05: Blue Prince Spoilercast

What's good, internet?

It is May 27th, 2025, and this is not a shifting manor of mysteries inherited from your cool gay granduncle.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by friends at the Table and supported by our patrons at friendsatthetable.cash.

Today, I am joined by Sylvie Bullitt, who has been here before.

It's me, your cool gay aunt.

It's that's true.

And your

first-time co-host, Keith Carberry.

Hi, Keith.

Hi.

Hello.

We are here to talk about the blueprints, but before we talk about the blueprints, in a big spoilery way, I need to say, who are you, Keith?

Because it's the first time you're on the show.

It's true, yeah.

My name is Keith Carberry.

I'm on Friends at the Table, and I have been the whole time.

And I'm also

fired at the beginning.

You fired at me.

Wow.

That literally Sylvia.

Yeah.

Look, there's, look, there's, it's just true.

I have been the whole time.

If you didn't know, I have been the whole time.

Oh, yeah.

It's true.

I also have been doing video game podcasts since

the aughts.

I started doing video game podcasts with my cousin Kyle in 2009.

We do a show called Run Button.

It's also a Let's Play channel.

I would say mainly a Let's Play channel these days.

YouTube.com/slash Run Button, where we've played through all the Sonic games,

Silent Hill games,

a smattering of other things.

And

your Shen Mu one and two

Shenmue.

That's like one of my favorite things we did.

That was an old Patreon bonus, but is now available for free.

So I highly recommend that.

And right now, we are replaying all of the Sonic games

and playing Silent Hill 2 original again alongside Silent Hill 2 Remastered.

That's our current thing.

Oh, and I do Media Club Plus with Sylvie and Austin.

You've been on.

That's right.

You do Media Hill Plus.

And then I just want to shout out you just as of this recording, like yesterday released the Repo multicam stream from we played Repo back a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago,

a month and a half ago.

It's up there on our YouTube channel, youtube.com youtube.com/slash friends of the team.

Watch me carry.

I carried so hard.

Yeah, we couldn't have done it without Sylvia.

So true.

So true.

In our hearts, at least.

So yeah, go watch it.

That is, it's fantastic.

We talked about that game, I think, on the very first episode of Side Story.

If you haven't seen us play it yet, you should go watch that version of it.

It's great.

Even if you have watched us play it, absolutely.

Even if you go back and seen that already, go watch the multicam.

You did a fantastic job with it, Keith.

Thank you.

There's movie magic in that one.

That's my first time playing with time.

It will bug

me that there are two editing errors in the first 25 minutes.

But then the whole rest of it's fun.

I wish that those came at the end.

He's going to have to have like a shop talk about getting into multi-cam editing and like the joys of it and the stresses of it.

Because it is, at some point, we'll go down that road.

Five cameras was too much for my kids.

That's too many cameras.

It was too much.

That's so, so hard.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's talk about the blueprints this is your warning we're going to talk very spoilery thoughts about blueprints i think probably in um increasing uh degrees of of spoiler spoileriness because

i think that's probably the way to do it is when you know start with the stuff that's like hey you open that you you turn on that game for the first time what's that game what do you think about it and then eventually you hit you hit credits or you hit you hit credits after you open chamber 46 right yeah okay and then there's a bunch of other stuff and so i think we are all in that bunch of other stuff part of the game at this point.

Very much.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think Sylvie, it sounds to me, Sylvie, like you're the deepest in, but honestly, you've had the game for a really long time.

Yeah.

I, so I beat the game during IGF last year, um, but beat the game meaning hit 46.

So

a third of the game?

It seems like a third of the game.

And it's, but it's, it's, oh, it's, it's an interesting one.

It's a weird game.

Um, it's a weird game.

Uh, for people who don't remember from our our conversations around Blue Prince or who didn't listen up to other folks talking about it, the very short version is the Blue Prince is a

puzzle, a first-person puzzle game

set in an ever-changing mansion.

It's run-based, like a roguelike, and it has tile placement gameplay, like something like Betrayal at House of the Hill, the board game,

where you're placing down tiles to try to build a pathway towards a destination while gathering resources, solving puzzles inside of each of the rooms or many of the rooms, and then also solving meta-puzzles around things like, hey, look, there's paintings in every room.

What do they, it seems like there's some sort of secret message being delivered there, or I'm trying to solve, get the codes to these safes to get letters that are inside of them, and figuring out what the, what the, um, the codes are.

