u/kathosaurus

!! MAJOR spoilers !!

>!Last month, my friends and I finished our playthrough (via discord with the one who owns the game streaming - wonderful way to play this game in my experience; we do this with different puzzle games). Finished as in we ascended, did atelier, got the Blue Prince book, etc. and I’d like to share some of our experiences and thoughts! We almost never looked up clues/hints/advice, we had an embargo on looking anything up or watching any content about the game until we finished!<

>!When we ascended, we did blue on the king’s banner in addition to having the scepter, crown, and effigy, because we went entirely off of the painting of the red king’s coronation! We totally missed the “steady is the scepter” clue because we were honed in on doing throne room and secret passage as outer rooms as soon as we realized we could put outer rooms outside. Hilariously, we basically always took the high roller monk blessing and didn’t look up the others (or give different amounts of coins) until we got to the stage where ascension and atelier were all we had left to do; when we did look it up, I was like uhhhh guys I think we’re supposed to put indoor rooms outside LOL!<

>!Our first time ever digging from a treasure map, it was in the Bedroom by random chance! We spent the entire rest of the game trying to figure out how to use MANTIS, alas it was fruitless!<

>!In the drawing room, figuring out what counts as small gates and how to organize the numbers into a date was by far our hardest safe, even though we found the safe the first time we entered the room!<

>!The whole game, we were convinced something was up with the den, due to the clocks with weird arrows on them, knocked over candle, and little (music?) box on the mantle that looks like it needs a key!<

>!We brute forced a few of the sanctum sigils because we realized really late we should be looking at stamps lol!<
>!For the Aries court, we got all the letters for the hint grid except the X, so brute forced the three possible times!<

>!I was convinced for a long time you have to draft throne room off of foyer in order to ascend, because of the foyer’s hand statues, plus the carpets lining up and the fact it’s a royal looking foyer. The purpose of the hands is still unknown I believe!<

>!We finished the atelier in just two or three days after finding it!<

>!We never got the second upgrade for spare room (we did green room)!<

>!We got the final ending exactly on day 100, at like 103 hours in the game!!<

>!What a great game, it was a truly unique experience. Every time we felt lost, we found something that made it click in a beautiful lightbulb moment. We had soooo many days we thought were useless and then something happened where we suddenly unraveled a huge thread and the day takes an extra hour or more to finish. We had crazy crackpot theories that sometimes ended up being true. We thought it’d be a nice little <10ish hour experience like most puzzle games we’ve played together, we had no idea what a treat we were in for… we started Nov 22 and finished Apr 26. And we didn’t even do the special modes or try to get all the achievements!<

I’ve been thinking about how the birds mirror the spider pole; both show an image of an animal, which we’ve so far seen traces of (spiders leave webs, birds leave feathers). It’s made me think we should be treating the birds like we treated the spider: overlay them on the map of web poles to find the next location of a clue.

I overlaid birds on the spider, keeping the center of the bird’s body at the same place as the center of the spider’s body (where the web that says “N T” is, which led us to the birds). I put one wingtip on each pole/spider leg tip, and oriented the bird so the curve of the wing matches the curve of the spider’s leg. Then I looked to see where the other wingtip is.

For 4 birds (I drew over them with red), this lands on a spot that so far is unrelated to this mystery, and those general locations are circled in blue. For 2 birds (I drew over them with black), they perfectly align with another one of the 8 poles; the angle of both legs match in both cases.

I’d like some community help in exploring these areas. Please note my blue circles are very general, not a strict boundary of where we should look within those regions

Thoughts on this?