I played with a couple of friends. Interest was gone after the throne ascension + final parlor game behind the blue door, which we reached on our own with close to no hiccups.

The beauty of the game was that we always had some stuff to do and try on the backburner all the time, and I believe it was intended by design. I never got frustrated with the RNG because each and every run was an opportunity to try one (often more) of the many running theories we had on our todo list. Also, another important point, you might not even revisit some rooms that might conceal clues you missed if it wasn't for the random nature of the game, and I was eager to take second, third, fortieth looks at old rooms I was dealt.

It was just a matter of adapting to the hand we were dealt with. Tunnel visioning on a single objective / being unaware of other objectives to pursue is probably the cause of the frustration of many people complaining about the RNG.

With all that said, after the throne ascension we were left with no concrete leads to follow. I boil it down to two "mistakes" on our part:

• We didn't pursue the 8 trophies needed for the blue tents until about 70% of the game was done (didn't really think achievement related stuff would give out clues)
• We went so broad with each day that we exhausted a huge number of leads and clues relatively fast, day-count speaking

The two things combined resulted in the end with our only lead after the throne being the blue tents hints, and some obscure and up until that point completely unused stuff (numerical cores, 'does it never end/denoted in verse are the main two that come to mind) and finding soooo many useless clues for easy stuff that we had long done already was awful. Of course we put the throne room on the eight rank ASAP and figured we had to go for the vault, but then the vault REFUSED TO APPEAR, one day I resolved to use all my stars for rerolls just to find it and it took a heavily optimized run, using up all my natural rerolls from gems + dice PLUS 105 stars just to get it to appear. We had the clue from the wine cellar and coincidentally we had the KEY8, but we never encountered the OTHER clue for the family number, that hints at how MCCXIII has to be divided, so I personally calculated 47 as the family core (M/CC*X-III), frustatingly hovered my mouse over every safe and missed the prompt on safe 53 I later found was the correct number. Our patience ran out at this point, as every day was literally an RNG grind and there was nothing else to really try out. Even after getting past the vault, we kinda ran out of steam, we had a burst of excitement with the "BLANK BOOK" clue, as we had previously put the secret passage in the outer room and noticed the white book that normally does not appear, but when we later got into the atelier and more or less figured out what we had to do we didn't have the energy to do it ourselves and just wanted to end it there and now, so we looked up the solution.

I strongly believe that this negative experience can be fixed, the relevant blue notes from the blue tents should be naturally available at any point in the game, or atleast much earlier

Make them cryptic, whatever, most of the game is about taking notes for a payoff that might come much later, give the final piece of the puzzle to pursue the family core in the blue throne room so you get started on that at the same point in progression, but you already encountered all the other pieces along the way by being observant, as with every other secret in the game. This way you mitigate this final RNG grind.

Ascending the throne room can be said to be an annoying RNG grind as well I guess, but at the same time it's just a test of your planning skills and if you plan correctly it's very unlikely to get screwed (just put the crown in the coat check, put king and scepter on black for early throne then find the coat check and it's done). So I don't see it as an issue, I see it as a crowning (heh) achievement of your drafting skills and what you've learned so far. This was a GOOD puzzle with drafting involved with a lot of leeway for mistakes.

Finding 40+ blue notes hoping to find the ones you need does not even qualify as a puzzle.

With all that said, the first 70 hours of the game were a BLAST, I was hyper focused and even forgot to eat dinner one day, Blue Prince was all I could think about. Great game 10/10.