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

MCBanjoMike said:
I recently "solved" the castling puzzle, by which I mean I tried a bunch of incorrect things before being nudged toward the (much simpler) actual solution. It was infuriating!
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lol, this seems to be the standard way to experience this puzzle. FWIW, the solution is spelled out much more explicitly very far down the treasure trove memo line, among other things. That said, I was nowhere near grinding that out myself (per our spreadsheet, we'd found 19 of them so far), but now that I've decided I'm done, I've been voraciously consuming spoiler threads and the like.

ETA:
That reminds me: If anyone is morbidly curious, the spreadsheet we used is here. Warning: it's a bit of a monster, with 52 sheets that are not sensibly ordered unless you're me.

Please note that the first tab, General Notes, long ceased to be relevant and is mostly a bunch of initial observations about the house, and further note that this spreadsheet has hundreds of images and any given page might need several attempts to load, if you see a bunch of blank space.

Oh, and massive spoilers abound, obviously.
 
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JBear said:
now that I've decided I'm done
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I mean, you are done. There isn't really anything else in the game left for you! When you posted that big list of "loose ends", I was like "oh no, I hope he doesn't waste a whole bunch of time on these", lol.
 
IT IS DONE. I mean, probably. I'm almost 100% sure it's done.

Finding the atelier and walking into the Prism (or whatever you want to call that place) is 100% my gaming moment of the year, only potentially matched by the first time I discovered the basement and just how extensive that area was. I know some people (including my poor coworker, who was playing along with me for the last parts of the game) were disappointed at how little fanfare there is when you find Blue Room 46, but I personally thought the moment landed pretty well. That said, I had been told by friends that the game's true ending was a "community-accepted 100% completion", so I knew there wasn't going to be a big cutscene or anything.

I'm a bit surprised at how many story points go unaddressed by the game, honestly. Simon never makes contact with his mother, and the country remains firmly in possession of the red camp. I don't know what I was expecting at the end, but it wouldn't have surprised me if you wound up leading the restoriation of Orinda Aries or something. I'm also a little disappointed that you never actually get to visit some of the places from the Alzara visions - I was 100% convinced that the outer gates would open and lead me to that cemetary-looking place with all the statues. Or a train would come to the station. Or I'd be able to take a rowboat down the river. Or...

Overally, this is an incredible game that was equal parts genius and intensely frustrating. There are no fewer than 4 major puzzles where I totally misinterpreted what I was supposed to be doing and had to end up asking for help, but the times when I managed to figure something out on my own were all supremely rewarding. I'm in awe of the sheer ambition of this game, especially coming from a single person. We won't see another one like this for a long time, I think.
 
I feel bad I stalled out after the initial ending. I didn’t know what to work towards, while the RNG kept being actively hostile to a ridiculous degree.
 
Fantastic work, Mike! What a journey this game is.

The Atelier was also probably my gaming moment of the year. I said this in an earlier post, but it's just such a jaw-dropping setpiece. As far as the ending goes, I was satisfied with it. One of the big late game themes is how some things never end (the spiral of stars, the boxes at the end of the tunnel, etc), so it felt appropriate not to get a cutscene. You've earned Auravei's esteem! What more do you need?

I think this has to be my game of the year. I've never played anything else like it and I've rarely been so caught up in any game in my adult life.

Dirigiblocks when though
 
I’m finally playing this, and I am utterly captivated. This is world-building and puzzle design of the quality I associate with classic Cyan Worlds productions. I keep finding more layers of puzzles going on. I’m not even as frustrated by the roguelike characteristics as I was worried I might be: I’m finding that there’s something going on that’s worth focusing on in every run, though in practice I don’t know how I’m going to get the Boiler Room to line up with the things I want it to line up with, and I’m concerned that building up and keeping all the coins I’ll need to buy everything I want from the Bookstore is going to be really tedious. But those are problems for later.

Anyway, I haven’t read through other posts in this thread because I don’t want any spoilers, but I’ll probably be raving more about this game in the future.
 
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One of us, one of us...

ETA: And yeah, this is a game that, IMO, it's almost impossible to read discussion about until you're done with it. Even with the most carefully-constructed spoiler precautions, progression is so non-linear that it's impossible to know what another player has or hasn't done.
 
Got into Room 46, but like a fool I didn’t use the key to unlock the door in the basement before I triggered the credit sequence. I didn’t expect that clicking on door 46 would end the day!
 
R.R. Bigman said:
I feel bad I stalled out after the initial ending. I didn’t know what to work towards, while the RNG kept being actively hostile to a ridiculous degree.
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I also stalled out after the initial ending. It felt like I got to the top of the mountain and there was another mountain to climb. No thanks.
 
