The Player Experience of Puzzles in Blue Prince

I was gonna put this in my Blue Prince write-up, but it’s kind of its own thing, so I’m pulling it out real quick.

While playing Blue Prince I wasn’t hitting the same wall of frustration I’ve hit with other puzzle games like Type Help or Return of the Obra Dinn, or even things like Braid and Escape Simulator.

I think Blue Prince is uniquely designed to prevent puzzle game frustrating. It uses its new dual roguelike/puzzle structure. It’s also interesting enough that I want to talk about it for a bit, and make my best guess about how the design of the game leads to avoiding this common emotional experience that I’ve found in other puzzle games.

There are three main elements that make Blue Prince less frustrating than other puzzle games.

1. Puzzles in Blue Prince are a bit easier than puzzles in many other dedicated puzzle games.

This doesn’t mean they’re not challenging, but that they’re not quite as a evil as they could be. Instead, the difficultly is placed into finding the puzzle.

2. The roguelike nature of the game. Most of the games puzzles are self-contained… But many puzzles require combinations of multiple rooms and other manipulations, so it’s not always possible to find them on any given day. The result is that sometimes if you find yourself stuck with a puzzle, you’ll run out of steps, and be forced to take a break.

During that break, you’ll play the roguelike portion again, and get to experience some level of success and enjoyment, so that by the time you return to the puzzle that blocked you before, you’re not feeling frustrated.

3. Finally, because of the type of game Blue Prince is, you don’t need to solve all the puzzles to make forward progress. Solving puzzles helps! But unlike many of the games above, in order to get to the end of the game, you don’t actually have to solve very many things, if any at all. Instead, you mostly need to collect information.

SMALL SPOILER

In fact, I think it’s mechanically possible to find Room 46 on Day 1. That said, I don’t think anyone is actually capable of doing that completely blind, but I bet it can be done, because you mostly just need to know what you need to do, and how to do it. But it’ll also still be a challenge, because it relies on being a very effective drafter.

I have a very specific memory of absolutely losing my mind at Return of the Obra Dinn, and that one moment colored a lot of my experience with the game. But because of the way that Blue Prince is set up, the game actively prevents you from ending up in the sort of fugue/frustration state of just raging at a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

I only ended up slamming my head into a wall over and over when I actively chose to do so. If I didn’t want to, it was entirely possible to avoid any given puzzle and return to it later.

In This Essay, I will

So let’s put it all together.

First, the game splits the satisfaction of puzzle solving into two parts: spotting the puzzle, and then solving it, but cranks down the difficultly of the solution part.

Second, because the game is a roguelike, it actively forces you to restart in situations where you hit a wall, or cannot make progress on a puzzle, diverting your attention from a frustrating experience temporarily.

Finally, it minimizes the number of puzzles that are truly needed to make forward progress, with many providing bonuses or hints, but not stacking them in a truly linear fashion.

The end result is that making progress is mostly dependent on collecting information, not necessarily solving puzzles.

A Quick Caveat

I’m writing this having seen the credits for Blue Prince, but not having done… well, quite a large number of things actually. I have around 50 pages of notes for this game, and I suspect there are a huge number of things I haven’t put together yet!

So it’s possible I’m wrong about a few things above, especially the difficulty of later puzzles. But I still think the rest is a pretty fair observation about the roguelike nature of the game, and nature of forward progress lets Blue Prince avoid some of the frustration the genre is known for.

TowerFall

Do you remember the Ouya? The Kickstarted Android console that cost $100 ($140 adjusted for inflation) and was never a commercial success? The one that released 12 years ago?

No? You don’t? Oh. Okay. Well, it was sort of a thing. Not a “thing” thing, but boy did people like talking shit about it, and writing articles about how it was a doomed to fail.

Anyway, when it released, one of its exclusives was TowerFall, a 2d multiplayer platform fighter. It became the Ouya’s best selling title, at just around 7000 copies.

TowerFall ended up being ported to all the other consoles, including Switch, and it was on Switch that I ended up playing it recently at a friend’s birthday party.

And this is how TowerFall should be played. A full six players. A giant screen. Preferably a crowd of onlookers. In this sense it resembles one of my favorite discontinued games, Killer Queen Black.

Unlike Killer Queen Black, though, TowerFall is every person for themself. Everyone starts with three arrows. Getting shot with an arrow or goomba-stomped kills you. After only one player is standing, the next map is loaded, and the next round starts. Victory points are awarded for kills, and the first person to reach 10 points wins.

