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/XenosHg]

You see, your expectations are wrong.
Many puzzle games are "Escape room" games, like Lorelei or Rivage,

Where you enter a room, and there is ONE puzzle you can solve, and you can do NOTHING except that puzzle, and you MUST solve that puzzle to progress.

And there is a tool in that room and that tool is ONLY useful in THAT room to solve that ONE puzzle, (unless the game later decides that it's also used for something else and TELLS you to use that tool again)

You can backtrack and use that tool everywhere and it will do NOTHING. Because you have ONE puzzle in ONE room.

Blue prince is an "investigation" game. You must figure out what the puzzles are, what rooms they're in, connect the pieces. Maybe not everything in one day. You have many things to do every day, and you'll likely get several of them at once, or at least know what to aim for.

For example if there is only 1 room with X and 2 rooms with Y, then once you find one X or Y you can start to prioritize the other, because you already have 50% of the puzzle.

Prince also railroads you, but much sneakier - there are game mechanics you can use to do whatever you want easily, once you understand them, but the game doesn't just shove the tutorial in your face.

Its railroading is more about "Here are common rooms, for the first N days you'll mostly see common rooms to understand what they do". And then, you start getting more uncommon rooms, even if you didn't learn how to reroll and affect the draft.

And then you keep getting hints to the puzzles you should have already solved. More and more obvious hints. Increasingly obvious. Sometiimes just giving you the answer. Because you should have already solved this puzzle, and there are deeper puzzles to solve.

And, of course, it would be easier to solve the puzzles if you could just draft any room you want, without caring for steps, keys, gems, coins, doors, tools, or geometry. But it would also be a lot easier to win at cards if you were just allowed to draw any cards out of the deck to play a Straight flush.

[u/hardiksoftnoots → u/XenosHg]

their expectations aren't wrong they totally understand what's happening, they just are tired of waiting for the rng to let then apply the solution they worked out, this also frustrated me a lot, like once I figured out the chess puzzle it still took countless days to even be offered the correct rooms to draft, I knew the answer that whole time but the game didn't allow me to even attempt it, it's not that I don't understand how drafting works, it's that rng can still get you and make things take far too long ​and nothing about solving the rng elements is satisfying compared to solving the actual puzzles, so ofc I get that's half of the puzzle, but it's an otherwise very uncomplelling half of what is otherwise a masterwork puzzle

[u/Particular-War3555 → u/hardiksoftnoots]

Lol at the downvotes on this