This is not my beautiful house! - Talking about The Blue Prince

[lincolnic]

Spoiler

That's not what I meant.

Spoiler: More specific

There are a bunch of Drafting Strategy books.

Spoiler: More specific still

Check out number 5.

Ohhhhhhh. Clever! We've actually been trying to get that blessing to try an idea I had about a different room (based on a note in said room), but we haven't been able to make it happen yet. We don't have a ton of Shrine experience so we're not sure yet if they're random or tied to specific donation amounts. We've gotten the Gardener at 5 (I think?) and the General at 10. Most recently we tried 12 and got the Tinkerer. I thought maybe they'd follow the order listed in the Drafting Strategies book, but it doesn't seem to have panned out that way.

Little bits of progress, mostly stuff I've posted about before:

Spoiler: If you haven't read any of my previous spoilers, do not start here

-As mentioned in the above paragraph, I want to get Blessing of the Monk to try and pull the Treasure Trove outside the house, based on a note we found in there.
-The tunnel: knowing that we needed the Power Hammer made me say "This sure is a hallway of different ways to open doors, I bet we're going to need to light some candles too", and of course we did. Luckily, we've been using Mantle of the Knight and were able to pick up the Torch in our Power Hammer run. We got to a door with the Mt. Holly insignia on it and are trying various ideas to open it. Things that did not work: bringing the Crown to it, unlocking all doors in the House via the Shelter and successful experiments. Ideas we have yet to try: pulling all three Antechamber levers (wherever we find them), solving the map puzzle in Room 46 again since it conspicuously didn't stay open after the first time. I suspect the actual solution will be something else entirely.
-We found a note in the Locker Room (a room we hadn't really spent too much time in before) that made a bunch of other notes we'd seen suddenly make a lot more sense. Seems like we still need to find at least one more note though, maybe two, and I really have no clue where those might be. I feel like we're at a point where we don't know where the things we don't know are, which is that's kinda tough.
-We completed our House Directory! The Planetarium is...kind of disappointing? Which makes me suspect there's something else in there we're missing.
-I've noticed some of the rooms with wood floors/walls have arrows hidden in them, but have no idea what to do with this information.

 

[lincolnic]

We couldn't access it and when we looked it up and found this guide for that room (under the Where is the Foundation elevator control? section, and I don't know if anything else on that page is a spoiler) noted that's how it works.

Oh, yeah, okay. I wasn't quite following you at first. I didn't think this was particularly difficult to pull off, but that's only based on my own experience. In our game we'd discovered the Tunnel blueprint right before finding the Foundation, so something in my head went "what if we tunnel to the back of the Foundation?" I felt like a genius for a couple of runs, until we saw the Foundation switch again in a later run with a different room.

There's also a note you find somewhere -- I honestly don't remember where, maybe the Master Bedroom? -- that tells you the solution, but I think we'd already figured it out in our game by the time we saw it.

 

[lincolnic]

Spoiler: Talking about a big purchase

We finally managed to get enough cash in a single run to buy the Blue Tents, and we didn't even have to break the piggy bank. We started with Tomb as our Outer Room, got lucky with being able to craft the Lucky Purse about 1/3 of the way through the run, and already had well over 100 gold by the time we hit the Treasure Trove (which gave us ~200 gold thanks to our contraption). Going into the final corner of the house we were up around 370, and then we pulled the Office as our final room. We'd previously drafted a Conference Room, so then it was just a matter of doing a little backtracking after spreading gold from the terminal.

We had to stop for dinner then, so we haven't actually gotten to see what it does yet, but I'm very curious to find out tomorrow.

 

[lincolnic]

No new gameplay thoughts on my end, but the PS5 save bug has officially been fixed! I'm very relieved.

I haven't looked at the patch notes too closely because they've got a lot of spoiler text, but we did experience one really nice QOL update tonight (not even sure this counts as a spoiler): safes stay open now!

 

[Lokii]

HAhaha we just noticed that on tonight's run and were theory-crafting like crazy

 

[MCBanjoMike]

Big progress in my last couple of sessions! I'm up to 5 out of the 8 sanctum keys: room 46, clock tower, reservoir chests, music room and safe house. I also finally solved the chess puzzle last night, and the reward was interesting, if not quite what I was expecting. I chose the pawn as my reward, and I was able to make use of that in my last run by drafting the armory, buying the axe and removing the gem cost from the cloister. I thought I was going to then go and increase the frequency of the cloister showing up in the conservatory, but I forgot that I had drawn it on my previous run, so...too bad.