And of course, the great success, I think, of this game is that there's two puzzles I just said, the paintings and the safes, are very directly connected, despite thinking for most of the game that they were not.

And then you open the big chamber 46, you get to the secret place, and then what unfolds is a bunch of other more meta-scale puzzles.

I've heard a lot of different people talk about this game.

It's been out for a while.

I was interested in playing it.

I was listening to...

uh you know podcasts people online i listened to the uh side story episode where

uh you talked about it for the first time.

And I think it's worth saying you said run-based like a roguelike.

It's also run-based like a board game.

It is run-based.

It's a board game.

You're right.

It's so board game.

It's a board.

To me, it feels like playing a piece in a board game, kind of start to finish.

You did, you

compared it to, I think it was like Clue the Great Museum heist or something in our chat.

Clue the Great Museum caper.

Thank you.

Sorry.

A hidden gem 90s board game that is so fun and good and interesting and way cooler than you'd think a clue game could be.

But it does have that feeling of

putting tiles down so much more than I first thought it would.

Interesting given, of course, one of the great post-game things you've learned is about a museum caper.

Yes,

totally.

Do they know?

Some really fun color to clue the Great Museum Caper

is that it was very, very soon after the

Isabel Stewart Garden Museum heist in Boston.

It was like two years after that this game came out, and it just feels inevitably inspired by that.

It looks like the folks who made that made two other games together.

It's John LaBelle, Thomas Rabideau, and Dave Rabideau.

And it looks like they also made a game called Pipeline, which seems like it's made of cool little pipe parts that you put together.

And then a game called Crazy Old Fish War.

Yo, wait, we got to play that on Friends of of the Table.

I think it's like a crazy eight meets old made meets fish meets war.

Crazy Old Fish War is a counterweight prequel

about the Avastalissian Empire.

Yeah, there you go.

Perfect.

Yeah, so funny.

See, I think you're right.

The board game stuff is really heavy, though I think that as you get into the...

I mean, the thing that reminds me of the most, of course, is Betrayal Legacy, which is a legacy board game, partly because

there is a sense of of progression, not just, you know, I'd say in the first half or the first third or whatever of the game, when you're trying to just reach the antechamber in chamber 46,

there is like, oh, I unlocked the apple garden, and so now I get extra turns every day.

Or, oh, I have figured out how to like earn

stars or fruit or something more

regularly.

And so I get an extra resource or something like that.

Yeah, totally.

I think that the best analog, like you said, is those legacy games that did it start with Pandemic Legacy, but yeah, definitely prominent one.

No, Risk Legacy was the first one.

Yeah,

that sort of was that a fad?

Those were great.

I loved all of those.

They're still happening.

In fact, one of my favorite games out, coming out, I'm like waiting for my copy of it.

Is Earthborn Rangers, which is by Earthborne Games, which kind of like was a

the brainchild, the company founded by Andrew Navarro after he left fantasy flight games.

So a lot of experience with games like Netrunner and Arkham Horror and Arkham, the Arkham Horror CCG, which is also a TCG, LCG, whatever it is, also a tile-flipping, tile-based exploration puzzle.

But Earthborn Rangers is also a really, really cool legacy thing.

I would love to play.

I played some with Jack and Janine and KB actually over the winter.

And I would love to figure out how to do a game like that on a Friends of the Table stream at some point.

I have to talk to Kato over at Remap to figure out how to do it.

But yeah, so lots of board game connections there.

But then I was going to say, is like after you hit that Chamber 46, you're still doing the board game part, but your brain is much more in some of the long-term, hey, what's up with the countries in this world?

Because I need the answers so I can solve these weird underground realm dial puzzles or whatever.

You know?

Yeah, when I started reading about the history of Arindia,

I felt myself.

This game turns you into Charlie Kelly from the Pepe Sylvia clip like so quickly and so like powerfully.

I mean I would wager to say that the thing that I think is the true ending of the game gives you a choice and the choice is whether to continue being that or to hit uninstall on steam.

Damn hold on a minute.

You mean all this spiral and infinity imagery was going somewhere?

It is like formally with the game.

Yeah, I'll wait to talk about that until later.

I'll give like a big final warning about what that is.

By By the way,

we talked a little bit just in our Discord chat about this game, and you, Sylvie, talked about a room that I didn't know what you were talking about.

Yeah.

I still haven't been to that.

That's true.

Is it Ruby?

I have a picture of it.

