This game came out of nowhere for me. I hadn't heard of it or seen previews for it until it was released. I saw a trailer that made me add it to my wishlist to maybe purchase if it went on sale. But when I overheard a co-worker talking about it, I decided to go ahead and purchase it and start playing, so that we would have an opportunity for some water cooler talk.

Blue Prince is, at the simplest level, a puzzle game. But simply calling it a "puzzle game" doesn't quite do it justice, because it is a wholly unique blend of different video game genres, all packaged together in a way that feels more like a board game. It is a puzzle game, for sure, but it is also a rogue-like, and an adventure game (in the vein of classic 90's point-and-clicks). It utilizes a unique tile-placement mechanic that feels almost like playing a digitized version of a board game akin to Betrayal At House On The Hill (minus the overt horror theming).

The player takes on the role of a young heir to a family estate. But the inheritance comes with a catch! The house has a shape-shifting layout, with each room being placed from a pool of randomly-selected rooms, each time you open a new door. In order to earn the inheritance, the player character must navigate the shifting mansion, solve its myriad puzzles, and find your way to the elusive, hidden 46th room. But there's another catch! You cannot take anything from outside into the mansion, nor can you remove anything from the mansion, and its layout resets each day. This creates the rogue-like element.

Blue Prince's room-drafting mechanic feels similar to a tile-placement tabletop game.

Each day, you have a finite amount of stamina, and when that stamina runs out, you are forced to your campsite outside the home to rest for the night. When you wake up the next morning, you will have to start the exploration of the house over again from scratch. Well, mostly from scratch. You'll be armed with the accumulated knowledge from your previous explorations, as well as some permanent upgrades.

As such, Blue Prince straddles the line between "rogue-like" and "knowledge-based" game. The vast majority of the board resets each day, but you do keep some persistent elements of progress, so you don't have to memorize everything or repeat the same steps for certain activities over and over again, every time.

A puzzling house

Blue Prince is a heavily-randomized game, for the better and the worse. Every time you open a new door, you'll be given a choice of 3 semi-randomly-selected rooms to draft on the other side of the door. Opening certain doors requires the use of keys, and certain rooms may require that you spend gems, both of which can be collected within the mansion. Rooms may contain a puzzle, items, clues to the over-arching story, or some combination of the 3. Rooms may also have special effects that are triggered by drafting the room, by entering it, or by using certain objects within it.

Different rooms have different abilities.

For example, there is a "Drawing Room" that allows you to re-draw new rooms, if the rooms you drew weren't to your liking. And then there are rooms like the Parlour and Billiards Room, which always contain a logic or math puzzle that awards resources if solved. There are also "red" rooms that penalize the player for drafting or entering them, such as the Chapel, which collects a tithe from your purse of coins each and every time you enter.

Perhaps equally importantly, each room also has a different configuration of doors. Some rooms only have the single doorway, turning them into dead ends. Most rooms, have 2 doorways (the one you came in through, and a second exit that goes in a different direction). Some rooms and hallways have 3 or 4 doorways. If you run out of new doors to go through, then your day will also end, on account of there is nowhere else for you to go.

This combination of room abilities, resources, puzzles, and door configurations creates a lot of strategy for how you choose to layout the mansion on any given day. Do you focus on exploring new rooms to find as many of the puzzles and clues as you can? Or do you try to bee-line due north to the antechamber every day? In any case, how do you place rooms in order to accomplish your goal?

There is a surprisingly huge collection of different rooms, along with some clever and creative abilities for some rooms. There's also items that the player can use to solve puzzles or manipulate the environment. This creates a lot of tough decisions regarding how best to spend your limited resources. However, knowing that you'll loose all of those resources in the next day, liberates the player to feel like you can and should spend your resources whenever possible. There is no point in hoarding resources, the way you might save up all your most powerful ammunition in a survival horror game, only for the game to end before you've ever used it.

The puzzles in this game are no joke! Things start off simple, but they gradually ramp up. The puzzles aren't insanely difficult to solve on an intellectual level, but they require a lot of meticulous exploration and careful observation. There are plenty of puzzles and clues that are hidden in plain sight, and you'll walk right by them dozens of times without realizing there's something there, until you find a document or clue somewhere else, hours later, that makes you say "wait a minute, those were puzzles?!"