I'm not actually sure what I want to work on next, aside from continuing the hunt for the sanctum keys.

 

[lincolnic]

We had an amount of progress tonight as well.

Spoiler: Super late game talk within

We finally got Blessing of the Monk and then put the Treasure Trove outside, revealing a fancy-ass chest that apparently can't be opened with normal keys. So...back to not knowing what we don't know, I guess.

We also found some Blue Memos that suggested castling a rook and king, but when I tried that in the chess puzzle room nothing happened. Once again, probably missing some critical information. We'd previously filled in some pieces of the message behind the cracked wall thanks to the note we found in the Locker Room (which put the ones in the Kennel and Grotto into perspective), but there are still plenty of letters we don't have and don't know where to look for.

Finally, a couple of days ago we got a piece of mail telling us that there's a safe in Rank 10 (which we assumed to mean Room 46, since that's the only accessible thing in Rank 10) and were finally able to look in there again today. We're not sure if that means a literal safe, or if it's referring to the map board where you track Sinclair's journey. I'm leaning towards "literal safe" since there's still a red letter we have yet to read. We tried putting the pins in the map following the order that's on the fireplace, but that didn't do anything. We couldn't find anything else to interact with in there (aside from the desk drawer that has the ransom note in it) and left kind of frustrated.

I'm hoping the answer to all of these things isn't just "read a bunch of Blue Memos until you find the one with your next step", because that seems kind of tedious, but it's basically the only lead we have right now.

 

[lincolnic]

Edited: we were able to get pictures of the thing we wanted to look at again while playing today.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I've played this game for like 35 hours and yet any time I try to read some of the spoiler text from a few pages back, I keep seeing references to places I've never even heard of. What even is this game??

Anyway, to summarize my current (post-credits) progress:
- 5 sanctum keys found, and I'm pretty confident I know where two more are hiding
- 4 red letters found, plus I've got two known safes whose codes I still need to crack
- 2 sigil puzzles solved to date

I still think this game is really cool, but it does feel like the RNG is starting to work against me. I have 2-3 goals that I would like to accomplish, but some of them get shut down really quickly if I don't draw specific rooms (in particular, I've made next to no progress with the classrooms and I'm starting to think it's high time that I did).

My long-term goal is to complete the 8 realms map puzzle in room 46, at which point I will re-evaluate whether I want to keep going some more.

 

[lincolnic]

I'm a little too tired to type out another State of the Blue-nion post, but I'm reasonably certain that we're actually deep into the endgame now. Unfortunately we've currently exhausted all of our ideas (to no avail) and don't really know where we're supposed to be looking to move forwards. I'm at the point where I want some kind of gentle hint, but my girlfriend is steadfastly refusing, so I'm not yet asking for anything. I'll come back later and type out some spoilery thoughts since it'll help me organize my mind too.

 

[JBear]

We're well into the postgame now (I think? We just saw something that might imply another level still beyond what we're doing now) and this game continues to slap. I'm super obsessed with it. I still don't dare click any of the spoiler boxes in here, since progression is super non-linear* and I don't want to spoil anything, but this is absolutely one of the best games I've ever played. I am just floored time and again over how well-designed the whole thing is. It feels like every puzzle always has several different paths/solutions to lead you along. It just feels so very fair at all times. Every single day just leads to more and more things to puzzle over instead of fewer. My Google sheets grow as if they have a life of their own. Every new texture is like "...is that a puzzle solution? That might be a puzzle solution. I'm snapping a pic."

And I still don't understand any of the RNG complaints at all. It's just so very mitigatable with sound decision-making. If we ever get cut off prematurely, it's because a greedy choice led us there (thus far, our worst day of all time record still stands at rank 7, but having a full or near-full house is far more typical). Maybe once we get down to a final one or two things to do we'll finally start to chafe against the RNG, but for now we're perfectly content to play that hand that's dealt us, even if that means that we've been waiting days and days to chase down certain room placement objectives.

