I was super excited to try Blue Prince after it got rave reviews almost everywhere, especially Eurogamer which has been my go-to for reviews for two decades.

I’ve played on the PSPlus version for an hour or two. I have to say, I’m kind of over it already and very glad I didn’t fork over 25 quid for it. And I don’t really get the raving reviews – it feels like they reviewed the first few hours of discovery, which are certainly promising and very charming, and are skipping over the empty grind that sets in once that discovery period is over. It didn’t ever once make me feel like raving about it.

Reason being, it’s ultimately a game of luck. Success is more out of your hands than in them. The random number generator (RNG) that decides what rooms (or cards) you’re offered each time is ultimately what will decide if you even stand a chance of winning your run. Some skills are absolutely required to solve some of the puzzles, sure, but really once you’ve learned the solutions it’s just a grind until you get lucky enough with the cards you draw and the way you place them that you can finally win.

So what you do is, you start with a 3-door room in this mansion you have to explore, the point being to find the ‘final’ room within it. Each door gives you a choice of three random rooms (or cards) to place on the other side of that door. And at each subsequent door in those rooms, the same thing. Think a mansion-based Carcassonne where your route through the mansion is dictated by your choice of rooms to place behind each door you encounter.

The problem is that if the game doesn’t give you rooms with doors that are compatible with the doors you’ve already placed, you’ll eventually create a closed layout that doesn’t lead all the way to the top of the blank map where the final room is located, and it’s game over, have another go.

Some rooms have puzzles, some of which are easily solvable with the most basic of gaming logic (although could easily stump someone if they’re not used to that sort of puzzle). Other rooms have clues to puzzles you may or may not have encountered. You’ll need to write down (or screenshot) some of those clues for when you do finally encounter the relevant puzzle during a run.

Once you’ve played enough to accumulate solutions or at least methodology for all the puzzles then all you’ll be doing is playing over and over until eventually you get lucky both with the cards drawn and how you’ve placed them so that you don’t hem yourself in.

There is of course some degree of strategy you can employ to boost your chances – not using certain rooms until later, to give you a better chance of success when your route options become more limited; or collecting certain items and placing certain rooms to enhance your likelihood of stretching your run out that bit longer. And being a rogue-like, some improvements persist across runs once you’ve earned them.

But ultimately it all comes down to the RNG. You could have all the solutions, know exactly what you need to get to the end, nailed your placement strategy… and just never get given the cards (rooms) that you need.

There’s not much joy for me in a game that ultimately locks player success behind RNG systems, and as soon as I realised that was the ultimate decider of success I lost interest in it completely.