Yeah.

Oh, a picture of it.

This is my favorite room, I think.

It's solving.

I solved.

That was the last puzzle I solved before the IGF voting and before I had to like...

decide how I felt about that game.

And let me tell you, it made me go, this might be the best game ever made.

The combination of the, you can do the gallery then too, too, right, Sylvie?

Yeah, the gallery is.

I love the gallery.

The gallery is the most like Professor Layton matchstick puzzle thing I've come into in the game, and I was really happy about it.

It really is.

Keith, have you found the gallery?

I so I tragically have only been to the gallery one time,

uh, and I have been unable to draw it again, and uh, so I haven't been able to solve it.

Everything in the gallery can be solved in the gallery, which is

a weird thing to say.

It's a fucking strange

set of questions.

I got the sense that that was true.

Yeah.

But it was dinner time and I had like three more rooms to get to the antechamber.

And you're like, fuck it.

And I was like, it'll pull fucking.

Yeah, I'll come back to the gallery.

You can always come back to the rooms when you pull them again.

And then it's that was a month ago.

Well, I should say one thing, which is we should just like at the top, what do you feel about this game?

And the thing I was going to say is, I wish they added a save and quit.

Just add a save and quit.

Just let me save the game and come back to my innings.

I understand it might be exploitable in some way.

That's okay.

You know, fuck it.

Add a,

you know, you blow up the whole game as far as I'm concerned.

Let me do it.

You know, someone will mod it so that I can, but it would be nice.

Someone's still going to hit alt F4 when they run out of steps to restart the day.

You can let me save in the middle of a day.

Would that work, or would you just load in and then...

Buddy, let me tell you, it works great.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

So funny.

So

what are you doing, Sylvia?

Are you getting a Steam Room, giving yourself 20 steps, being like, this is my run to do a really good job, fucking up, alt death flooring, and then getting your Steam back?

Your Steam steps back?

It's a lot of like,

I, oh, wait, oh, shit, I've only been able to get to level two because I got too focused on trying to fill everything in, and I drafted way too many deadlines.

What's the problem with just starting a new day?

Because I was, was it a blessing or was it an item that I was trying to do?

Okay, because

I am at the point in this game where a lot of stuff rolls?

I was sort of close with the steam room idea.

Yeah, yeah.

It was more, I think it was, I got a blessing that was every time you draw a yellow room, you get two re-roll dice.

Oh, interesting.

Sure.

And somehow, somehow on the last day of having that, I needed to save scum because I completely fucked it.

Yeah.

You know, sometimes you just get a run where you get south-facing rooms only.

You just go,

what the fuck.

I try to accept it gracefully, but that one I was like, I had just gotten like the bookstore was starting to show up more, things like that.

And I was like, I need this.

Oh, the other part of the blessing is when you use the re-roll, you get five.

Sorry, I didn't mention that part.

It's broken.

The really impressive thing about this game is how crucial and impossible getting into the antechamber feels before you finally do it.

How like

totally encompassing getting to that room feels

until the moment it switches.

And then it's effortless.

And then it's effortless, or it's nearly effortless.

So it's at least regular.

It's like going from being unable to hit a baseball to being able to guarantee that you're going to get on base twice, two or three times per game.

Where it's like, oh, yeah.

I might still get, you know, I might fly out.

I might hit a, I might get struck out a few times, but like, I'm going to get on base.

It's going to happen.

Maybe I need to do three or four runs, but I'll get there.

You know?

So my, like the the ex the this game almost ruined me, but I was able I was able to to persevere.

I made it into the antechamber on day like

Or I'm sorry, I made it to the lockdown to the lockdown for the first time on day like 15 to sorry to the lockdown to the antechamber or to the locked door

outside the antechamber.

Yes, okay.

On day like 15.

And I figured out, like, oh, here's, here is what I need.

Here are all the pieces.

I'm on day 15.

I figured out what it is I need to do to get in there.

Right.

And I just was hitting run after run of like horrible bad luck, no progress, like not even, not even making any progress on puzzles.

Like the time, yeah, because I guess it's worth saying there are little puzzles along the way if you haven't played where you're like, oh, well, this is a dead run, but what if I could figure out what's going on in the laboratory this run?

Yes, totally.

And that'll carry you in your spirit in some ways if you can do that.

I had 20,

20 days

of making no real progress at all.

Couldn't make it back to the antechamber.

And then I was in the antechamber like seven days in a row.

