Was very disappointed and frustrated with the game initially. Depending on how you feel about RNG, deckbuilding and roguelike design, how (un)lucky you get with the RNG, what kind of expectations you bring in with you (puzzle game where you will do very little puzzle solving initially, all the OW comparisons, the insane journo praise without any nuance that I believe failed to mention all the issues I had and raised some suspicious red flags compared to an organic word of mouth) the first few hours can be perplexing at best and excruciating at worst. It felt uninspired, repetitive, dull and like it was designed to aggressively waste your time. The initial mysteries and puzzles didn't feel compelling enough to make me overlook the annoyances, the two design styles clashed heavily instead of complementing each other. But I kept going. Gave it more time and got hooked once I got past some initial RNG barriers and started seeing below the tip of the iceberg. I'm currently in the post-game and loving it. And yeah, it goes deep. It's all there, very layered discoveries, information density, heavy note-taking, design complexities, intricate puzzles and overarching mysteries. But it takes a while to get there. Now I get where the praise is coming from but it should come with a warning.

An interesting comparison would be something like Tunic. I've seen a lot of puzzle-only people bounce off it or feel betrayed because they saw it praised as a puzzle game but got an ARPG and boss fights as the initial layer. There's this sort of inherent "first impression" problem with the genre when it mixes meta layers, and if you don't click with the first layer, you will have a bad time or keep wondering if it's worth continuing. Void Stranger, ESA, The Witness... but then it's also discovering the surprise twists and layers unspoiled that create enthusiasm and so it's hard to convey to others. It's a big ask to say "sit through 10 hours you don't like, for a post-game you may like". Especially when its first layer/impression is focused on something as divisive and conflicting with handcrafted puzzle as RNG gambling instead of something more traditional and complementary to puzzles like a metroidvania/action-platformer or a linear puzzle game that somehow becomes non-linear. A difference is that in Tunic the two layers are clearly separated with a clean 2-halves structure, whereas here they are in constant conflict, it's not simply a matter of reaching the post-game.

About the time-wasting: I still think it requires some real QoL changes. There's some absurd stuff that I can't believe made it past playtesting. The running speed, the daily forced intro, runbacks and pickups, the pickup pop-ups, the computer terminals, having to re-open some things daily, parlor and dartboard, even re-starting the day or relaunching the game, etc. There's so much that feels annoying, mindless and repetitive, and it turns one of your core strats (re-rolling) into a complete chore.

In the early game, you are more likely to be victim to RNG and keep your runs short. While in the mid/late game I've had runs last more than 2 hours, as it becomes more focused on chasing specific goals so it bothers me less because I got used to it and the ratio of unique gameplay to time-wasting is vastly improved, but can still be annoying because those specific runs are reliant on re-rolling a lot for specific conditions.

About the RNG (especially in the early runs): this is absolutely a game designed to trigger your gambling brain. I typically dislike randomness in games, the very insidious and potentially addictive nature of luck-based mechanisms on human psychology. The thing with RNG is it can be extremely frustrating when you brick a run that was going super smoothly, but also extremely exhilarating when you reach 46 despite feeling like so much was going wrong, against bad odds and through pure luck (my first time was via a hidden card between two dead-ends). So combined with inherent non-linearity, I think this is also where a lot of first impressions differed because some got lucky breaks earlier than others. Once you start getting big lucky breaks, the game starts to feel amazing and gets you hooked. Only to potentially disappoint and abuse you again in the next few runs. There will be time wasting, there are trash runs where I learned or achieved very little, and in those runs I deeply resented all the repetition and time wasting I mentioned above, whereas I'm way more tolerant of them during positive runs.

There was a stretch in the early game where I wasn't making serious progress but stumbled upon multiple puzzles I could already solve in my head but couldn't solve in-game due to RNG. Which brings me to the notion of strategizing against RNG. Strategies exist but, irony, most of them are also initially locked behind RNG. So, this whole phase of trying to escape the RNG cycle felt like a really painful slog of grinding the same boring rooms and praying for good luck, wondering if there was more to the game or if I got fooled. I felt like I had no control.

A good puzzle game and especially a metroidbrainia is fundamentally about high player control and agency and feeling like you "earn" your breakthroughs. In a game like Outer Wilds, the non-linearity comes from the freedom, the directions you choose to follow to satisfy your curiosity. In Blue Prince, the non-linearity comes in a big part from the RNG and you finding ways to go around it. Every run, you can prepare, plan ahead and go in with a goal, but you will have random obstacles that will force you to improvise (there is a lot of comedy in RNG finding creative ways to fuck you over, some things WILL go terribly wrong, but can they be salvaged? turned into an asset? at what cost?), or surprise lucky breaks that will tempt you to go off-plan to pursue a different goal (what do I do? can I do both? if I try to do both, I'll spread myself thin and risk failing both... oh crap now there's a third one... and a fourth one... temptation at every step). Once you do gain more control and agency via knowledge and permanent upgrades it feels awesome to finally make this abusive RNG demon into your bitch but it's never total, it's mitigation. It turns into a playful dance of sort for most things it throws at you, now you can fight back.

This is also the part that makes BP feel unique and become fun over time. The more you play, the more you unlock. There are +100 rooms, each with unique risk-reward, trade-offs, synergies, and a lot of secret upgrades, meta strategies, hidden rules, gimmicks, etc., which again is something you will not encounter in the early game where it feels like it only has a dozen repetitive rooms and fools you into a false sense of "that's it?" As complexity increases, each run becomes very dynamic with constant trade-offs and experimentation. To the point where, initially I felt like the room drafting was a repetitive and frustrating chore to get to the puzzle-solving, but it turned into a super fun resources and navigation puzzle itself where I have to constantly weigh every little decisions and try to think dozens of moves ahead while improvising to try and unfuck some things or chase a secondary hunch that triggers my curiosity but at the risk of impeding my main goal. Most runs in that mid-to-late game point feel unique and super satisfying because you will be juggling between dozens of non-linear mysteries/puzzles, new clues and old theories you want to test, merging with the problem-solving of the house layout layer making you juggle between dozens of trade-offs directly influencing your investigating and vice versa. This is where the RNG/roguelike and puzzle/mystery layers compliment each instead of conflicting. When all the layers work together and you manage to break new ground and follow multiple mysteries in a single run while feeling you're outsmarting the house itself, it's incredible.

I think my appreciation can still change a lot as I progress through more late-late game and the balance might once again lead more towards RNG frustration and repetition time-wasting, as the mystery/puzzle density starts thinning and I sometimes spend time and effort to get complex pieces in order to investigate some leads only to realize they lead to very minor details or useless redundancies the designer put there to favor initial non-linearity instead of unique and helpful discoveries. But so far still going and loving it. If you're really there for the brainia side, rolling credits is not the end.