Good grief, this game certainly does throw a lot of Mora Jai boxes at you by the end, doesn’t it?
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This is not my beautiful house! - Talking about The Blue Prince
- Thread starter ShakeWell
- Start date
Is it just me, or are the letter-subtraction puzzles in the rough draft a lot harder than they were the first time around?
I think I did everything there is to do in that game and I'm not totally sure I understand what you're talking about.
I mean the puzzles where each room has two pictures, and you have to figure out what words describe the pictures such that there's only one letter of difference between them.
Oh, of course! Yeah, I think there were a few where I kind of guessed based on what would make words and what wouldn't.
We did some guesswork on some of these as well, and marked the guessed letters in our map with a question mark. It helped us solve the thing once we had enough total letters to figure out if our guesses were right or wrong via surrounding context. I think there may have been a few where we really didn't know what one or both of the pictures were, but it's a little hard to remember at this point.
(That's an Exposition Owl-safe spoiler btw, just talking about some general stuff around guessing.)
I managed to figure out what the message was yesterday, actually, though I don't know what it means yet.
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And now I've figured out both messages. The one from the Mora Jai boxes, at least, seems immediately relevant to the next (and I presume last) puzzle, which I'm assuming will have to do with finding a path through the rough draft maze marked out by lanterns of the proper color(s). One of the blank books looks like it bears on this, too. This is another place in the game where I wish the accessibility update had changed more things: my particular kind of colorblindness means I'm having to look carefully to tell the red lanterns apart from the orange ones.
ETA: I've traced out two of the "primary paths" (ironically named, since they're both secondary colors--that threw me off for a while), and gotten the "this was not the true path" message for each of them, but at least that more or less confirmed that I'm on the right track in thinking that the key is walking to the antechamber via the right route. Since orange and purple correspond to "academic" and "poetic" countries, respectively, I guess I can see how they might be the "tint of truth" and the "hue of wisdom" that the poem talks about. The "shade of rain" and the "one left hidden" make me think that the third primary path must be blue, but nothing I've been able to think of has revealed any more of a blue path than the blue lantern where it would start.
ETA: I've traced out two of the "primary paths" (ironically named, since they're both secondary colors--that threw me off for a while), and gotten the "this was not the true path" message for each of them, but at least that more or less confirmed that I'm on the right track in thinking that the key is walking to the antechamber via the right route. Since orange and purple correspond to "academic" and "poetic" countries, respectively, I guess I can see how they might be the "tint of truth" and the "hue of wisdom" that the poem talks about. The "shade of rain" and the "one left hidden" make me think that the third primary path must be blue, but nothing I've been able to think of has revealed any more of a blue path than the blue lantern where it would start.
If you're having trouble seeing the colors, I can dig up our map and let you know which is which.
Thanks, linc, but I don't think I'll need it. I went back over my map and found a few errors, and found the red path, so that's the third primary path, I suppose. The three paths together seem to pass through a total of eighteen rooms, so there's the "sum of eighteen." I'm guessing now that the "tint of truth," the "hue of wisdom," and the "shade of rain" are three different colors I'll have to hit sequentially on the true, hidden path. The only rainy country among the realm sigils was (purple) Eraja, so I assume purple is the third color, but in that case "truth" and "wisdom" are ambiguous. I'm feeling kind of sheepish at this point, because it doesn't look like anybody else on this thread was stuck on this puzzle for any great length of time.
I mean, everyone gets tripped up by different things. I would say instead that most people in this thread didn't make it this far! This puzzle is a lot of busywork, but I admittedly don't think we were stuck on working out the solution all that long, but that's because we were kind of poking it around as we did our busywork. You're definitely thinking along the right lines, and I'm sure you'll get there soon. Good luck!
I'm seconding everything JBear said!
Also, one nice (?) thing about this puzzle is that since you've got your map sorted now, you can do a bunch of thinking without having to have the game open. I don't know about you, but for me not having the subliminal pressure of "I need to do this before the in-game day is over" gives my brain the space to wander a little and not necessarily focus on whatever's on the screen that I'm looking at.
(There are no actual spoilers in this post about the puzzle, but I have one sentence that could give a modicum of probably-useless information to a theoretical future player who may not want any, so I hid it anyway just to be extremely cautious.)
Also, one nice (?) thing about this puzzle is that since you've got your map sorted now, you can do a bunch of thinking without having to have the game open. I don't know about you, but for me not having the subliminal pressure of "I need to do this before the in-game day is over" gives my brain the space to wander a little and not necessarily focus on whatever's on the screen that I'm looking at.