Exactly.

We had a question in from DW who basically said the same thing, or who asked if we found the game as frustrating as they did.

Quote, I opened room 46 and called it there.

While I enjoyed what I played, I was curious about the larger puzzles.

I often found the rewards for completing those puzzles pretty disappointing.

The last big one I did involved the chess piece, which gave me an upgrade for the drafting sections.

I do not enjoy the room drafting mechanics of this game very much.

It becomes too much about RNG and is just not as interesting as the actual puzzles.

With some tweaks, like being able to rotate rooms and focusing more on larger puzzles, I think this game would have hit harder for me.

Do you all have similar issues with it?

Can I tell you about the dove room?

Yeah, I was going to say, oh, do you mean?

Yeah, you can rotate the door.

Can I tell you about the elegant compass?

uh tell me about the elegant compass three times a day when you've got it you can uh rotate room i don't know about the elegant

regular compass is that a gap i thought i had all the it's a showroom

yeah i've been to the showroom uh a few times but i've never seen that piece there that's crazy let me

number one item in the game moon pendant the moon pendant is incredible I've seen that.

Yeah, I've actually never bought anything for the showroom.

I think my favorite thing in the game is actually tied to the chess puzzle which is um there's a there's a for people who haven't played this or played only through the the room 46 stuff there's a puzzle about about uh

you can light these torches outside take an elevator they reveal a secret elevator you take the elevator down and you find a room uh in the depths below the the uh i almost said the castle the castle is actually below the manor also yeah um crucially crucially but uh there's a um if you can light all four of those torches you you can go underground, you can find a room with a chessboard in it.

Different rooms in the manor have chess pieces in them.

You'll find like a big bishop or a big queen or a big pawn.

As you might imagine, the queen is only in like the ladyship's chambers and the drawing room or something like that, right?

They're not all in.

They're rarer, the more rare the more powerful the piece is.

The king is like in the throne room and like the office or something like that.

And if you can then remember where those are, write them down or take a screenshot and mark it, which is what I did.

Go back outside, take the elevator down, go to the chessboard, and put the pieces where they're supposed to be.

You can add,

you can choose a blessing, a permanent blessing, for one of the five pieces of the chessboard or whatever, right?

And the rook,

I think it's the rook, the rook or the knight, maybe it's the knight.

It's the knight, I think, can add the armory to the

draft board and there you can get the axe and the axe lets you remove a cost from a room permanently what wow you can only use it like three times and then it breaks and like it it like it will never show up like it it is you can only use it three times across the entire your entire game you know forever unbelievable being able to like be like oh this room is free now is like it's funny because it's like it's the best item in the game you can only use it three times.

So it's not the best item in the game because I'll never use it.

But

how many rooms is it crucially important to be able to pull for free?

Like, it's not that many rooms.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

Okay.

Yes.

So I have two things.

After we talk about this, I want to talk about my personal tragedy with the chessboard and with the pictures.

I have a, it was, it's so tragic what I did.

I can't wait to talk about the pictures.

Okay.

But first, I want to say that that is the main thing I see people talk about this game when they're not fans of it or when it didn't click with them is that how brutal the RNG can be.

But I also feel like the people who feel that way haven't dug in quite deep enough to get to the point where it feels like there's constantly some new way to change the RNG in your favor, whether it's the, like, is it the conservatory that lets you change how rare a room is?

It'll give you three random rooms you can change

how rare it is.

And then there's the is it the study that you can add a room like to the pool?

What?

I think that's the draft, like it's just straight up called the drafting room or something.

Oh, there's the drawing, right?

The drawing room lets you redraw.

The drafting room lets you pick a new room to add to your room pool.

Once you get the

laboratory going, I have to show you a map I built.

I have to show you a map I built that is the funniest thing I've ever done.

Yeah, I need to,

I'll find it in a second, but you keep talking.

Oh, wait, wait, I found it.

I found it.

I found it.

And I want y'all to tell me, I want you to describe for me what you're looking at here.

Oh my God.

Wow.

Uh-huh.

What do you see here?

You're building aquariums like tunnels.

That's right.

You also have some tunnels.

I do have tunnels.

Yeah, I was going to say, the tunnels actually not as big as the aquariums.

The tunnels are like, they just go north-south, but you can, you'll always draw a tunnel when you have a tunnel.

And then I have aquarium, which is a room with three doors, like the one you come in, and then two other ones.

It's kind of like a T-shaped door.