I’ve found and used a couple of sanctum keys—I’ve managed to open the doors to seals that were already explicitly shown elsewhere in the game, so I know figuring out the rest is going to be trickier. I just opened the door to the Nuance seal, and I barely remember seeing anything about that country in all of the library books I’ve read.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten past the things I thought would be annoying earlier in the thread: I got lucky with a sale on a run with a lot of coins and bought all the books in the bookstore, and eventually managed all of the boiler room connections. I’m currently poring over the book A New Clue and all the interwoven layers of hints in there. I’ve found a few places where I’d know exactly what to do if this were a Zelda game: what look like the outlines of doors on brick walls that seem to be crying out for bombs. ETA: Just constructed a power hammer tonight—but couldn’t draft a coat check to hold onto it. Hopefully those stars will align again soon when I’ve drafted a greenhouse and/or a secret garden.
 
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Exposition Owl said:
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten past the things I thought would be annoying earlier in the thread
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I remember feeling like these things would be insurmountable too, and then being pleasantly surprised when things worked out similarly.

Exposition Owl said:
I’m currently poring over
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We found taking screenshots to be extremely useful for this sort of thing, but I'm sure you're already doing that!
 
lincolnic said:
We found taking screenshots to be extremely useful for this sort of thing, but I'm sure you're already doing that!
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Heh. I’ve just been taking pictures of the screen with my phone so that I can refer to them without closing the game. Not really in the spirit of the mid-90s setting of the game, but still.
 
Exposition Owl said:
Heh. I’ve just been taking pictures of the screen with my phone so that I can refer to them without closing the game. Not really in the spirit of the mid-90s setting of the game, but still.
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That's exactly what we did too, but we played on PS5 so it was also the only way to look back at them when the console was off.
 
One thing that’s starting to make me wonder: I deciphered the messages in the pictures in the various rooms, so I know the codes to the safes are all dates. I’ve opened the safes in the boudoir and the shelter, where the dates in question are fairly obvious, but I’ve found four more safes, and I’ve punched every significant date that the game has mentioned into all of them, but none of them have worked. There’s a typed red memo (and I know red memos are always false unless handwritten) in the conference room that says that one of the safe combinations is 9083, and I’ve punched every date-formatted combination of those numbers into every safe I’ve found, but no joy. I’m starting to suspect that I’m going about this the wrong way somehow, but I don’t know how.
 
Are you asking for a hint, or just thinking out loud? (I don't think anyone here would offer a hint that you didn't ask for, but it's always good to check!)
 
So, something just happened in the game that left me bewildered. I was in the clock tower, studying the acrostic poem on the scrap of paper on the table for hints. I got up to make some tea, and left the game unpaused while I did so. Once my tea was ready, no sooner had I sat back down at my desk then I was treated to a cinematic in which a door opened up in the base of the tower!

I solved the rest of the puzzle and got the sanctum key, but I'm still mystified by what happened. I had suspected that the puzzle involved waiting somehow, but I waited for the "sacred hour" when all the clocks read 1:30 twice and nothing happened. So please, thread, tell me: what did I do?

Sorry for the double post, by the way, but I seem to be the only one who's playing through the game at the moment.
 
Exposition Owl said:
So please, thread, tell me: what did I do?
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The clock face embedded in the floor of the tower, the stopped clock face in the window at the top, and the clock in the card art for the room all indicate a specific time, and that's when you need to be in the room for the secret door to open. So basically, when all of the clocks in the room, including the two stopped ones, match. Now, that said, I thought that *was* the sacred hour, which is indeed 1:30, but I've been away from the game long enough that maybe I'm conflating two things? I also think that maybe it needs to be the first time each day, though? So if you waited a full 12 hours for the time to advance because you missed it, I'm not sure it'll open again.

ETA: Just consulted my old notes doc, and it says plainly "1:30PM is "the sacred hour"; alcove opens at 1:30", so I guess it must be the latter thing.
 
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Exposition Owl said:
So, something just happened in the game that left me bewildered.
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Something extremely similar happened to us there too! The first time we ever got into that room, we went up the stairs and poked around at the top of the tower, and then when we were coming back down the cutscene started playing. We were as baffled as you are! I'm pretty sure I came to this thread to ask the exact same question.
 
