could not stop undermining itself with cool ideas. It took me forever to unlock Lady Epsen’s diary but the contents were the very definition of underwhelming. It’s a guide to what happens if you sleep in various rooms. In other words, what happens if you call it a day in specific locations – but you know what, you’re not allowed to sleep in the rooms of Mt. Holly! You always go back to your bloody tent! How does this make any sense?

As I related in the previous chapter of this series, incidents like this undermined my trust in Blue Prince. It doesn’t matter what makes sense to this human here, what is it that makes sense to Blue Prince? Use the Telescope in the Planetarium, you say? And what of all the walls that are begging to be demolished? Yes, you’ll discover dynamite fairly early in the game but it’s not to be used on any of these walls. Do you know how many times I tried to move that damn dynamite?

So the hard-earned diary secrets were GET EXTRA STEPS IF YOU SLEEP IN THE MASTER BEDROOM or LOSE STEPS IF YOU SLEEP IN THE SERVANT’S QUARTERS. Wow. Countless players unlock that diary after Room 46, after they have better ways to boost their steps. Of course, the real prize is an unassuming drawing at the back. I knew it referred to the Outer Room on the Mt. Holly estate but I did not realise, at all, that it was suggesting I put the Antechamber there. This is the clue that makes the diary important – and I missed it, tossing the diary into my pile of worthless discoveries.

A New Clue makes a jibe about how the detective is looking for is a new clue and then ‘he’d know what to do’. Because that’s exactly how you feel, sat there, worrying you are running out of puzzle threads to pull on. Initially, I thought this was delightful and knowing but as the game drew on, I found the joke less and less amusing.

When any fragment of an expansive three-dimensional world, any page of any book and any part of the UI could conceivably be a clue or a puzzle, it’s enough to drive you mad. Have you looked hard enough? Did you do a close reading of every room description in the directory? I remember The Witness fans who were convinced there were more secrets beyond the black pillars. But every now and then Blue Prince will jump scare you with something you had long dismissed as unimportant and the conspiracy theories about deeper, more hidden truths are renewed.

And so the screenshots begin.

I have over 900 Blue Prince screenshots taking up 200MB.

In the beginning, I wrote down discoveries I thought were important but after a few times where I had not captured what was actually important, I turned to screenshotting as a backup. In the end, everything was screenshotted in case I made a mistake. Every note, every weird object, every page of every book. Looking through my screenshot library was something I did every game as my brain occasionally made odd connections that would send me off on a little quest. I solved many puzzles this way, saving hours of trudging around Mt. Holly and saving Simon from blisters.

Screenshots made solving some of Blue Prince’s puzzles enjoyable but it’s a slow process which only pays off if you take your time and suppress the desire for a quick answer. This has made watching Blue Prince streamers and YouTubers a weird ride because some commenters who have played the game will lose their mind when the streamer is not forging the right connections.

Joseph Mansfield had made a mistake noting down the clues in the music puzzle. He had accidentally written down ‘sheets’ instead of ‘trees’ which prevented him from finding the buried Conservatory greenprint for weeks of game time. Screenshots meant he could have quickly re-referenced the original material but viewers had to listen to hours of Joe deliberate on the meaning of “white sheets.” As far as I was concerned, it was one of those bad jokes you repeat so much that it just becomes funny, like an image sharpening into a meme. But ‘help’ came from the commenters, not really to support Joe but to stop him wasting his audience’s time on pointless white sheet theories.

Cracking the Cryptic had a difficult time playing Blue Prince and while the comments were civil, they were sometimes unpleasant to read. The main beef was that Simon & Mark weren’t taking proper notes and forgetting everything they were learning, so it was frustrating to watch. When they reached Room 46, there was the usual, ‘Ah, the tutorial is now complete!’ but Cracking the Cryptic never streamed Blue Prince again. (Update 22 Sep 2025: They’ve played again.)

Even Aliensrock, who has an editor to translate his lengthy play sessions into something closer to storytelling, got grief from some of his commenters about forgetting things or missing clues. You’ve got to play my favourite game, the Blue Princers cry, but we’ll fuck you up if you take too long and forcibly progress your game to improve our entertainment. That’s the deal.