And then an aquarium's count is every color of the every color type of the door.

Every tile, sort of, every tile in the game is either like purple, it's a bedroom, or orange, it's a

hallway.

And so mechanical and thematic colors.

Yeah, they are both 100%.

And so what I what I fucking did was I had a lab,

I was running an experiment in laboratory that said, each time you play a hall, connect it to another hall and add three aquariums to the tile pool.

Oh my fucking God.

That's insane.

Tunnel makes that.

Tunnel makes that

infinite aquarium.

Exactly.

The second that I had tunnel, I was able to pull aquarium and then it's just there.

It's just do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

And then it's like, oh, yeah, I can go anywhere anywhere here.

This was, I was, what I was trying to do actually was fill out the entire, the entire board, which is a post-game challenge.

And I didn't do it on this run, unfortunately.

I've gotten 45 out of like one blank space like four times.

Anyway,

go ahead.

I'll take a screenshot of my full house because it took me.

It's good.

It's good.

I did good.

But your point, though, Keith, is like, there comes a point where your knowledge of the game systems will eventually break the difficulty in the RNG.

And I agree that, of course, that could be tweaked.

And I think, and also inside of any system that runs RNG, there is going to be a loser,

which is to say the RNG is going to work for some.

You could be a really great set of game designers who make it work for 95% of people.

And like, you could just be in the 5% where it just completely doesn't work.

I think the percent is actually much higher for this game.

But, you know, as a designer, you sometimes have to ask the question of like,

am i making a game where it's okay that 30 of the people who play it bounce off because of the rng because it hits the goal i want in the feel for the other 70 and that's a hard answer to think hard thing to have to answer for yourself but you do end up needing to answer it at a certain point you know yeah a certain percentage of people are going to coincidentally keep rolling ones right 100 even if they would like it they're going to be like what the fuck is happening and obviously you want to design

you want to design to your desired outcome there, but there's no universal thing.

I don't think that it's possible to hit the thing where it's like, well, no one will have a bad time with this

without giving, without then moving towards a different game in some way, you know?

Yeah.

Like if it's already giving you more steps every time you lost or something, I think that would not be the experience that they're going for.

Yeah.

But

here's my tragedy with the pictures.

Tell me.

Pictures in this game are there's two there's two paintings in every room that you put down.

Yeah.

Two sketches, I guess, in a frame.

And

the way that they integrate that into

why that's happening, I think is so good.

But that's secondary.

So

I'm compulsively screenshotting

things in this game.

Little bits of notes,

interesting, every page of every book that I read.

Yep.

Things on the wall.

Except on day one, I go to the commissary where you can buy, you know, gear to help you or keys or I guess you can't buy keys there usually.

And on the wall are two pictures.

There are.

And

like an arrow that goes to one picture that goes like, like, has and like

one of this is doesn't have or something.

It's some obvious thing.

It's with and without.

With and without.

Yes.

Thank you so much.

And I'm like, huh, that's interesting.

And I like, I remember looking at it for like five full seconds and then going, I'll figure that out later, not taking a screenshot of it.

And I'm noticing the pictures in every room.

I'm solving all these other little things.

And for some reason, I'm never engaging with the puzzle

at all until

I light my four flames.

I go down to the chess piece puzzle you talked about, Austin.

I saw that table, and I'm like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot.

That's for this.

Right, of course.

It's not for that.

It's not for that.

It's not for that.

It turns out that

they both just used

the 46-step grid or the 46 tile grid.

So when we finally set the date for doing the spoiler cast, I'm like, okay, I've got to get this chess piece puzzle bare off my back.

This is the biggest thing that I haven't done.

And over the last few weeks, I had been

logging

every single one of those pictures alphabetically,

which is not what matters.

That's not what matters where they are in the picture.

It matters where they are.

I've seen people do it the other way too, Keith, which is they go, all right, well, the first time I went into the parlor, I got car and cart,

which means the parlor has to do with the letter T and then like, huh, but then on day seven, I got fire and fir tree, which is an E.

So maybe seven has to do with E.

And like, oh no, it's just the placement in the grid.

It's all it is.

It's all it is.

Yeah.

And so what happens is,

you know, when I was last really playing the game about a month ago,

I had like 38 or 40 of the letters I had all the letters but I didn't know where they were I was like and I was like and I was like how do they fit onto this chess puzzle downstairs I couldn't figure it out I was like people were like you know I asked a friend and they were like you know

uh being but I didn't ask it in a way that would have clued them in that I'm combining two separate things.