Of course, there are a few more meaningful mechanics. There’s a dash that allows the player to grab arrows out of the air, and the screen wraps both directions, so falling into a pit to go up is an entirely viable strategy. There are also a few subtle catch up mechanics, as players who fall significantly behind get a shield that blocks one hit.

Perhaps your friends don’t want to turn each other into pincushions. That’s okay! There’re also a few co-op campaigns: a 1-4 player one, and a 1-2 player one. It’s hard to find much to say about these. They’re fine, and mildly interesting, but in most cases I’d rather be playing the versus mode.

As a fairly mild point of criticism here, I will say that I generally dislike how the ideal strategy for some of the co-op modes was memorizing when/where certain enemies would spawn, and setting up to kill them immediately upon spawn.

It’s hard to think of much else to say about TowerFall. It’s fun. It’s fine. I think it’s best as a party game or in person couch co-op, and it’s one of very few games that works on one console at six players.

I’m going to get back to worrying about the collapse of society now. See you folks next week.

Interestingly, the designer Maddy Thorson would later go on to make Celeste, which sold a million copies in under a year. Slightly more than TowerFall’s 7000 on the Ouya.

Note: I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this week I’m just using images from the Steam store page, and I usually prefer to call it out when I’m doing that. Anyway. Hope your week is going better than mine.

FragPunk

Wikipedia says that Chess has been around 600 years, which coincidentally is the same amount of time I would need to play it to really review it. When a game is popular enough and played at a high enough level, I don’t think there’s much point in critiquing it as tourist, unless you’re specifically trying to observe the new player experience.

I feel a similar way about Counter-Strike, and as a result, its strange progeny: FragPunk. The tactical shooter as a genre, like Chess, is one of those things that people have been playing forever. As such, if you’re the sort of person who knows what ‘tactical shooter’ means, and likes the genre, you are not going to get anything from this writeup. There is nothing I can say that will tell you if you’ll like FragPunk or not.

You’re excused for today.

The main thing that separates a tactical shooter from its other FPS cousins is the primary game mode: bomb defusal. It’s played with two teams of five across several rounds, with one team on offense, and one team on defense. Players only respawn after a round finishes.

The team on offense needs to reach one of the two bomb sites, plant the bomb, and then defend it until it detonates. The team on defense needs to either stop them from planting the bomb or, after the bomb is planted, defuse it. In addition, offense wins if they kill every member of the defending team, and defense wins if they kill everyone on offense before the bomb is planted.

This, then, is the starting recipe for the genre, one that every designer then makes their own variations on.

Counter-Strike has an interesting economic system of buying weapons and equipment, occasionally putting teams into positions where taking a loss in order to pool resources for a stronger round later is the right strategic choice. Valorant takes elements of a hero shooter, turning each character into a specialized agent with special abilities.

FragPunk has cards.

At the start of each round, teams can spend a resource called Crystal on activating cards. Activated cards have an effect that lasts through that round. Cards range from “neat” to “what the hell.” My personal favorite is probably the one that lets defenders pick up with and run away with the locations the bomb is supposed to be planted at.

I will say that after playing 40 hours, the cards feel less random than they did at the start. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, but the sense of “Wow, they covered the map in grass and made us crabwalk!” has been replaced with a sense of “Yup, they popped big heads. Guess I’ll try to avoid peeking down long corridors.” The magical has become the mundane.

Finally, this is a F2P game, so let’s talk about the elephant real quick: In-App Purchases.

Macrotransations

FragPunk doesn’t feel much greedier than any of its peers. On the other hand, no single mosquito sucks less of my blood than any other, so that doesn’t count for much.

There’s a premium battle pass, and there’s an even more premium battle pass. There’s a gacha draw system for weapon skins.

I paid for the ($20) battle pass, as I did play like 40 hours. But I kind of hate the lootboxes. I’m not sure why I hate them more than I usually do, but I do.

Overall

I like FragPunk. It’s nice to play a tactical shooter where everyone else hasn’t been grinding it since before I was born. I’ll probably keep playing for a bit, or until everyone else in the friend group drops off. If you like first person shooters, and don’t have a compulsive urge to gamble, you could do worse then checking out this F2P game, since games are apparently going to cost $80 in the near future.

Super Battle Mon

Super Battle Mon is a sort of micro-TCG, where decks are 7 cards (10 total if you have a sideboard), games are 6-7 minutes long, and you can play without a table. More on that last one later. I quite like it!

Image of the Super Battle Mon Starter Deck Box Set

It’s also in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign for a pair of mini-expansion structure decks. So if any of this sounds fun, I’d encourage you to go check it out and consider pledging.

