Over the past few weeks, like many of you, I started playing Blue Prince. I’m not a beneficiary of PS Plus Extra though. Instead, my wife bought the game when it was released, and I have access to it thanks to Steam’s Family feature.
It’s funny – I played a demo for Blue Prince back in June of last year, and completely missed what it actually was. The demo was limited to 3 hours of playtime, and I called it quits after playing for about an hour. In that time, I never managed to figure out that Blue Prince was chock full of hidden clues for a variety of different puzzles. That’s an unfortunate side-effect of trying to play, and cover so many demos in such a short period – not all of them get the time they need to breathe.
Regardless, I still thought the core-concept of Blue Prince was neat enough for a second viewing when it arrived in early April. There aren’t many (any?) games on the market where you construct the space that you’re exploring room by room as you explore it. That gives Blue Prince some novelty to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Having now played Blue Prince, I’ve gotta come clean about something: I didn’t particularly care for it. Maybe I needed to trudge a little further into the experience, but I bounced off it harder than a rubber ball on concrete in the opening hours. There are a couple reasons for this, but there’s 1 that I wanted to focus on with the remainder of this article: why isn’t there an in-game notebook?
I played for about a week of in-game time, and I already have 2 full pages of notes for Blue Prince in my physical notebook. Honestly, I can’t even make sense of all of them. I was recording so much information that I thought might become relevant since the random layout of Mt. Holly changes everyday, and I didn’t want a particular piece of info to be held hostage depending on my luck.
Looking over my deranged notes got me thinking though: why doesn’t Blue Prince allow you to record anything within the game itself? It’s purpose built to reward keen-eyed observation. Furthermore, many of the game’s puzzles require players to identify that the puzzle even exists before they can work out the solution. That sort of pattern recognition necessitates heavy note-taking since most people aren’t capable of juggling that much information simultaneously.
Heck, the game even acknowledges this, and contains a note within 1 of the common rooms that informs players that they should take notes as they play.
So, again, I’ve gotta ask: why isn’t there a way to record my notes in-game?
To be clear, I’m not asking for Blue Prince to take notes for me like the Rumor Log does in Outer Wilds. That would be entirely self defeating. As already stated, some of Blue Prince’s puzzles require players to spot a pattern, make a deduction, and validate their solution. Having a system like the Rumor Log, where key information is automatically recorded once the player stumbles upon it, would outright spoil the foundation that Blue Prince is built upon.
Instead, I’d like to see something akin to the notebook from The Roottrees are Dead. It’s just a digital notebook where players can organize, and record their thoughts as they play the game. Mine has a combination of hand-typed notes, and information that I deemed relevant to particular threads that I was pulling at throughout my playtime.
As an aside, I’ve censored any of the information that I thought might spoil Roottrees from that screenshot. Roottrees, like Blue Prince, is best enjoyed without first being molested by spoilers.
Roottrees also makes it very easy for players to record any information that they deem worth storing for later. You simply highlight the text that you want to record, click a button, and it’ll be added to the open tab in your notebook in the next available spot. Given the sheer volume of information that you’re bombarded with as you comb through Mt. Holly looking for clues, I’d have really appreciated something similar in Blue Prince to record similar details as I explored.
You know what else would have been cool? Being able to take pictures, and store those alongside your written notes. It never dawned on me, but having screenshots of what something looked like might have saved me from having to write notes describing its appearance. My wife, who is evidently much smarter than I, collected several pages of screenshots within a Google doc, and she’d have appreciated having all her pictures available in-game, instead of open on her second monitor.
I dunno. Is it really so much to ask for the player character to carry around a notebook with him as he explores the manor? I know the rules state that you can’t bring any tools from outside the manor, but that internal logic goes completely out the window once players unlock the mines. As such, it wouldn’t be any more inconsistent to bring along a notebook (and instant camera) too.
What about you though? Did you find the lack of an in-game notebook as bothersome as I did while playing Blue Prince? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
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Frostilyte Writes 
I think I had something like 8-10 pages of notes by the end, and that would have been higher if I wasn’t getting hints from someone and eventually just looking stuff up.
I wholeheartedly agree that some kind of in-game note system would be nice, in two ways.
Firstly, as a record of everything you’ve read that you can pull up and consult. Every letter, book, etc. You surely wouldn’t have reached this point, eventually you can find yourself wrestling with RNG to get certain rooms just so you can reread a note and get the exact wording.
Secondly, I actually disagree that a rumor log would be too much. A direct copy would be overkill, but there’s definitely a way to make a kind of rumor log work where interacting with something just raises a vague question for you to pursue and keep track of. Perhaps even let you input information into a log entry. The value here would especially be in letting you know that there’s something to do. The late game really struggles with the vagueness of “is there even a puzzle here?”
Hell, a pretty consistent question people ask is “is that it?”, and a rumor log would provide a sense of finality.
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That’s an absolutely eye watering amount of notes. I’m not at all surprised though – that’s just the sort of game Blue Prince is.
Honestly, I was a little surprised that the game didn’t already keep track of any of the notes that the player has picked up and read. That’s the sort of thing that just about every modern game does, so the lack of it in Blue Prince feels especially odd. It’s not like anything is gained by withholding the information either. What is the player even proving by not needing to double check written information? That they made a note of something that the game could, and should have already noted on their behalf?
Point taken. In chatting some more with my wife after she decided she was done-done with the game, I think she’d agree with you too. Largely for the reasons you’ve already stated: the game becomes too opaque (after a point).
Honestly, it’s nice to know that there are folks who feel similarly about the game (in general). Before posting anything, I tend to look around the internet (reddit, steam, various websites) to see if anyone is already talking about the subject I’ve written about. It turns out, there are a LOT of people who feel very strongly about keeping Blue Prince the way it is now. That’s all to say, I was prepared for the worst when I hit publish. Though, were this article to blow up in my face, it wouldn’t have been the first time hahaha.
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I’ve only put about a half-dozen hours into the game, and I couldn’t agree more. Even if the game just had some sort of tagging system, that’d be better than nothing. I laughed when I first saw that note about keeping a physical journal. I mean, I want to play the game, but I don’t know that I’m keen on “winning” it if I need to take actual notes.
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This is a bit of a crude comparison, but it’s almost like those posts you’d find on the self aware wolves subreddit.
When I found that note I audibly said something along the lines of: Yes game, I WOULD like to keep notes for these puzzles. It’s a shame you haven’t provided a way to do that.
At least that made my wife laugh from the other room when she heard me.
All joking aside, I genuinely don’t know what folks on consoles (which is where I assume you’re playing it?) are doing. Using their phone maybe? At least on PC, I can always scribble some stuff down in Notepad, but I’d have still much rather had everything in-game instead of needing to constantly alt-tab to record pertinent information.
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Yep, playing on Xbox. It’s not a great experience, and the lack of an in-game note-taking system is just one knock against it. I am glad tried it out, but it’ll be a game to pick up on PC at some point. I really do like the concept, and I can see how the puzzles get under your skin, making you WANT to solve more and more of them. Since it seems unlikely that the devs are going to add anything else to the game, eh, maybe I’ll be more in the note-taking mood whenever I try it again elsewhere.
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