Oh, yeah.

And so they're just like, look in the study.

The answer is in the study.

And I'm like, no, it's not.

It's not in the study.

And

the real tragedy comes in

today

when I finally figured out how all these things fit together.

And I finally solved the message.

I go through, you know, four, just four or five runs to get.

everything in the right order.

And even before I had it fully

realized.

I think it was a free puzzle at this point still?

Or did you give up?

Did you know it wasn't the chess puzzle?

Until I figured out what it said.

Yeah.

Okay.

I thought it was the

chess puzzle.

When I figured out what it did say, which is

if we count small gates, eight dates, crack eight safes.

This is a solution to a puzzle I had figured out like day 10.

Yeah, of course.

I knew that they were all dates on day 10.

I had already

tied to various gates.

And

did you know that it's a hint for another puzzle?

I've gotten the Apple one because of a magnifying glass in the dark room.

Sure.

Okay.

So I didn't care.

As far as I know, that's the only gate.

That's not true.

Oh, sorry.

That's not true, buddy.

There's the West Gate.

There's the other gate.

All of the safe.

All of the safe puzzles are tied.

Maybe not all of them because the boudoir one is just, it's Christmas, right?

Right.

That's a date, but it has nothing to do with gates.

My favorite one is the drawing room one.

Yeah, I solved this right before we started recording.

So this game loves homonyms.

This is why I like

a ton.

Yeah, it's so much fun.

You solve the drawing room.

Yeah, I solved that.

I didn't even put it together.

Yeah, I solved that ages before I learned about the gates.

That's really funny.

I saw the gate game.

Yeah, sorry.

Go ahead, Sylvie.

In the drawing room,

there are...

So one, you have to find a hidden safe.

Throughout the game, there's eight hidden safes that you're trying to crack, like the puzzle says.

I don't know if we explicitly mentioned the safe system.

There's a bunch of these things you're trying to find.

It's one of the big things to kind of piece together what's happened here, and they're all in a different locked safe in different rooms.

After this, maybe we should talk a little bit about what has happened.

Yes, I would love that.

Yeah.

It's just, we've got too much excitement about this game.

So, in the drawing room on the walls, there are a bunch of framed drawings, like sketches, same art style as the hints for the with-without puzzle, of people walking.

And if you look at their feet, there's like four different types.

There's like

an adult man, an adult woman, there's an old man, there's

a horse and a child, I think.

And

each of them under their feet has a measure of from one foot to another.

And so you look at them and you see, oh, so it's the smallest difference between the old man,

the old man's two feet.

So he's got the smallest gate.

G-A-I-T.

And so you count the number on each wall, and that comes out to be, I think it's April 15th.

I think that that's

04155.

I've put it in 0415 so many times.

The actual nice thing about this is that's a free gem every run, buddy.

Yeah.

Oh, I just patched that out.

Latest patch that went out.

Wait, did they?

Yeah, they just stay open now.

They just stay open.

That's awesome.

It's not that

you don't get the reward.

It's just just that you don't have to enter the thing every time.

Yeah.

It's really nice.

I thought that it was a new puzzle when I first encountered it.

Of course, of course.

There's also the other one that I like is in the is it the not the side?

It's the office that has the busts, and you have to find the guy whose name is like Count Gates.

And you have to

count.

Yeah, March of the Counts.

He's Count Gate.

Another one.

You have to know the gate part to know that.

But if you look at him in the Great Hall, his name is

Count is Count Something Gates, Gates, you know?

Yeah, the Great Hall, a room that I constantly think there must be something else going on here.

And I think it's just

about the other rooms.

So here's, but there's a guy named Major Key in there.

There's got to be something.

The study or the office one that you're talking about?

The office one.

Yeah.

So there's just a hand pointing to that guy's head.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Above the safe.

So just counted him and put him in.

And that's the thing, right?

It's like, for me, that is the stuff that also helps counter the RNG.

It's like, you don't need, oh, sorry, not the great hall, not the great hall, the um, the foyer, the foyer.

That's what I was thinking of.

You don't need to find the foyer to learn that his name is Count Gates.

You could just put the clues together in the room if you wanted to.

You know, this explains something to me that I found there's a book that you can buy from the library called like a new clue.

Wow.

Uh-huh.

There sure is.