* - I have a friend who is playing who has led us to believe that having 6 red letters before rolling credits for the first time was atypical, just as an example.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I haven't had too many issues with the RNG yet, but I do see it becoming more of a problem as I continue to play. It's not about putting down a lot of rooms, so much as the frustration of knowing you want to pursue a goal and not being able to do so. Early on, you have dozens of little mysteries to chase, and it's pretty easy to make the most of whatever rooms the house chooses to offer you. But once you're down to just a few threads to follow, suddenly you find yourself needing more specific configurations to succeed, and this is where I can imagine things start to get frustrating. As an example (which shouldn't be a spoiler to anyone who has seen credits), I want to start working towards getting two of the trophies: placing 8 classrooms and winning the contest in the architecture magazine. The first one, in particular, requires a bit of luck to even attempt, and while I know of some ways to improve your odds of building the house properly, I have a feeling it's going to take a few attempts to get things to line up properly. A friend of mine got frustrated because he wanted to build something in the workshop and it just refused to show up for 5-6 consecutive runs. At the point where I am now, maybe 35 hours in, it feels like I should have more control over which rooms I can draw at any given time.

To be fair, I do think that the randomness was one of the major reasons why the game grabbed me at first. It forces you to pick rooms that you might otherwise avoid, but which up being necessary to advance. I just think the game rolls out its various "powerups" a bit too slowly, especially when it comes to the actual room drafting part. I still don't have any ivory dice when I start each day, for example (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's a way to change that).

 

[JBear]

Yeah, we've made a couple of runs at 8 classrooms so far but have come up short. We haven't tested this ourselves yet, but I would think that if that if you were laser-focused on that (which it sounds like we both agree you probably shouldn't be), one possibility would be coming back out to the outer room with some dice in hopes of rerolling it for a the schoolhouse.

A friend of mine got frustrated because he wanted to build something in the workshop and it just refused to show up for 5-6 consecutive runs. At the point where I am now, maybe 35 hours in, it feels like I should have more control over which rooms I can draw at any given time.

As far as this goes, though, this is a specific situation where you can get more control, which we leveraged: we used the wrench to make the workshop common. We only had the opportunity to do that recently (I don't know if Wrench only starts generating post-credits, but we didn't see it for the first time until then), but it's already paid off bigtime.

 

[lincolnic]

I have a friend who is playing who has led us to believe that having 6 red letters before rolling credits for the first time was atypical, just as an example.

We also had the thing in your spoiler before we rolled the credits. I think it just depends on what you decide to prioritize.

 

[Mogri]

* - I have a friend who is playing who has led us to believe that having 6 red letters before rolling credits for the first time was atypical, just as an example.

I'm going to go with "very atypical" on this one!

 

[JBear]

We were finally served up the Gallery for the first time tonight, and I think a couple of you were calling this puzzle bad earlier in the thread, but we kind of loved it? Like, it was without question super difficult, and ground our run to a halt as we just stared at stuff for at least an hour in there, but it was super satisfying to tease out, and we felt very clever once we got there. Spoilers as to how we went about it follow:

Spoiler: Explicit Gallery Spoilers

We all agreed pretty quickly that given the game's love of puns, it was going to be something tricksy. We stared at all 4 pieces for a while each and tried plugging in some possibilities, but nothing felt right. We were almost ready to throw in the towel, or at least look up a hint, but then the first concrete step proved to be when my friend insisted on transcribing the possibilities for the shortest name in the spreadsheet (I was against this and didn't want to go to the trouble) and then just seeing if any answers fell out. I was looking at the list of letters and literally said "lol, THIN-K is in there, and there's a thin K", and only once he started plugging it in did I realize that I had just spelled THINK, and the positive feedback at that point meant we were off to the races. We went through the same transcription exercise for each subsequent painting, but we then spent entirely too long looking at the second painting, longer than any of the others. We knew it must be a pun on 'P', so we tried a bunch of words that began with P, and then I noticed the word PONDER was both a synonym for THINK and began with P, but it was only once we plugged it in that I realized the full extent of the P ON backwards RED pun. The third one actually came pretty quickly, and was a group effort, predicated on noticing that it could end in IES, which sounded like EYES, and my friend sounded out the correct answer almost immediately, but once we got it we saw several ways to pull that specific pun out of the painting (VERI TABLE, GENU WINE), so I think that might be my favourite. The last one also came pretty quickly, and at that point we were on a roll, but it was definitely a long walk to get started.

 

[lincolnic]

Alright, so. I know I've used the word "endgame" quite a bit in earlier posts, but now I believe we're actually there. Our paths forward have narrowed (and seemingly become very complicated?). I'm gonna talk about where we're at below, so if you're not sure if you should click in, then please do not.

