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.

This is another one that's been sitting at the top of my wishlist for a quite a while. The Forgotten City is one of the handful of games that was made a few years back, during the big "time loop" craze. Following Outer Wilds, there games like 12 Minutes, Death Loop, Returnal, and a few others -- including The Forgotten City. Sadly, I didn't get around to playing The Forgotten City at the time, and it's been sitting on my wishlist, waiting to go on sale. That sale finally happened earlier this year!

When I played Outer Wilds after its Steam release (I refused to give money to Epic), it quickly catapulted into the shortlist for one of my favorite games ever! If The Forgotten City was going to be anything close to Outer Wilds, then I knew it was going to be something that I would like.

But really, the similarities kind of begin and end with the time loop gimmick. Outer Wilds is a knowledge-based, open world, sci-fi puzzle game in which the player uses their understanding of the in-game laws of physics and the schedule of the solar system, to solve a giant game-long puzzle. Forgotten City is more of a traditional inventory-based narrative adventure, which mostly consists of exploration and dialogue.

Put simply, the player travels back in time to an ancient Roman city that is stuck in a time loop. The citizens of the city are bound by a "Golden Rule", imposed by a vindictive god, that says that if anybody in the city commits a crime, everyone in the city will die. So far, nobody has tried to break the rule, to find out if it's true. The player must learn everything you can about the city and its inhabitants, in order to try to figure out which god is responsible for this situation, and hopefully find a way to get yourself out -- and maybe save the city's citizens while you're at it.

The Forgotten City was one of several games (along with Outer Wilds) in a short-lived time-loop fad.

It's about damned time!

Forgotten City does not require the player to memorize the exact schedule in which all the events in the city happen. In fact, certain events kindly wait for the player to arrive before they trigger, meaning that you can do things in pretty much whatever order you want. The game also includes a quest log and objective markers, telling you exactly where to go, and giving you a good idea of what to do when you get there.

The puzzles basically come in 2 flavors: dialogue-based logic puzzles, and inventory puzzles. Inventory puzzles are pretty basic, and usually require the player to simply have the item or use it in the appropriate location. The dialogue puzzles usually require the player to learn something about a character or the game world by interrogating NPCs, or to occasionally convince (or trick) an NPC into doing or saying something that you want (by using knowledge that you've acquired from past time loops to manipulate them).

Having to run around, repeating the same conversations over again, and doing the same tasks over again would get very tedious very quickly, and would doubtlessly turn a lot of people off of the game. This isn't like Outer Wilds, where where you can just go straight to the end game and see the true ending; Forgotten City requires that you put in the legwork to make the best ending(s) possible.

There are multiple time-saving features, including a system of zip-lines between key locations.

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.

This isn't the first time that I have said that a game is difficult to review. Mouthwashing is a very difficult game to review. Usually, however, when I say that I'm having difficulty reviewing a game, it's because I have very mixed and conflicting feelings about that game. Or because it's borderline impossible to review the game without discussing extensive spoilers. Well, that last one actually is true in this case, but there's a more important reason why this game is difficult to review: Mouthwashing is a very difficult game to play. Not "difficult", as in "challenging", the way that Dark Souls is "difficult". Not "difficult", as in "broken", the way that a lot of awful low-budget indie games might be. Instead, Mouthwashing is thematically and emotionally difficult to play because it depicts a lot of very disturbing and grotesque subject matters that are just hard to sit through.

The low-fi, PS1-inspired graphics do not, in any way, take away from the visceral visual design of the game. In fact, the low-fi visuals, combined with a film grain filter, give the game a gritty, grimy feeling that might have been harder to accomplish with higher-fidelity graphics that might fall into the uncanny valley. For example, it might seem that the lack of facial animation is a flaw in the game that makes it difficult for some players to understand the emotional context of what the characters are saying, and to read the actual plot of the game with a cold detachment that will make the story harder to understand. And while that is true, there is also a very valid thematic reason for why the characters don't have facial animations, and for why their emotions aren't immediately obvious.

The crippled, disfigured husk of Captain Curly is disgusting to look at, and even more disgusting to listen to. The pain and humiliation that Captain Curly is subjected to are absolutely horrific to behold and contemplate. And that's just the start of the awful things that this game subjects the player to!

This a grotesque game that can be difficult to play.

But this isn't a game about body horror; it's a game about abuse, and the failure or unwillingness to take responsibility for one's actions.

But this story is delivered in a disjoint, non-linear, and sometimes abstract manner that can make it difficult to follow on a first playthrough. It might take a second playthrough to really understand what is going on, and what had happened prior to the events of the game. Thankfully, the 2-ish hour runtime means that a repeat playthrough isn't much of a burden at all. It's nowhere near as annoying and burdensome as something like having to replay Silent Hill 2 remake to try to get different endings, or to collect all the collectibles.

And this is where it starts to get difficult to talk about this game without spoilers. Honestly, if low-fi, psychological horror walking sims about abuse aren't your jam, then you won't play this, and probably won't care about spoilers. Otherwise, if you're into this kind of thing, then you probably know who you are. If you haven't already played the game, and you might be interested, then you should stop reading and play it. It gets my fullest recommendation!

It is impossible to talk about this game's merits without major spoilers...