Some rooms have respawning logic and math puzzles.

The Sinking City is a game that I started playing a year or 2 ago, after picking it up on sale on PSN. I fell off of it last year though. It wasn't that I wasn't liking the game; I was liking it quite a bit. It's just that other games came along that demanded my attention. Games like Alan Wake 2, College Football 25, and Silent Hill 2 remake kept pulling me away from finishing Sinking City. But I left The Sinking City installed on my console, fully intending to come back to it.

But there is a sequel due out sometime this year, and it's being marketed as a full-fledged survival horror game. That puts it firmly in my radar as a potential "must-play". In anticipation of the sequel's release, I wanted to go back to The Sinking City to finish it and review it.

While the sequel to The Sinking City is going to be more strictly a horror game, the original is actually a very different game. While it has Lovecraftian Eldritch monsters, and a madness-inducing plot, it stays more in the territory of a detective noir mystery. Think more along the lines of L.A. Noir than Resident Evil. And that makes sense, considering that most of the developer, Frogwares', catalog is Sherlock Holmes games.

Sinking City is a detective noir; not a proper horror game.

The horror of Lovecraftian racism

I admit, I was expecting more of a horror game. So I was surprised to find that Sinking City is 100% a full-blown detective noir mystery, with only light horror elements. Well, the horror may be light, but the Lovecraft-ness is dialed up to 11, and that includes the racism that was so present in Lovecraft's work. But thankfully, Frogwares is fully aware of this racism, and so the game is self-aware and hyper critical of its racism as well.

There's a splash screen at the beginning of the game that talks about Lovecraft's books being very racist, and that the developers made a conscious decision to include many of those racist elements for the sake of "authenticity". This means that characters who are coded as "black" or as other ethnic minorities are depicted as ape or fish men, and that misogyny is common place. It makes for an interesting approach to a genre period piece, since this is how many white Americans and Europeans really did see Africans and indigenous peoples: as little more than animals. However, The Sinking City doesn't make this a simple matter of perception. These characters really are ape and fish people. It's a literal depiction of how racist white Americans saw the world. But the game goes out of its way to make sure that these characters are not depicted as being inherently inferior to "normal" (e.g. "white") human characters.

Racism is a major component of the game, and sometimes, we get to shotgun Klansmen in the face!

What the splash screen doesn't mention is the way that this would be turned against the player. Right off the bat, the player is made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in ways that closely resemble racist bigotry. While there are plenty of characters who welcome the player character and are perfectly friendly towards him, there are also plenty of people who are outright hostile to him. The word "newcomer" is this game's N-word. Even when dealing with characters who are outwardly friendly and tolerant of the player, there is often an undercurrent of tension in their interactions, as if the other characters just want the interaction to be over with, so that they don't have to be seen in public conversing with a "newcomer" any more than they have to.

Frogwares doesn't go so far as to include other more overtly racist allegories in the game. Like, you aren't going to be stopped and harassed by police when the sun goes down, nor are you ever asked to show your papers, or to enter and exit public establishments through the back door. The NPCs' distrust of you as a "newcomer" never obstructs or interferes with your ability to play the game and complete your objectives, which does make the whole thing fall kind of flat. Yet that sense that you aren't welcome is always there, lingering.

We don't take kindly to Newcomers around here.

I think I bought This Bed We Made on a PSN sale. Or maybe it was one of the free monthly titles? The trailer piqued my interest. It looked like it might be a fun little murder mystery.

Mystery video games are difficult to get right. It's a tough balancing act to give the player enough information to solve the mystery, but not so much that the game basically plays itself. Can the solution be easily brute-forced? Do option prompts give the solution away? Does the player ever get that sense of "eureka!" for figuring things out for yourself?

Generally, in my experience, the bigger the game, the more difficult it is to hit that fine balance. It seems like indie games make much better mystery games due to their smaller scope. This Bed We Made certainly keeps its scope fairly small, which helps to provide a reasonable possibility space for the player to work with, and allowing for player-driven deduction and some assertive leaps of logic.

