Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle masterpiece

After playing the game for 10+ hours and dropping it out of sheer frustration, I came to the conclusion that I must have been playing a vastly different game than the people praising it.

The first hour was great. I was constantly encountering new rooms and solving puzzles. The many times where the game decided to give me nothing but rooms leading to dead ends was annoying, but I still had things to explore in the next run so it didn't matter that much. After that first hour, the game became a slog. I encountered the same rooms, solved the same two puzzles for resources and was constantly praying for the RNG to give me something new. There is some RNG manipulation, but not enough to mitigate the boring part of the game. There are a few interesting overarching puzzles, but most of them are wrapped in multiple layers of RNG.

For example, for one puzzle you need a specific item that randomly spawns, use it in a room that randomly spawns which you need to unlock with another room that also randomly spawns. It took me 6 hours for the game to give me a run where I got all three of those things in a single run. The reward? Some resources that I have next to no use for and some clues that I can only experiment with if the RNG deems me worthy.

I have absolutely no idea where the praise for the game comes from. Maybe this game is perfect for those who are really into roguelites, but for me personally it just feels like the game is wasting my time for no reason at all.

This is 'article' is just an advertisement

OP here: Is there anything that makes you say that other than the fact that it’s positive and I received a review key? I’ve written about plenty of games I didn’t enjoy that I got for free (e.g. for judging awards) including games that were very well-received, like Viewfinder and Pacific Drive.

Posting a review for an arbitrary game to HN definitely smells like advertising to me. I don’t think you would be posting an article like this to HN that shat on a relatively unknown indie game you didn’t like.

How is this _not_ advertising in your mind? Surely you don’t think random people on HN are invested in your take on this game. What purpose did you intend if not to promote the newly released game?

I feel you’re trying to say you weren’t paid to advertise this game, which I believe, but it is 100% what you’re doing.

A lot of people do this, no? It doesn't seem more offensive than any of the other handful of self-submissions per day; certainly it's less so to me than all those tech blog posts by companies. Also Blue Prince is a puzzly, escape-roomy game that's one of the highest-profile indie releases this year, so probably more in tune with HN's taste than most games.

I like that a link aggregator serves to surface things that people don't necessarily have investment in. I thought the article was well-written and I'm more interested now in what he has to say in future. (I guess the advertising worked...)

Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here.

Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy.

Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising.

And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing tone and then negative comments here has really thrown me about the whole thing. Whereas before I would just say it’s a difference of opinion, now there’s a question of intent to deceive. Meh.

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.

I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.