u/WasSuppyMyGuppy

This game was so interesting to me. For context, Blue Prince is a roguelite game where every day you enter a house and are presented with 3 doors. Each time you choose a door, you are given 3 room options, and you choose one to slowly build the house, with the ultimate goal of reaching room 46. At the end of the day, the house is reset, and you begin the process again. You collect gold, keys, and gems along the way, which allow you to progress further into the house and unlock more rooms and house upgrades along the way. It sounds way less fun than it actually is. I promise.

 

Then you get to room 46 and realize the ultimate goal is way more complicated than that.

 

What I find fascinating about this game, and other puzzle games like it, Obra Dinn for example, is that it was primarily made by one person. From what I've read, a few people were brought in at the end to help with refinement, but it was mostly one person. This means that each puzzle was designed based on how that single person thinks and how their mind functions. Which can be good or can cause you to dead end because your train of thought may be completely different from the creator's. This is why I brought a friend.

 

I played this entire game with my wife. She managed the controller while I took notes. And being able to bounce ideas off of each other, and pointing out things that the other person did not notice, or did not think was important, was really cool. Solving puzzles together made the game flow really well, and we eventually reached room 46 without a guide, which I am super proud of. I strongly recommend playing this with a friend. Then we tried to go a bit farther and dig deeper into the puzzles, and that's where the wiki came in clutch, because we enjoyed navigating the house and solving puzzles, but some things were so well hidden that we would miss something critical and not know where we missed it, and rather than hopelessly looking around, we looked up some hints. The sanctum keys are a good example of this.

 

I don't know how deep to go in my analysis, so here are some spoiler filled points:

 

• >!WHAT ARE THE GLOBES FOR AND WHY CAN I SPIN THEM!?!<
• >!I cheated so hard on room 8. My mind did not work that way.!<
• >!The game really opens up once you reach the Blackbridge Grotto and can remote into the lab from any computer and customize your available experiments. Game changer. This was such a great concept to add to change up the gameplay focus.!<
• >!If you passed the exam in the end without looking up the answers, you deserve all the praise. That was a legit test that you had to really study for and learn this world. Really cool idea, but I cheated.!<
• >!I think everyone should attempt to fill up the directory. The amount of rooms and how to trigger some of them is really clever.!<

 

Overall, this was an incredibly tightly designed game that rewards you the more you play. You start out with no money and 50 steps. By the end I had more money than I could spend, and I was regularly filling every square in the house as I tried to trigger my experiments as much as possible. For the average player, finding room 46 is probably enough; for those that want a never ending rabbit hole, there are few better options.

This is the question I kept coming back to as I played Cuphead. For those who don't know, this game is a completely hand drawn 2d side scrolling shooter where you play as two little guys with cups for heads that make a bad deal with the devil. Every character, every level, every frame is hand drawn. That is absolutely incredible and should be praised because that level of dedication to animation is unreal.

And what kind of game have they created? In summary, a boss rush with a few run and gun levels. But the bosses are incredible. I spent a lot of the game just flabbergasted at how unreal the phases of the bosses look. Special shoutout to Ribby and Croak and all the background detail, Dr Kahl's Robot, the Phantom Express, and ALL of the DLC bosses. But that's just from an artistic perspective. How is the actual game in this game?

You may have noticed that all of my praise keeps coming back to the art. That's because there isn't a lot of game in this game. There are in total, counting King Dice and his mini-bosses as one since it's one continues battle, about 19 bosses. You battle them with a 5 weapons that you can swap between. Which doesn't seem bad, but each boss, except the final 2, can be beat in about 2 minutes. I am not good as 2d shooters and I found Cuphead pretty challenging and still beat everything in about 7 hours. So I bought the DLC to get more and another problem came up.

The DLC is basically pay to win. The new weapons and charms you get, including the crackshot, divine relic, and heart ring, break the game. The P ranks become easy with the divine relic, and having 3 extra hits with the heart ring giving you hearts on parry, makes the bosses soooooo much easier. I went back and platinumed the base game, the main challenge being beat expert and get at least an A rank on all bosses, because the level of difficulty went down so much with the new gear. The DLC bosses are still tough though.

This game also has the problem where it asks so much of you, especially in the base game where you start with only 3 hits, that each time you get stuck and can't dodge, shout out to Cala Maria, Hilda Berg, and the nightmare platforms on Rumor Honeybottoms, it feels like BS. If they ask perfection, it gets frustrating when they randomly throw out 2 attacks at the same time that you are unable to dodge, or the platform RNG causes an entire row to not appear and you just have to eat a hit. It's rare because the game is really well made, but still sucks.

In the end, I think I did enjoy the game, but I kept wondering, if I didn't enjoy the art so much, would I like this game? I think so, but I am curious to hear how others who don't care as much about the artistic side of games felt about this one.