What have you been playing this week?
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Tom O pretends he’s playing a different game to Rematch; Bertie shares what sounds like an obsession with Blue Prince; and Bertie steals his partner’s experience with a dating game and tries to pass it off as his own.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
This game! One moment I’m on the cusp of giving it up and the next moment I’m right back in, marvelling at the ambition of it all. To be clear: I’m talking about what I assume is the late-game part of Blue Prince. I’ve — we’ve, for I’m still playing with my partner — long since reached the antechamber, the ostensible ‘goal’ of the game when you begin, so we’re now in the apparently endless process of cycling through the game, over and over, in a quest to find something new. To find the deeper mystery, whatever that may be.
It can be a frustrating process. The random nature of the game means you’re never quite sure which room-cards you’re going to be dealt, nor what you’ll find when you draft or play them. You might really need a shovel during one run but never see one, for instance, or you might speedily and unexpectedly build yourself into a dead-end for no other reason than what appears to be bad luck. Frustration peaked; quitting imminent.
But then, the next time around, you might make a bold new discovery. A room type you haven’t encountered before might suddenly appear, or a solution to puzzle you’ve been stewing over for a while might crystallise in your mind, and in doing so, allow you push the game on in a way that’s exhilarating to behold — if only because you’ve struggled to progress for so long beforehand.
