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A double feature: two puzzle games with very similar gameplay loops and a few unfortunate flaws. Even so, I’ll not bury the lede – they’re both Tier One and recommended for puzzle aficionados, though both come with caveats.
At points, I begin to wonder if I even like puzzle games. But, much like anime, I’ll eventually stumble across an entry that reminds me of the potential the genre has. In this case, I’ve stumbled across two.
First up: Animal Well. Random Game Reviews has already said many of the same things I would in praise of this title – from the impeccable atmosphere (and it earns the distinction of being one of the few games I left the CRT filter on for) to the onslaught of metroidvania-style puzzling and platforming which constantly introduces new ideas and new uses for your tools. Few of the mainline (or, in the lingo, Layer 1 and 2) puzzles are terribly difficult, but they are numerous and varied enough to keep a consistent pace.
Having now completed the standard ending and secret ending (and deciding not to go for all the secret bunnies), I think I’ve experienced most of what Animal Well has to offer. I enjoyed my entire time with it (even if I did spend 2-3 hours looking for a missing tool only to find that a jump I thought was impossible was just very tricky), finding myself wanting to go back and play more each time I stopped. I have only two real complaints: the first is that one of your tools has a special way to use it that is just a little too precise – I spent a good 20-30 attempts on a puzzle where it was required just to have one shot at success. Admittedly, I’ve never claimed to be good at platformers and this might just be more proof of that.
The second complaint is a bit more structural – many of the platforming sections require lengthy set-up and each reset takes just a bit too long. The only times while playing that I felt at all frustrated were when I got halfway through a section only to fail and need to walk all the way back to the start and re-set whatever special conditions were needed.
Next, Blue Prince. While I enjoy the premise and promise of Blue Prince as much (if not more) than Animal Well, my overall enjoyment has been more uneven. The initial exploration phases were exactly what I had hoped for – clues to bigger puzzles everywhere, new things to see at every turn, and a slowly coalescing mental picture of how to leverage the mechanics to your advantage.
Unfortunately, the premise is also what causes the biggest issues. The house you explore each day is random – the room beyond each door determined only when you open it. You have to juggle this with your stamina – you can only enter 50 “rooms” each day (and backtracking counts). For the first part of the game, this is fascinating and enjoyable – but two problems quickly arise.
While I understand that the stamina mechanic is meant to push you towards efficiency in exploration, it is a bit at odds with the room randomness. The stamina management has many counters – rooms which award bonus steps, food that can be found or bought throughout the mansion, etc.. Conversely, though some rooms allow you to tweak the odds of a certain type of room showing up, you have very few options for forcing a type of room or – more importantly – the direction of an exit from that room. The result of this is that stamina almost doesn’t matter since you will invariably run out of available doors before you run out of stamina – so playing to maximize your stamina is typically a fool’s errand, especially while you are still in the exploration phases of the game. This is a pity, because I like the idea of the stamina mechanic, even if it only comes into play at the very end of a long run (and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in-universe).
The real trouble, then, is the room drafting. There are two problems inherent in the design chosen (and both are easily fixable with existing mechanics within the game). First, your tools available for adjusting which rooms you draft are more limited than your tools available for adjusting your stamina, coins, or gems. This is odd, since your room choices are fundamentally more permanent and nonfungible. As others online have said, this is just an RNG step too far for the game to be fully enjoyable.
The second is that you are unable to choose the orientation of the rooms you draft. A room might have three exits, but you can’t override the choices the game makes on how that room should be oriented – meaning you can often end up with two blank walls (or routes back) while blocking your path forward. This part of the design is, in my opinion, inexcusable. The limits to your exploration are already well-established: stamina, room choices, the number of exits, etc.. More than that, the orientation of a room with fewer than four exits presents an interesting choice to the player – do you create a faster route to an important room or do you leave a liberty open (borrowing Go terminology)? I said previously that the stamina mechanic did not matter, but the reason it does not matter is primarily due to these oversights in the room drafting.
As far as I can tell, nothing would be lost by allowing the player more control over this aspect of the game. Manipulating RNG is a fairly staple mechanic in puzzle games, and giving the player more choices would provide more interesting decisions rather than fewer – and there’s still plenty of RNG left in the game even if the player has more control over which rooms appear and in which orientations. As it stand now, the layout of rooms is simply a roadblock to puzzle-solving rather than a puzzle itself.
The other issue with Blue Prince is with the rather obscure solutions to many puzzles within the game. Admittedly, since I am far from finishing the game it is a bit more difficult to definitively rule this as problematic – and indeed, I even needed the pun of the title to be pointed out to me, so perhaps I’m just bad at puzzles (or generally oblivious). I know, for example, that color and room layouts matter significantly, but have not solved any puzzles involving them (partly due to RNG and partly since I believe I’m still near the end of the exploration phase).
But if you will permit a minor spoiler to demonstrate what I mean: there are a variety of safes and locks within the game (most of which do not have a defined password length) and one of them is near a picture taken at Christmastime (with the safe as a present in the background). Which, of course, means that the safe’s combination is 1225. In retrospect, this may seem like an obvious guess – but the issue is that a guess is all it would be. Dates are common passwords, sure, but puzzle games have known for decades that those dates should probably be well-connected to the puzzle and that combination lengths should typically be communicated to cut down on possible solution spaces. A good puzzle is something you have all the pieces for, and just have to put them together in the right way. The link between those two pieces of information is just a bit too tenuous for my liking.
In a game like Blue Prince, puzzles will typically need to take one of three forms: a single-room puzzle (as above), a multi-room puzzle (where information is scattered across several areas), or a meta-puzzle (requiring rooms to be of specific color and/or layout). Blue Prince, however, is both puzzle-dense and by nature cannot group puzzles and solutions – so the amount of possible clues quickly becomes overwhelming (I have at least five separate numbers written down which I need to plug in to every safe I see just from environmental hints) and it becomes very difficult to know which type of puzzle you’re trying to solve. This is also what I mean by puzzle obscurity: the solutions may be visible, but you are forced to guess what puzzle the solution is for – and if it is a solution at all or simply a red herring in a sea of potential clues.
Despite my criticisms of both, Animal Well and Blue Prince both earn Tier One. Animal Well does so with flying colors, while Blue Prince just squeaks in due to a couple frustratingly fixable flaws (as well as a few annoyances, like re-solving the same dartboard puzzle again and again or having to spend six stamina to go open a special room every day). Animal Well was over faster than I wanted it to be. I will have to push myself to finish Blue Prince – but I do at least still want to push myself.
Animal Well Steam link
Blue Prince Steam link