On one of the pages,

you know,

the character in the book is like working through a bunch of puzzles and one of them says gates slash gates g-a-t-e-s slash g-a-i-t-s and it's like oh they were trying to tell me about this thing I at this point I had already solved that puzzle yeah yeah yeah I don't even know if this is like a complaint necessarily that I have with the game but it does feel like right now I because of the sort of like format of mid to late game blueprints there's a lot of solving puzzles that lead to hints for things you've already figured out out.

Yeah, especially where you're at in the game.

I think it just starts to, you start to be like, oh, yeah, I knew this.

Or, like, oh, really?

I did all that.

What I get is blah.

Like, so I do think that that DW's point there is definitely right.

I think.

Sometimes you do finish a thing and you're like, wait, do I really not get anything for all the brain power I spent?

Because I already spent the brain power on a different part, you know?

Sounds like that keeps happening.

The silver lining gets it.

Yeah, really.

Did you silver lining the chest puzzle?

So I didn't do it because I didn't have time.

I haven't.

But

figuring out that

the pictures puzzle had nothing to do with the chess puzzle, but I had been logging where

all of these chess pieces were because I thought they were the same puzzle because in all these rooms, there's fucking chess pieces.

Chess pieces, yeah.

Of course.

And sometimes they're right next to the pictures.

You now know how to place them.

It became immediately apparent what the actual solution to that chess puzzle was.

Nice, nice, nice, nice.

Someone just brought this up.

I think Keith, you said this, but we also did get a question about this, which is,

I don't know, we're going to do it this exact way, but Chris wrote in to say, hey, friends, first time, long time, really enjoying the new video game podcast, since you're all very thoughtful and eclectic.

I love the blueprints, and I'm in the post-46 game now, aren't we all, buddy?

Trying to bring up my understanding of all the familial and geopolitical drama together.

This is less a question, more maybe a challenge.

Could you do your best to explain individually what you all understand or know about the family and or geopolitics of the game's universe so far.

There's a lot going on for extra comedy points.

As you take turns, the other hosts could deafen themselves so nobody's fragmented understanding can inform the others.

That's very difficult.

So that's evil.

This is a great question to have asked me six weeks ago.

Do you just not remember any of it now?

Because it's been taking a break.

So, right, it's so fragmented.

Like, I was deep into it.

Yeah.

Well, I should say Sylvie's deep into it.

I was into it

and getting deeper into it six weeks ago, and then I got busy and I was playing other games.

I kind of can you set up the first level of it, which is who are you in this game and what are you doing?

Without getting too deep into,

you know, you don't have to talk about

anybody except for main character, Simon, Simon's mom, and Simon's grandfather or great uncle or whatever.

Great uncle, great uncle,

her great uncle.

So

you are a young boy.

You show up

an outrageously huge mansion

on a hilltop, and you open a little letter, and it tells you that your uncle, your great uncle, has died and that you

will be the inheritor of his manor and title if you play his little game.

It's like Brewster Million, Brewster's Million situation.

It is, it is, yeah, it's very Brewster's Millions.

You have to beat it.

And he says, I know you've got it in you because you were a plucky kid.

You used to love to run around the house.

That's right.

That is really cute.

There are some very cute letters directed towards Simon.

So the thing that becomes clear pretty quickly after this, after you're like...

I'm in here.

This is a weird magic house where every time I enter a room, I have to choose which of three rooms it's going to be.

Do people really live like this?

Why is no one weirded out?

How come everyone just accepts that this is the truth of this world?

It becomes clear that in addition to all this, your mother is dead or gone.

And it starts,

and I think that you could get this in many orders, but

the order that I got it in seemed to imply that maybe the uncle had something to do with the disappearance in a bad way.

Yeah, you could maybe start to read that through some of the red letters you find.

You might think that because they seem like they're tied to secrets in a way that's like, ooh, right, the red letters that define the safes, right?

Exactly.

There's like implied blackmail, and you're not sure who is being blackmailed at first.

And very cleverly, like the easiest safes to solve and the most common rooms with safes that you'll find are the ones that seem to implicate

your great uncle

Herbert

in a bad way.

Yep.

Unless you really, really, really

decided to go for solving the one in the shelter.

There's an outdoor room that you get at.

One of my favorite locks.

There's an outdoor room that you get at.

Yeah, it's great.

An outdoor room that actually, you don't even need to solve the safe to figure this one out.

That's actually how I figured out that he was, you know, a good guy.

