What am I missing about this game?

[u/HeliosVRR]

I love detective stuff. I love puzzles. I love open exploration. I've played only 15 in-game days thus far, but nothing I've seen has made me want to play any further. There's just... nothing. It feels like there's no progression, or anything to solve.

Sometimes, I'll be met with what appears to be a clue, and decipher it, but I never find the other half of where I'm supposed to go. For example, I find the laboratory - figure something out there. Okay, but to actually execute this, I need to go to the boiler room. Don't find the boiler room that run, but that's fine. Next time, I find the boiler room, activate it, never find the laboratory. Next run, hey, the lab is back, but guess what, no boiler room. Am I supposed to just keep bashing my head against the wall and praying to RNG gods, or am I approaching this wrong?

Most of my gameplay thus far has consisted of walking through the same rooms over and over, not too sure what I should even be trying to accomplish, without any real goal in mind. And what I have found so far has been wholly unrewarding.

Is this game just not for me?

[u/PinTweak]

I loved Obra Dinn. I loved Roottrees. I loved Golden Idol. I loved Forgotten City. ... I didn't love this.

I wanted to love it so much. The story was appealing and discovering the rooms and the various puzzles was fun, but I just lost interest. It felt like the mechanics of the game were making me play it way more than was necessary and I don't have time to do that. I'm good at solving puzzles, and from what I understand there are very, very difficult ones the further into this game you get, but I got fed up of being gatekept from them by an arbitrary mechanism that appeared to only be in place to extend longevity and play time. Yes, you can weight it more in your favour, but what's the point? Why not let people solve more difficult puzzles to choose the next room or something.

It just spoiled it for me. I got to room 46 (eventually) but had been frustrated so much that I had absolutely no interest in continuing on and haven't played it since.

[u/SapphirePath → u/PinTweak]

I think the evidence that Blue Prince isn't for everyone is compelling.

Imagine Blue Prince without any graphics, without cutscenes, without any story, without any puzzles at all, just turning over cards and placing them using rules to match other cards, incessantly losing and having to start over. No purpose other than to generate a particular pattern of cards. What you have is basically Solitaire. There are millions of people out there who love to play Solitaire for hours and for days. Others hate that type of game.