These are games I played recently on Game Pass that are, well, passes for me.

Blue Prince

I had seen Blue Prince be praised a bunch recently, but I’m apparently not smart enough to enjoy it.

The premise of Blue Prince is that a young boy has to navigate a magic estate that moves rooms around every day, and discover the mysterious “46th” room. You start with 50 steps, which is how many rooms you can enter within a day, and when you reach a door, you get to pick one of three random blueprints for what kind of room is on the other side. The blueprints themselves come from a deck of sorts, so there is an element of strategy involved as the unchosen blueprints go back into the “deck.” You keep going until you run out of steps or, infinitely more likely, you end up getting dead-ended with your choices and/or the doors start getting randomly locked and you didn’t RNG your way into enough keys.

And that is kind of where things fell off the rails for me. I don’t like puzzle games generally, but I have played and enjoyed ones like Braid, The Talos Principal and… uh… does Portal 1/2 count? In the case of Blue Prince, the actual playing bits aren’t fun. Go to door, pick 1 of 3 options, possibly collect items, go to next door. I have encountered some “chests” that require other items to open, but near as I can tell, the required items are RNG-based as to whether they will show up in a given day. There was one run when I alllllllmost got to the Antechamber but then every door was locked/gated by a currency I ran out of and… it honestly felt like those bad roguelites where they make it impossible to win until you grind some progression. Although I guess there’s an achievement for winning on Day 1? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Whatever. The bank can have the house.

Atomfall

British Fallout!

…except not at all.

To be fair, they never said British Fallout, even though that is what everyone wanted. Instead, you have a first-person pseudo-mystery game in which you accidentally solve all the mysteries by just playing the game like a Fallout. Except the hoarding part, because you have an extremely limited inventory, no means of crafting anything until you purchase schematics, and no currency to purchase schematics, only what you can trade with what you’ve managed to stuff in your limited inventory.

Honestly, exploring every derelict house and having to continuously pass up on yet more Scraps or Cloth because I had the maximum amount already is what killed this game for me. Can’t stash the extra bits, can’t sell them for currency, can’t (yet) craft them into useful items, so… what? Should I just ignore all the exploration and make a beeline to the quest objective? I understand 2.5 hours might not be long enough for any plot to materialize, but if the gameplay or setting or characters can’t bridge the gap until it does, then you’ve got a pretty piss-poor design, IMO. And certainly not worth 71.6 GB of space.