People who write about Blue Prince genuinely love Blue Prince. I’m cooler on it than a lot of critics, but I’ve still gotten a lot out of it, and wrote a pretty glowing review right here at Paste. As I said in that piece, it’s the kind of game critics love writing about, and also the kind of game that’s easy to obsess over. And that combination leads us to where we are today: with a lot of critics openly calling for more people to play Blue Prince, their obsession du jour. That drives me to ask a simple question: what if we didn’t do that—and by “we” I mean game critics, and by “that” I mean loudly urging people to play a game that is guaranteed to alienate a significant amount of the people who play it?
Critics love to advocate for the stuff they think isn’t getting its due, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s one of the underlying points of criticism: If you don’t passionately care about whatever medium you write about, and don’t want to elevate what you think are its best works, why even write in the first place? (It’s definitely not for the money.) There’s a difference between writing a positive review and issuing calls to action outside that review, though. That kind of advocacy has quickly come to the fore with Blue Prince, tilting quickly into overkill. Major sites have published articles calling for more people to play it, and writers have hyped it up non-stop on social media. Their general attitude is that this is one of the best games of the year, and so anybody interested in games needs to play it. And that’s absolutely not true with Blue Prince, and with games (or any other art) in general.
Blue Prince is not a game everybody needs to play. I’d wager that most people who play videogames would get very little out of it. It’s an intentionally obtuse, incredibly complex puzzle game that demands a lot of patience and a decent amount of work outside the game from the player, and that’s not always what people look for from their leisure time. Blue Prince is a niche game, and should be celebrated as such; although niche games as uncommonly good as this one sometimes break out to a wider audience, they still won’t appeal to everybody who normally has no time or interest in that niche. Blue Prince is not a game for everybody, and acting like it is isn’t good for anybody.
(And just to cut this response off at the bud, no, Blue Prince isn’t a “niche game” because it’s an “indie” or was made by a small development team. One reason Blue Prince works for those of us who like it is that there hasn’t been a lot of recent games that are anything like it, which kind of inherently means it’s not aiming for broad mainstream acceptance. This isn’t some “AAA” vs. “indie” debate, but a simple observation about Blue Prince and how it fits into the current games ecosystem.)
This also speaks to a larger issue with how we write and talk about games. There’s a tendency towards critical consensus in games that’s rarely seen with other mediums or artforms, and which is a big factor in the typical games cycle of prerelease hype, rave reviews, and inevitable backlash. That backlash wouldn’t be so inevitable if there was a greater diversity of critical opinion in reviews, and if there was less of an immediate rush to join in on the conversation and play what all the critics are praising. It’d be good for the medium—and for games criticism—if Blue Prince was a mainstream hit. But pushing something this finicky this forcefully directly feeds into that predictable cycle, and we’re already seeing it take root with Blue Prince: user scores on sites like Metacritic are noticeably lower than its review scores, and social media and the game’s Steam message board are full of complaints by people who don’t dig it. It’s finding an audience, and that audience isn’t always fond of it.
It’s great if you love Blue Prince. Again, I’m a big fan of it, despite its many frustrations. But strongly encouraging everybody to play a game that’s so cryptic, so uncompromising, and so unlike most games that consumers have made successful right now isn’t going to help that much. It might not just make them dislike and resent Blue Prince, accomplishing the opposite of what its boosters hope to achieve, but also make them further question the value of games criticism and reading about games in the first place. And given the ongoing collapse of all media, but games in particular, we don’t need to give readers more reason to check out.
I don’t think anybody would argue that not every game is meant for every player. That’s an obviously true statement. There’s no real upside to insisting the opposite, especially for a game as unique and as exacting as Blue Prince. Let’s maybe all just cool it down a little, okay?
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