Spoiler: Pretty sure I'm talking about the final puzzles in here, read at your own risk

Okay, so. There's a bunch of stuff to get into.

We've read all the Blue Tents memos, some of which were seemingly not super helpful, but a few pointed us towards "the family core" and the coat of arms. We've followed the instructions on the memos and applied them to the number below the coat of arms seen in the Wine Cellar and Master Bedroom (and also Room 46), but we have no idea what we need to do with this information. We've also gotten a note in a piece of mail telling us there's a safe on rank 10, which we assumed to mean Room 46 (as that's the only available room on said rank), and have had absolutely no luck finding anything in there. We noticed that the sequence of Realm Sigils on the fireplace is different from the solution to the "8 realms in 8 months" puzzle, but placing the pins in that sequence didn't do anything. We've also tried being in Room 46 at 1:30 per the stopped clocks, and that did nothing too. We noticed in one of our recent runs that putting Room 46 in the Outer Room via Blessing of the Monk moved the house deed outside of the map (while leaving the will inside), but we weren't able to get back to Room 46 in the house to see if anything changed in that map. We're set up to try this again in the next run we'll start. It's entirely possible that the mailroom note was only telling us about the map puzzle, but given that we're still missing a red letter (and every other safe that wasn't a gate has been a physical safe), I feel like there has to be something else.

We had a very frustrating series of days (actual days, not game days) where we were trying to put the Antechamber in the Outer Room via the appropriate Blessing, because it seemed like that was what the drawing in Her Ladyship's Diary was hinting at, ultimately culminating in a run where we had it outside and had 7 triggers on an "unseal an Antechamber door" experiment, but when we went back to it in the Outer Room, only the west-facing seal had opened. I assumed that we just hadn't done the right thing and was pretty annoyed. Then on Thursday (I think?) there was a new patch, and in looking at the patch notes I discovered that it turns out that this exact behavior was bugged and the doors were supposed to unseal all along. So, after doing more runs to put the Antechamber outside yet again, we ran down to the northern lever in the Sanctum. That got us a new note which I think is telling us the actual victory condition of the game -- bringing the Crown, the Cursed Effigy, and the Scepter (?) to the Throne Room. We haven't actually seen the Scepter yet, but I suspect it's what's in the treasure chest that appears when you move the Treasure Trove to the Outer Room. Do we know how to actually open that chest? We do not. But I'm seeing that the bigger picture will require you to set this up over multiple days, so that'll be...fun? I guess? We did do one extremely smart thing that I think should help us on this path whenever we eventually get there -- at one point we saw the Throne Room offered as an option in the Conservatory, and we said "let's make this common, since it seems like we'll have to do something with it eventually". So we've got that going for us.

After reading a particular message in the Staff Announcements, we were directed towards another piece of the 6x3 "Castle" message that we'd never seen in the Secret Passage. We're only missing three letters from that now, so it seems like there's just one more piece to find, but given that the letters we have found don't actually spell out meaningful words, we're probably going to have to decode them somehow. Given that the Secret Passage letters were so hidden (and hard to read!), I'm not excited to try and find the rest of this code. Like, are we really supposed to search every nook and cranny of every room again? I'm hoping that there'll be another Staff Announcement to nudge us in the right direction.

There were some other Blue Tents memos telling us about the castling (the chess move), but we tried every possible way to set this up in the Underground chess puzzle room we could think of -- including drafting rooms with a rook and a king and then swapping them on the chess board, drafting those rooms in the actual places where you'd castle on a real chess board and then swapping them, drafting specific combinations of those rooms, etc -- and none of them did anything. I think we're missing information about what else we're supposed to do here.

We have made no progress trying to open the door in the tunnel with the Mt. Holly symbol on it. Maybe the stuff in the above paragraphs will do something here? No clue, and we've put it on the back burner for now.

In the meantime, we're continuing to open chests in the Treasure Trove in the hopes that one of them will give us more useful information. Unfortunately, the first few times we did this was earlier in the game when we were still hunting Sanctum Keys, so we had assumed that they were only talking about the chests in the Reservoir (which we'd already opened) and didn't take notes/screenshots of some of them. Hopefully we haven't forgotten anything too important there.

We've also fully upgraded the Planetarium since my girlfriend was saying "I wonder what happens if we bring the Telescope in here" from the moment we first drafted it, and that's been nice, but hasn't helped solve any puzzles.