(There are no actual spoilers in this post about the puzzle, but I have one sentence that could give a modicum of probably-useless information to a theoretical future player who may not want any, so I hid it anyway just to be extremely cautious.)
Speaking of that map, I made the very ill-advised decision to trust its creation to a friend who was playing the game alongside me. The main issue with that was he's colorblind, which caused him to mislabel the color of the sole blue lamp in the rough draft. (< ExpoOwl, don't read that!) It took me a while, and no small amount of frustration, to realize what the issue was!
OK. After playing The Blue Prince for all these hours, it’s hard for me to believe that that lone blue lantern isn’t significant for this puzzle, so let’s assume that blue is our “tint of truth,” the first color on the path—it’s at the other end of the maze from our goal, so it could hardly be our second or third. The third color is a “shade of rain” that lets us “pass the light” (that is, pass by the box in the antechamber with the word “light” in it, I assume), and I can’t imagine what color rain could be pointing toward if not the purple of proverbially rainy Eraja. So, the path starts on blue and ends on purple.
That leaves the second color, the “hue of wisdom,” and I have no idea what that clue could be saying. Orange-flagged Coriarca’s realm sigil calls it an academic nation, so that could be a wisdom connection, but this second color is described as “turn[ing] us right,” and there’s no way to make a right turn onto the orange path starting from the blue lantern that doesn’t take you through at least one other color first, keeping us from ending on purple. So, I tried going south from the blue lantern, turning right, and passing through both green and yellow to get to purple, but it didn’t work in either case. Given Lady Auravei’s political leanings, it doesn’t seem like she would associate the red of Fenn Aries with wisdom, but for completeness I also tried going north from the blue lantern, turning right onto red, and following the red path until it intersects the purple one, but still no joy. I can’t see what I’m missing here.
So, a request for all who have passed this way before: am I at least thinking along the right lines by looking at realm sigils for color clues?
That leaves the second color, the “hue of wisdom,” and I have no idea what that clue could be saying. Orange-flagged Coriarca’s realm sigil calls it an academic nation, so that could be a wisdom connection, but this second color is described as “turn[ing] us right,” and there’s no way to make a right turn onto the orange path starting from the blue lantern that doesn’t take you through at least one other color first, keeping us from ending on purple. So, I tried going south from the blue lantern, turning right, and passing through both green and yellow to get to purple, but it didn’t work in either case. Given Lady Auravei’s political leanings, it doesn’t seem like she would associate the red of Fenn Aries with wisdom, but for completeness I also tried going north from the blue lantern, turning right onto red, and following the red path until it intersects the purple one, but still no joy. I can’t see what I’m missing here.
So, a request for all who have passed this way before: am I at least thinking along the right lines by looking at realm sigils for color clues?
Yes.
Are you looking for hints beyond that, or is that enough to go on for now?
I actually went ahead and looked up two hints, which were both things I’d meant to do earlier, but I got caught up thinking about the Mora Jai box riddle and forgot about them. The first hint was to pay attention to the colors of the Mora Jai box symbols, and not just to the colors of the lanterns. That made me realize that the red, orange and purple paths were all marked out in the rooms as well as in the lanterns, so presumably the hidden path would be, too. The second hint was to think about the letters that each path passed through, and to check the rough draft gallery. From there I worked out pretty quickly that those letters were anagrams for words that fit into the blanks on the gallery walls. That suggested that the hidden path would also be a word or an anagram of one associated with the fourth blank. I started looking at my map and thinking about ways to get from one "blue" room to another, and in the course of doing that it suddenly hit me that the colors in the riddle were marking out directions to turn rather than paths to follow. All there was to do after that was follow the turn-by-turn directions, along a path that I suddenly saw would spell out "swansong".
So, are Lady Auravei's will and that last Mora Jai box the only things to see in the final room? Did I finally make it to the end?
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I mean, the answer to that very question is one that it's pretty clear that the game would argue is a personal decision. DENOTED IN VERSE, etc.
That said, "yes", you have more-or-less reached the point that the community broadly agrees to be the end. Congrats! Without knowing beat for beat what you've done, I can't say for sure that you've seen *everything*, and in fact it's likely there's a few things that you've missed, but you've solved everything major. If there's more, no one has figured it out yet*, and Tonda Ros isn't saying.
