If you haven't yet played Blue Prince or watched someone play it, you need to know that it's really fantastic, as an experience, with a vivid world and compelling narrative. Also, fiendish puzzles and layers of deception.

& you're going to want to know that I'm writing this blog entry with the assumption that you already have that level of knowledge and/or don't care about spoilers, by now.

I didn't achieve every possible trophy, I didn't open every door. There's a whole other building I never even saw. But I had a hell of a fun ride. I'm really enthusiastic about all the pieces of the world's narrative which are implied by the classrooms, the books and letters.

This game was the most surprising and most fun of its genre[1]_ which I've gotten to play since Quern.

The opening is so good at establishing the tone and giving the player the first few clues as to what the game is going to be like. The rest of the game goes about subverting that established framework, showing the player more behind the facades, rewarding exploration and inference, note taking & note referencing.

We managed to solve our way through nearly everything to get to a good ending, but couldn't make the leap to using a fire to score the sundial from the clues we could find; we ended up looking up that solution. Everything else we did uninformed.

We got the first pair of blue doors open but not the second. That was complete enough for my needs.

[1]	Namely, the walk around and stare at stuff until something clicks, repeat, genre of puzzle games.