I’m not here to talk shit about people who watch puzzle streams, though; this frustration arises because Blue Prince is a damn slow game and revelations come at a different pace for everybody. You might suck at some puzzles today, but not tomorrow. You might make a mistake today, but you will fix it tomorrow… or next week. Never in a million years would I desire to taint my experience with an audience. You brave souls.

And that’s why screenshots were my tool of choice. But here’s the twist. Were they also the mechanism through which my game of Blue Prince collapsed? I’m going to lay out a theory about how screenshots killed my game.

You all remember, a century ago, that I wrote that ‘deliberate practice’ was important to enjoy a puzzle game? That if you don’t step back and acknowledge what you’ve learned, you’re just going to be brute forcing for the rest of your natural born puzzle life.

Blue Prince needs you to digest and reflect on what you see. And the trouble with screenshots is that I started to write less notes and take more screenies. It was instinctive in the end. OOH THERE’S AN ARROW ON THE GROUND, SCREENSHOT THAT SHIT. The trouble with kneejerk screenshotting is that if I didn’t see any connection immediately, I would rely on the screenshot to review later and move on.

Slowly, I began to forget things I had seen and relied more heavily on what was in front of me. I began to solve less. I felt like a man who had turned his thinking over to an LLM, incapable of solving puzzles, because the hard drive had all the answers. There were still victories but they became more infrequent. I trusted myself less. But if you want to know when Blue Prince eventually broke me, it was A New Clue.

I had successfully solved the book’s secret sign code, which sends you off to put together a sentence hidden across four books: turn scorched sundial base. But I had a Joseph Mansfield style accident and ended up with the word ‘heat’ rather than ‘scorched’ and never realised. I went to the sundial in the Orchard – after checking there wasn’t another one somewhere else on the estate – and was substantially confused about sure what ‘heat’ meant. Whatever, you just turn the base right?

Nothing happened. So then I thought I was bloody clever in turning the smudge pots in the Orchard back on, because their purpose was to keep the Orchard warm. We had turned them off to get access to a secret underground area but I had wondered why you could turn the pots back on. And here it was! My moment! But nothing happened. Surely I had hit upon the correct solution?

It never occurred to me to use the burning glass, because that’s silly, you’re not going to heat a whole sundial with a burning glass. If I had unearthed the word ‘scorched’ then perhaps I would have figured it out. Maybe. We will never know.

As time passed, I sensed I had become stuck, so eventually broke the emergency glass and consulted a walkthrough. I had become my own frustrated commenter. And that was that. Blue Prince was damaged. I’ve written about this problem before, when you break the seal and nothing is the same any more:

Use a walkthrough deep into the game and the impact is heartbreaking. My inner manic depressive whispers that I was probably no good at this anyway, I’d just been lucky until this point. I’ve surrendered victory and might as well watch the credits on YouTube.

I was often playing late at night – and it really did not help that it was not possible to save in the middle of a day which could last two hours on occasion – and so fatigue was my natural Blue Prince brain state. This bolstered an overwhelming feeling of misery and self-pity from this point on, convinced I just didn’t have what it took to solve any of the new puzzles. Walkthroughs were permanently on call and the developer exited the circle of trust.

I didn’t realise immediately, but it was over. That sundial was the real end of my Blue Prince, my Room 46.

Roll credits.

Next: Prince Unending

4.14.33.1 – 4.14.33.2 – 4.14.33.3 – 4.14.33.4 – 4.14.33.5 – 4.14.33.6
1.1.8.1 – 1.12.7.5 – 3.1.12.7 – 4.4.1.1 – 4.1.1.2 – 3.1.9.6 – 2.10.8.3
3.5.9.1 – 3.5.9.2 – 3.5.9.3
3.1.8.1 – 1.12.7.5 – 4.1.1.3 – 3.1.9.4 – 2.1.8.5 – 1.7.2.1 – 2.10.8.3