Admittedly, that final beat feels a bit disappointing (I thought so, anyway), which is why I suspect that folks are intended to do it before the final puzzle box room, since that feels like a much more fitting ending. Certainly the Atelier and the rough draft are a very impressive set piece, and well worth seeing, but actually solving them isn't nearly so rewarding as reaching them in the first place.
* - There are a whole lot of zany theories out there, and a lot of folks who haven't given up on peeling one more layer off of this onion. Certainly my own notes have a lot of dangling mysteries and potential puzzle solutions (like, for instance, the rough draft picture puzzle message!). However, it's pretty clear that Tonda Ros loves mysteries and red herrings, so I think what's left is a combination of intentional misdirection and ideas and content abandoned on the cutting room floor. I'd *love* to be wrong, though!
Well then! After 191 in-game days and 174 real-life hours (passing Skyrim to become my single longest-played game on Steam), I've reached the end of my Blue Prince journey. I'd like to thank everyone in this thread for their help, support, and friendly comments. When I first sat down with Blue Prince, back when I thought it would be a 15-20 hour affair, I hoped that my wife would want to work through the puzzles with me, but she noped out immediately after she saw that the layout of the manor changed every day. So, you folks have been my companions on the way. It's been an awful lot of fun. I've been a heavy-duty Myst fan since 1993, and a puzzle game hasn't "become my world" (as Myst's box copy read) like this in a long time. I can't wait to see what Tonda Ros does next!
It's probably worth noting that Tonda Ros had gone on record as saying that there will be exactly one piece of free DLC for Blue Prince that adds a cat to the house and a functioning Dirigiblocks machine, and I and a lot of other folks will probably dip back in briefly when that happens.
Huh, I never even considered looking at the Mora Jai boxes again after opening them all. In our game, I more or less immediately clocked the riddle as directions, so we were able to close that out fairly quickly.
In any case, big congratulations on making it all the way through to the end! This game is such an incredible journey and it was a lot of fun getting to relive some of that through your playthrough. I had a good feeling that this one was going to grab you the same way it grabbed us.
As to the question of "am I done", if you ask me
the literal answer is yes. There are definitely some red herrings, unresolved mysteries (what's up with the rooms that randomly have arrows in the walls or floor?), and just enough ambiguity in between to leave you questioning. But also, I remember reading that folks have datamined the game and found nothing extra beyond what we've all discovered through playing. Sorry if that takes some of the mystique away!
In a more philosophical sense beyond that, though, endlessness and unresolved situations are two of the game's biggest themes. "Does it never end?" is a question that gets asked in several different ways throughout the game, both literally via anagrams and experienced in not just the core gameplay of the house resetting every day but also through things like the Spiral of Stars. Simon never catches up with his mother. You never run out of days to start fresh in the house. This is why it feels correct, to me, to have no final cutscene when you find Lady Auravei's will. You've accomplished so much in solving all the puzzles that led you to that moment. You've earned her esteem, which is the rarest thing of all. And yet the Blue Prince, much like real life, actively refuses to let itself be tied up neatly. There are some answers you'll never learn, some things you'll always wonder about. No matter what heights you reach in any given day, you still have to wake up tomorrow and continue on. Think of the happiest day you've ever had, and remember that there was no credit roll when you went to bed that night. Art imitates life. There'll always be a next day in Blue Prince. I think that's beautiful.
In a more philosophical sense beyond that, though, endlessness and unresolved situations are two of the game's biggest themes. "Does it never end?" is a question that gets asked in several different ways throughout the game, both literally via anagrams and experienced in not just the core gameplay of the house resetting every day but also through things like the Spiral of Stars. Simon never catches up with his mother. You never run out of days to start fresh in the house. This is why it feels correct, to me, to have no final cutscene when you find Lady Auravei's will. You've accomplished so much in solving all the puzzles that led you to that moment. You've earned her esteem, which is the rarest thing of all. And yet the Blue Prince, much like real life, actively refuses to let itself be tied up neatly. There are some answers you'll never learn, some things you'll always wonder about. No matter what heights you reach in any given day, you still have to wake up tomorrow and continue on. Think of the happiest day you've ever had, and remember that there was no credit roll when you went to bed that night. Art imitates life. There'll always be a next day in Blue Prince. I think that's beautiful.
And hey, now that you're done, you get to enjoy Blue Prince Bingo from last year's SGDQ! I posted this when it was fresh but I think it's worth bumping again for you.
They're actually about to have an official Dogubomb-sponsored Blue Prince Bingo invitational tournament as well. I'm going to be coming back from vacation right when the top 8 matches begin, but I'm excited to see more of this.