The protagonist is a hotel maid with a penchant for snooping into guests' personal belongings.

The player plays a hotel maid tasked with cleaning up the rooms for patrons. But she has a penchant for snooping around in the customers' personal belongings. The game takes place entirely in the handful of rooms that she is assigned to clean, on a single floor of the hotel, as well as the lobby, and some of the employee-only spaces in the basement. The protagonist being a hotel maid also introduces the game's core gimmick: the game isn't necessarily about solving the mystery; it's more about how you handle the evidence and clues that you find.

Your job is to decide which pieces of evidence should be cleaned up, and which should be left behind. After all, your job is not to tamper with guest's belongings; it's simply to clean up their trash. Throwing away the wrong scrap of paper could, hypothetically, get you fired. But at the same time, not throwing away certain pieces of evidence could incriminate you or another innocent character.

Furthermore, your choices will also have impacts on the other hotel staff. Your actions may reveal co-workers as negligent or insubordinate, but that negligence or insubordinance may be justifiable or sympathetic, which leads to interesting moral and ethical dilemmas. Does a co-worker deserve to be held accountable for their actions and potentially fired? Or are their reasons for the inciting action justifiable or excusable, given the circumstances?

Your actions (or inactions) can lead to consequences for yourself and other characters.

I'll give Remedy this bit of credit: in a world overrun with soul-less, design-by-committee, live-services and vehicles for micro-transaction economies, Alan Wake 2 is a game that actually has a strong creative vision and personality. It follows in the footsteps of Hideo Kojima and Death Stranding by being completely confident in itself and being un-abashedly weird. And just like with Death Stranding, that means that sometimes Alan Wake 2 is genius; other times it's confoundingly stupid and hackneyed!

It's hard even to classify Alan Wake 2 into a single genre. That goes for both narrative genre and also ludic genre. In both cases, it's kind of all over the place. At the most reductionist level, it follows the basic formula of a modern horror game: exploring creepy environments to find keys for doors, fighting monsters as an over-the-shoulder 3rd-person shooter, solving puzzles, and managing a limited inventory. So it's a "horror game", right? In fact, sometimes, it's seriously scary and disturbing. But other times, I'm questioning its "horror" status while I'm laughing out loud to a deliberate joke, or bored out of my mind because nothing scary or particularly exciting has happened in hours. Yet other times still, it's farcically campy or schlocky, and un-intentionally laughable. It's story is ridiculously out there in its concepts and execution, but somehow every beat of the plot is set up and signposted as clearly and obviously as the neon signs that point the player to the next objective in the Dark Place.

Plot twists are signposted more clearly and obviously than the neon signs that often guide the player through levels.

It's also frequently up its own ass. It is, after all, a fictional story about the power of fiction to alter reality (and our perception of reality). It even features the lead designer as a self-insert character within the story. Though surprisingly, he made himself a secondary character instead of one of the 2 playable protagonists. So it's not really about him, but he still found a way to make the entire plot revolve around that secondary character.

In the mind's eye

I feel that Alan Wake 2 is consistently at its best when its sitting firmly in its horror-mystery mode. As such, the opening couple hours of the game really pulled me in and hooked me. The game's main quest and side content are split up into various "cases" for the FBI agent protagonists to solve. There's a mechanic in which the player can retreat into Agent Saga Anderson's "Mind Space", which is an imaginary office room in which she sorts through all the clues she's gathered and strings them together on an imaginary wall in order to fit the puzzle pieces of the mystery together. Each time the player discovers a critical piece of information in the game world, it will show up in the Mind Space's filing cabinet as a new file in a case folder. Putting the clues together in the right way will unlock new lines of inquiry, and can even reveal the next objective.

Agent Anderson can review the known evidence in her imaginary Mind Space office.