I think that covers the broad strokes of the state of our game! Anything I'm forgetting to mention is probably incidental to any of the points in the spoilers above.

 

[lincolnic]

Spoiler: tiny rant about an early step of an endgame puzzle

Yesterday I said to my girlfriend "I thought of a really dumb idea about castling."

Are you fucking kidding me, it actually worked. I'm so mad that my stupid idea was the actual solution after we tried so many other things! Worst puzzle solution in the game to date. (I'm not actually that mad, but I'm kinda mad.)

 

[JBear]

Fuck this game continues to just completely kick ass. We recently got our hands on (book title spoiler) A New Clue and we've mined so much out of it already and there still seems like there's so much left to go. I'm scribbling in red all over screenshots of it like some kind of conspiracy theorist and I love it. I feel like I played this game for more than an hour this afternoon without actually launching it, just staring at spreadsheets and making mental connections. Today's big event was getting our first Synka download, and the contents of that already imply some cool new stuff that has me positively salivating. In less exciting post-game progression, we're at 6 of 8 sanctum keys and 3 realm sigils solved, but I'm sure that stuff will come with time.

Man this game is so good. GOTY, maybe of the decade.

 

[lincolnic]

We made some big, big progress this week, though we lost a bit of time due to the horrible way this game deals with crashes/software updates on PS5. I'm starting to think we're very close to the end now. Let's get into it.

Spoiler: Endgame puzzle stuff, do not click if you don't already know

That got us a new note which I think is telling us the actual victory condition of the game -- bringing the Crown, the Cursed Effigy, and the Scepter (?) to the Throne Room.

So, the headline: we did this, and it wasn't! But it was an extremely exciting moment, and gave us a super clear path forward for our next steps. Thanks to the foresight I discussed a bit in my last post, we were able to set this up in a relatively straightforward way ("straightforward" notwithstanding all the hoops you have to jump through to get the Scepter). Since I knew we'd have to get cursed as part of the process, my plan went like this: at the start of the run, ignore the Outer Room and focus on getting five gems so we could afford the Throne Room. This was pretty easy, since you start with two from the permanent upgrades and we usually see the Parlor (we'd upgraded it to have three gems) and Den in the first rank or two. Once the gems were acquired, set Banner of the King (which we still had after castling) to black so that the Throne Room would be guaranteed to show up earlier, and draft it as close to the entrance as possible so you can actually get back there after getting cursed. Then, continue through the house as normal, making particular effort to get into the Antechamber so we could get the Crown. This nearly sank our first attempt, but we successfully managed to open the Secret Garden in the very last possible free space on the map. While you're drafting, try to keep at least two Ivory Dice in reserve for the Outer Room in case the Shrine doesn't show up at first. In our case, it didn't, and we had to use both rerolls to get it. But since everything else had gone according to plan, from there it was just a few steps back to reclaim the Throne.

Small side rant about unlocking the Aries Key/how this game handles saving: I wish part of the solution wasn't just "wait for ~40 minutes". When we initially did this, we'd just gone down to Aries Court as soon as our inventory was empty and waited, so we had a good chunk of the house left to explore. We got a Coat Check and were able to put the key in it, but right before we ended that day the game crashed, undoing all of our progress. Okay. This was close to the end of our play session, so we decided to just get the key again and then pick up the run again next time. After letting the game sit for another chunk of time, we got the key again and put the PS5 on rest mode. The next day, I turned on the PS5 to discover that it had updated the system software overnight -- which also closed the game and forced us to get the key for a third time. Eventually that one stuck, but the fact that you're so vulnerable to the game crashing or software updating is extremely stupid. I can't see any reason why it shouldn't let you suspend your progress in whatever room you're currently in. I can't remember the last game I've played that doesn't do something similar. In the meantime, I've disabled automatic updates until we finish the damn thing.

We've since learned that the key remains accessible on future days after you've fulfilled the requirements once, but we probably won't need it again. Nice to know, I guess.

Next up: trying to find our newly ascended Throne Room again to finally unlock that door in the tunnel! We also couldn't help noticing that the new room description said "permanently unlock all blue doors", but we've only seen the one so far, so that's extremely curious. We also found a note in the Treasure Trove with a hint as to where we can find the family core, which is another thing to watch out for. We have two frontrunners (the Vault and the Foyer), but haven't yet found anything to interact with in either. I'm hoping that whatever we find behind the blue door will give us another clue.