The Steam Reviews for "Blue Prince" Are Hilarious

"Now on 100+ hours of play... I still have a lot of mixed feelings about the game, and it has some weird game design decisions..."

I love reading Steam reviews. It’s a habit carried over from my community manager days, when I was working on PUBG and Apex Legends. I’d plop down each morning with a cup of coffee and start scrolling, laughing at the gags and shitposts and taking notes about repeat complaints.

In theory, Steam reviews are all about helping other players decide whether or not to buy a game. But in practice, there’s way more going on. The reviews section is a chance to get the developer’s attention and demand specific changes. It’s a venue to share incisive observations about games and cleverly-articulated insights—which other users reward with reactions and an apparently infinite selection of badges. It’s a place to let off steam after you got skill-diffed or to rage against the audio bug that cost you that last match.

But the culture of Steam reviews differs, depending on the game. And for last month’s critically-acclaimed Blue Prince, there’s something extremely funny going on in the reviews section. Most of the positive reviews read like they’re trying to scare away other players.

“This game deserves all of the praise it has received,” writes one user. “It deserves all of the criticism, too.”

Or, take this one:

This is a game for absolute puzzle degenerates. When you are considering whether you want to buy Blue Prince, you really need to look within and determine if, deep within your soul, you yearn for obsessive note-taking, screenshotting, and putting up a corkboard with a lot of red yarn and crazed theories. If the answer is yes, Blue Prince is here to sate your hunger like nothing has for years, and you're going to be raving about your GOTY. If not... you can still learn to love that, but it's not a sure thing…

—Steam user The Lord of Hats

So many of them read like this. Hey, are you a freak? Yeah, you like puzzles, huh? You’re a real sicko. Well this game might be for you. But also, maybe not.

Again, these are the positive reviews.

There are negative reviews too, and I want to talk about them. But first, a quick primer on what Blue Prince actually is.

In short, it’s sort of like a single-player version of the board game Clue, in that you’re navigating a house and discovering clues to solve a mystery. But the rooms are randomly generated in different locations each “day” (this is the roguelike part—each day is a new run). You have some control over which rooms appear as you explore, each of which contain an interlocking series of puzzles that reveal a deeper narrative. Ultimately, your goal is to find the secret 46th room in a mansion which supposedly has only 45 rooms.

That’s the gist—but I’m skipping a lot of nuance. Others have done a more thorough job of explaining the game, like this written review by Harrison Polites, or this video review by my favorite games critic, Christian Donlan:

Back to those Steam reviews.

Here’s my absolute favorite, where you can watch a person slowly gaslighting themself into liking Blue Prince:

This game was sold to me as "Outer Wilds mixed with Slay the Spire".

This is both a good elevator pitch, but also kind of the root of my issues with the game.

Blue Prince is, undoubtedly, a really good game. It is meticulously crafted, and overflows with attention to detail, great game design, and really immersive atmosphere.

Like Tunic, Outer Wilds, and Animal Well, the game has layers to uncover, puzzles within puzzles, and you should 100% start taking notes the second you start playing, because every detail matters.

However, the biggest thing that holds Blue Prince back from being as good as those other titles is that the rogue-like aspects clash with the puzzle aspects.

"Outer Wilds mixed with Slay the Spire" is an apt description because it feels like there are two games within Blue Prince. Sometimes, they work well together, and this makes for an incredible experience.

Sometimes though, they actively work against each other, and the result is frustrating. Without going into spoilers, the "endgame" of Blue Prince is a grindy mess, where the rogue-like elements fight you at every turn and you wish you could just turn them off.

If you are hunting for a specific puzzle piece but you get unlucky, you can spend hours grinding runs without results.

I still recommend the game, and I will still try to finish it because the puzzle elements are genuinely some of the best in that genre of knowledge-based games, I just wish there was a way to reduce all of the grinding that stands between the player and the puzzles.

—Steam user Betshet

So, again this is a positive, thumbs-up review of a game where the reviewer says mostly negative thing about the game. There is a puzzling comment that the game design is “great” despite serious problems with the game design that they themselves have identified.

But it gets better, because at some point after posting this review, this reviewer followed up with an update.

“EDIT,” the second half of the review begins. “Now on 100+ hours of play…”

I still have a lot of mixed feelings about the game, and it has some weird game design decisions imo.