Apparently, the actual game doesn't even pause, and continues to play in the background while the player is in the Mind Space. Even though the Mind Space is a full-screen environment, the character can still be attacked by enemies in the "real world". At first, I thought this would be obnoxious, but after the first time I was attacked while trying to re-arrange items on the case board in the Mind Space, I learned my lesson. After that, I actually came to realize that that needing to find a safe, peaceful space in order to let the character think about clues they've discovered (and how to proceed), really helps to emphasize the danger and stakes of the situation.

Arranging the clues in the Mind Space is not very difficult or complicated. It's not like having to solve a person's fate in Return of the Obra Dinn, or anything like that. Most of the time, the process is just going through the motions. Even when there are multiple options for where a piece of evidence can go, the solution can be easily brute-forced without the player having to know anything about what's going on.

The Case Board is an immersive quest log and objective tracker.

Even so, the Mind Space is a creative idea for presenting objectives, quest logs, story summaries, and characterization. The Mind Space at least tries to force the player to have to engage with the events of the story in a meaningful and immersive way. The player has to at least pretend to know how the various events of the story, the characters, and the McGuffins you find all fit together in the broader story in order to progress the main story or side quests.

And in fact, the entire game is about the interplay between the audience and the fiction. For most of the story, it's about the ability of fiction to re-shape people's perception of reality, but as the game goes on, it becomes more and more about the audience's ability to shape or re-shape the actual fiction. It emphasizes that any creative work is made up of both the voices of its creator(s) and also the interpretation and reception of the audience. This has always been true, with all forms of fiction and story-telling, but it's even more true with video games.

It's kind of hard to play a lot of video games while holding an infant child. It's certainly possible, but I had to accept that I was going to be less precise in my inputs whether I was holding a PlayStation controller or a keyboard and mouse. It seemed like a perfect time to try out a game that only requires a mouse to play -- a perfect time to finally try out Disco Elysium!

Disco Elysium is a unique and experimental RPG that straddles the line between RPG, point-and-click adventure, and walking sim. Most RPGs have combat of varying degrees of complexity in order to give all the various character stats and progression systems something to do. Disco Elysium completely eschews those conventions. I think I fired a gun maybe three times in my entire play time with the game (across a campaign and a half that I played prior to reviewing), and one of those gunshots was against a corpse hanging from a tree. Oh and I roundhouse kicked a a racist beefcake (you know, in order to establish my own racial superiority). Not exactly Call of Duty over here.

It may not require the twitch reflexes that many "gamer bros" expect every game to have, but games like this have been a godsend for those of us who only have one free hand to hold a mouse, because the other arm is holding a sleeping infant. It also happens to be a really good game.

I maybe fired a gun thrice, and roundhouse kicked a racist once, in 40+ hours of gameplay.

Inner dialogue

Instead of channeling character stats into gauntlets of filler combat encounters as a way of accumulating experience to improve those stats for the next combat encounters, Disco Elysium channels all of its character attributes into conversation trees. But these conversations aren't just with the other characters who I interview as part of the murder mystery plot. These conversations are also with the character's own inner monologue.

You see, the skills in Disco Elysium aren't like the skills of most other RPGs. They don't determine the character's physical strength, or agility, or skill with various weapons, or a blanket "charisma" attribute that determines if people believe your lies or are swayed by your arguments. No, instead, all of the skills of Disco Elysium represent elements of the protagonist's personality and psyche. Those skills will even pop up during dialogue and allow the character to have arguments or conversations with his own inner monologue. Each skill is like a voice in the protagonist's head, telling him what to do, or how to interpret the events he encounters. Each skill is sort of a character in its own right.

The character's skills talk to him, giving the player insight into the game world and current circumstances,
and also (sometimes flawed) advice about how to proceed.

I'm reminded of the psychosis voices of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, with each voice shouting over the others trying to tell Senua what to do or telling her that she's worthless and can't do anything right. Except in Disco Elysium, the player can actually have conversations with those voices. You can talk back to them.

These skills will pop up from time to time as interjections during conversations to make observations about what is happening or to recommend specific courses or action or responses. It's also a great way of delivering exposition and ensuring that the player knows any relevant details that the character should know. But they aren't always completely reliable. Sometimes blindly following the advice of these skills can land you in trouble.