IIRC the logic behind that is hinted by the paper that you get in room 46 with the list of sanctum keys (spoiler should be safe to read for ExpoOwl)
 
MCBanjoMike said:
IIRC the logic behind that is hinted by the paper that you get in room 46 with the list of sanctum keys (spoiler should be safe to read for ExpoOwl)
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I can't remember if this was exactly the case, but in our game I think we got to the Clock Tower before re-entering Room 46. I'm pretty sure we'd found at least two keys before we went back in there; at the time I thought going back into Room 46 would roll the credits again since that's initially what the game tells you is its win condition.
 
Yeah, I made the same assumption at first. One of my very few complaints about the game is that it doesn’t communicate that better.

ETA: Thanks for the heads-up, Jon.
 
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So, I’m not looking for a hint, but I am looking for confirmation on something:

I solved another puzzle in “A Nrw Clue,” and I received instructions to “turn the sundial base.” The only sundial I know of is in the apple orchard, so I went out there, and I couldn’t interact with the sundial in any way. I’ve come back to try with various tools, but nothing yet. Am I at least looking at the right sundial, or is there another one somewhere around?
 
Well, I fell into that solution backwards. I didn’t expect the burning glass to have anything to do with this puzzle, but I happened to have one in my inventory while I was banging my head against the sundial today, and managed to turn the sundial base as instructed.

The trouble is that I expected the sundial to have the third microchip, not another place to put the two I already have. A letter in the mailroom suggests that “A New Clue” is where I should look for information about the chips, but I thought I’d already got everything from that book: I found the red herring admin key that Marigold planted. Maybe there’s more to do with that than I thought. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

ETA: Oh, and I finally got around to thawing the letter from the Baron in the deep freezer. Mostly stuff I’d already figured out by this point, but it did say that none of the dates that open the safes are written down anywhere, so “I hope you haven’t been jotting down random invoice numbers and dates.” Well, I had actually been really conscientious about doing that, but better late than never on learning it was useless, I guess.
 
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Exposition Owl said:
Well, I fell into that solution backwards.
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If you're curious now that it's solved: you had most of the solution right, except your second word was off. The instructions are actually "turn scorched sundial base", which is why you need the burning glass first.
 
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OK. I finally opened the safe in the drawing room. After spending a long time trying to find various mathematical expressions that would work the various drawings on the wall into a date format, I eventually just started putting the numbers of pictures in at random, and one combination worked.

-I've got one more safe left to find, but a memo suggested that might be in room 46--I wonder if it's behind the map that I can put pins in. I won't know the order of the pins until I've solved the last realm sigils, though.
-I've got two sanctum keys left: the last room of eight and the king on his throne. I suspect that the first one might be the eighth door of the mechanarium that the room description mentions, but I've drafted a mechanarium with all the mechanical rooms I have plans for, plus the rotunda just in case that counted as mechanical, and I only counted seven doors. The list of trophies in the entrance hall says that I have one more room plan left to find, so I'm hoping that one's mechanical. I thought the king on his throne might have something to do with the chess puzzle, but I've solved that twice now, most recently taking the king bonus, and no sanctum key. I don't think I've heard any other kings mentioned, so I don't know what else to try.
-I've tried everything I can think of to find the third microchip using the clues from A New Clue (I've already found the one buried by the bridge), but nothing I try is leading me anywhere. I wondered if it had something to do with the LeeB admin key, but the only thing of substance in the fake admin logs is that one of the fake conspirators was hiding out in the schoolhouse. I've been over the schoolhouse with a fine-toothed comb and every tool I can think of, but nothing. I thought that the note on the blackboard about "a timely manor" might be something, but I drafted a whole House of Tomorrow, including a clock tower, and nothing changed in there. All I'm left with now is thinking that the "DEAD end MAJOR KEY" note in A New Clue might refer to something other than the orchard sundial, but none of the ways I've tried to use that to find a second message hidden in the library books has yielded anything.
-I've filled in most of the letters in the "CASTLE" diagram in the chess room on the cliffside, but I have no idea what that puzzle is even referring to.
-I haven't aced the final exam yet, but I think I might need to wait until they release the accessibility update before I try that one again: I'm not sure I'm differentiating the colors in the math sections very well. I can tell them apart when they're being used in the dartboard puzzle, but the shades are harder for me to distinguish when they're just in the small spaces inside the printed numbers. Anyway, I kind of doubt that this is the clue that I'm missing that's keeping me from progressing: solving room 8 just led to a trophy, and I suspect that this will be the same.

Now that I've done that, though, I'm starting to run seriously low on clues and things to try with them.
So, I am in awe of the puzzle-solving brains and sheer sticktuitiveness that many of you obviously have, and I think I'm at the point where I have to swallow my pride and ask for a hint. I've got a hunch that the microchip door in the server grotto is the thing I need to solve next, so maybe someone could give me a tip on that one.
 
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