The goal of Super Battle Mon is quite simple. Each player starts with their entire deck in their hand, and each turn both players play a Mon. After resolving each Mon’s abilities, you compare your total Mons’ power to your opponents’, and the player with lower power discards a card. This continues until both players can’t play any more cards, and the player with the most Mons in play wins.

Two decks of Super Battle Mon cards are laid out on a card mat.

So what’s the catch? Well, there are quite a few. Many Mons can be cheated into play. Mons also have costs that have to paid by discarding cards, and each card spent paying those costs is one less Mon in play in the long run. There are mind games on what your opponent’s next Mon will be, and there are counter plays to overly devastating strategies. (Looking at you Capybara.)

And all of it is packed into a very short game that can be played in just a few minutes. And honestly, that form factor is a large part of my enjoyment. Games are so short that even when I did get blown up, I just dug into my collection and built a new deck.

Overall Thoughts

TCG’s as hobbies are notorious for being time and money sinks, but with Super Battle Mon, every booster pack is a deck. It’s possible to build a deck, play it, rebuild it, play it again, and then scrap it and build a new one in less time than a single game of Magic.

Is it a perfect game?

Well, no. Not yet. There’s a fair number of errata for the first set, and the ability resolution system is a bit clunky. Not a bad system. Just a bit tricky to parse correctly.

Still, Super Battle Mon does an excellent job of delivering on what it’s trying to do: the bite size TCG experience, without the pain points of most modern TCG’s.

And since they managed to fulfill their first crowdfunding campaign, I feel pretty comfortable pointing folks at the second one. So maybe if you want to play a card game with more playing and deck building then just buying cards, check it out.

Type Help

I’m going to save both of us some time here. Did you like Return of the Obra Dinn? Did you like it a lot?

Yes? Great. Click this link and you will have an enjoyable several hours, and it will not cost you a penny.

Okay, time to deal with the rest of you.

Somehow it’s become “Free Web Based Indie Games That Are Novel Takes On Existing Systems” month. It doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, but just like Dragonsweeper, Type Help is a FWBIGTANTOES.

I did not intend for that acronym to include BIG TAN TOES. Now that I am looking at it, it’s making me increasingly uncomfortable, so let’s move on.

Type Help is a mystery puzzle game played via a command line, all about deducing information. Specifically, it’s about deducing the names of a series of transcribed audio files, all which follow a specific naming convention.

Since it’s a puzzle game, and part of the puzzle is figuring out what the puzzle is, from here on out there will be heavy spoilers. Consider it your last chance to experience it on your own.

Here There Be Spoilers

Type Help is a murder mystery. As mentioned above, your primary goal is to deduce the names of various text files, all audio transcriptions of a house in which 12 strangers were found dead, with no clues as to who they were, or how they got there. Even more mysteriously, the individual working the case in question also died.

So the main gameplay is guessing the names of files. After you’re given a few starting points, it becomes clear that the title of each file follows a simple naming convention, like this:

02-EN-1-6-7-10

The first number indicates time in the sequence, the second set of letters indicates a location, and the remaining sequence of numbers indicates who of the 12 strangers were present in the scene. For example, early scenes will often end with characters saying things like “Person #1, please come with me to the Billiards Room” and so you can deduce that a file might exist named something like 03-BI-1-8. Typing that in will unlock the file.

Of course, it’s obviously not all that simple. Sometimes someone else will have already been in the billiards room, so you’ll need to deduce who that was. Sometimes people don’t leave a room they’re in. Ultimately, it’s a big puzzle of “Who was where, when?”

My Thoughts On It

I have roughly the same problems with Type Help that I had with Return of the Obra Dinn, but a different set of praise. I consider Type Help a far more compelling mystery—and more interesting sets of character dynamics—than Obra Dinn.

Unfortunately, just like Return of the Obra Dinn, once general gist of the mystery became clear, I didn’t find it particularly compelling to puzzle out a lot more of the busy work, and get the “true ending.” In both games, I got about 60-70% of the way through, and hit a wall where I was no longer having any fun.

Some people really enjoy color coding elaborate spreadsheets.

I am not one of them.

For Return of the Obra Dinn, I put the work in to finish it out. For Type Help, I just looked at the spoilers in the comment section, and frankly, I think I made the right choice. The initial puzzles, worldbuilding, and unfolding mystery were interesting. But it would have taken me an additional 5+ hours to find the finale and “big reveal,” and I bet it wouldn’t have felt worth it.

I did enjoy a large portion of Type Help. I think it’s good. But it’s like a cake that’s just a bit too large, with frosting a bit too rich. Maybe it’s somewhat dry in parts, preventing me from finishing the whole thing.

BIG TAN TOES