However, I cannot argue the objective fact that this is the best crafted and most intricate puzzle game I have ever played.

I simply do not think I am ever going to play a puzzle with as much depth, thought, creativity and effort put into it in my lifetime.

There is a lot of care put into making sure that a single person can access and solve all of the puzzles on their own. The game gives a ton of redundancy and clues to help players figure out even some of the deepest secrets.

There are some missteps, yes (the Gallery puzzle is a farce), but overall the game does an incredible job of giving players all of the tools and almost no leaps of logic.

So, to recap, before this reviewer reached 100 hours of playtime, they wished the game required less grinding. But now that they’ve sacrificed literally days to the game’s grasp, they realized that actually, the puzzles are worth it!

What are we to make of this? Is this what the logic of sunk cost does to a person?

Let’s see how a properly negative review reads.

I like the writing style of this one:

I really can't recommend this game. I enjoyed the first half of the game, finding new things, learning how the mansion functions, solving some puzzles and putting together clues to solve more puzzles.

Then the space between puzzles grew larger and larger as the game went on. The puzzles were there, I just couldn't get to solve them. Not without luck and RNG on my side.

The way the rooms work, you only have a certain chance of encountering a room during a run. Some rooms are extremely rare, some are more common. Some rooms require other rooms to work or navigate around. There is one puzzle in the game that I've never had the opportunity to solve because in 16 hours, both rooms I need to even start the puzzle never spawned in the same run. This is not just frustrating, it's defeating and draining. More often than not, runs don't end with a satisfying "Can't wait to try this the next day" and instead end with limp "Oh and it's a dead end and it's over."

And you might say "The exploration is the point! Find new things and new threads to pull!" Cool, I still have to explore to get that to happen and if my fifth run in a row ended with nothing new, there's nothing to explore. Once the swell of novel rooms, story exposition, and clues turns to a trickle, the urge to and reward for exploration dwindles in kind.

RNG is fine in games, but here it feels extremely limiting with the extreme swings that rarely align to give you a genuinely good run. For every run where it ended in a satisfying way, with many rooms uncovered, a half dozen items found, and every gem and key used to the maximum, I have a dozen where I have multiple keys but no gems, many rooms but no items, or they end prematurely at Rank 3.

There's a good game somewhere in here and it was fun for a while, but it's just not very fun. A game I was excited for turned into a disappointment the more I played it.

—Steam user Burncoat

There’s this thing that a lot people reflexively do when they dislike something that’s popular. They go “Well, hey, it’s just not for me! To-may-to, to-mah-to. Different strokes! Maybe it’s just not my thing!”

You see a lot of the people who love Blue Prince sort of pre-emptively building in permission for others to feel this way about the game. But isn’t this always just a cop out? Saying “it’s not for everyone” is really just a way to dismiss our own thoughts in deference to public opinion. After all, shouldn’t we “just let people enjoy things?” We’re good people. So we pull our punches and strike an enlightened, capitulatory pose.

It’s tempting to do this for Blue Prince. The game has gotten a lot of well-deserved buzz for combining a bunch of familiar ideas—from board games, roguelikes, and first-person knowledge-acquisition games like Outer Wilds—in an undeniably original way. The game is also deep and lovingly made (it took the game’s director eight years to finish it). Much of the appeal of Blue Prince lies in its intricacies. It’s a box full of secrets and surprising connections that only reveal themselves over time.

But I gotta be honest: I didn’t much enjoy playing Blue Prince. I agree with the reviews above that pointed out the ways it fails to synthesize its disparate component parts. Some of its puzzles are more frustrating than interesting. And the randomness inherent to its roguelike elements manifests in ways that feel disrespectful of the player’s time.

These are real design flaws. But whereas some would say “I liked it, but maybe it’s not for you,” my takeaway is the exact opposite.

I didn’t love Blue Prince. But I still think you should buy it and play it.

I can’t pretend to know “who Blue Prince is for.” It’s a work of art, and that’s not how art works. None of us are perfect fits for some imaginary market segment.

You might like it, or dislike it, or you might have some more complicated reaction to the game. But you’re really going to have to experience the game for yourself in order to find out. And once you do, you’ll have a greater understanding of the discourse around the game.

For me, at least, that’s where the fun is.