What was the, what did you remind me?

So there's an outdoor room.

One of the permanent additions that you can unlock is a gate to the west that permanently stays open, which gives you access to an outdoor room that has special outdoor

rooms that you can get.

Like a tomb or a tool shed.

The tool shed is really useful in your pre-46 runs because it gives you two items that can be really useful.

Or the classroom, which fills the manor with classrooms that help you solve the dartboard puzzle.

Again,

I just did math on all those.

Yeah, me too.

I also just did the math.

Yeah.

Although

without the classrooms, you will eventually need to brute force it and then like reverse engineer it to figure out what that is.

Which is what I did the first time.

The first time I played this game, I did not get deep into the classrooms.

It was just like, I guess I'm fucking, you know, doing the square root of this now, huh?

Or whatever.

Yeah, that's my experience.

What's the shelter?

The shelter.

The shelter, it looks like a bomb shelter.

It has a radioactive

icon on it, right?

So, yeah.

But if you get down there, there's letters out in the open, not in the safe.

And I'm pretty sure that the letters that you can just read are from Uncle Herbert being like, don't come out.

It's not safe.

Right.

Something like that.

You know, you should have enough food down here to last, you know, this amount of time.

And then here's when you can come out.

And then I can't remember what what exactly is in

that safe

but one of the safes start to reveal that like

you're giving uh or sorry great uncle herbert is like sheltering uh

uh the main character's mother from like right uh becoming a political prisoner

yeah for a children's book that she wrote want some more stuff well

is that where you're at keith Do you think that what she has done is that?

No, no, no.

There's other stuff.

There's other stuff.

But it seems like the heat starts with the children's book.

I think her radicalization starts

with having a kid, and then she starts writing those books, and then where she gets to is rocket launchers.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm in love with her.

One of my big questions,

I don't know where she is, is where I'm at.

I know where she went, but I don't know.

I haven't seen anything that is like, and then you meet her.

Do you know what I mean?

Which makes me wonder if she is getting somewhere or

if I missed something.

I've opened five or six safes.

Okay.

So I still have more safes to go.

We're about the same.

And my understanding right now is that she escaped across the southern border.

That is right after robbing the Royal Jewels.

That is right.

Yes.

And that

she is alive.

That is

my understanding.

Well, then my understanding is she's alive yes i can say and that she's written a letter saying i'm i hope to see you yeah like totally yeah that a lot of this puzzle is like a wrapper around this sort of idea that if you keep going that you'll figure out like when and where you can see your mother again and that's the part where i haven't found anything i found lots of other stuff i know lots of you know i am the blue prince you know um now but and i am the blue prince and i am the blue prince you know so and all things being said, I'm blue.

The blue is my

so yeah, that's the first layer of it, I think.

Yeah, Sylvie, do you want to fill in more?

Yeah, um,

I can talk about, do you want me to talk about the sort of why she's radicalized like the geopolitical situation?

I know that she was involved with like those terrorists, but I don't know how

you know about her fake names, you know about her fake, her fake computer logins.

So, is it, is it, uh, Hold on.

I just found this today, actually.

Is the name Kirk Darren?

I think it's been a while since I've.

There's a few names today.

I found a letter today saying Kirk Darren is a pseudonym.

And I'm like, great, I don't know the fuck Kirk Darren is.

Okay, yeah.

If you eventually find.

Do you know where the.

Oh my God, what's it actually called?

Where the satellite dish is?

The what?

Do you have the grotto?

Have you been to the grotto?

Go ahead.

I think it's called the grotto.

The

Black Ridge Grotto.

Oh, I actually found another thing about this.

The one that's like the permanent

thing called the Black Ridge Grotto.

Yeah, I did not have this.

I got that, but I still don't know what I'm doing.

I found a piece of paper that says Grotto in red and encircled.

Very important.

I don't know who it is.

So

useful because

one of the things that it can do is let any computer talk to any other computer.

You can log in from one computer.

Which is implied that that's a possible function.

Yes, exactly.

It's a room in the it's outside.

It's hidden in between the kind of front gate and then like the campsite.

It's on the left-hand side if you're going that direction.

I've been waiting since day because, of course, the first thing that I did was leave the house and go explore outside.

Right, of course.

When I started the game,

finding the locked apple orchard, finding my own tent tent.

And seeing that

seeing a door that I still haven't opened.

Right.

So this is actually so funny to me because the number one thing I didn't get to do last year when I was playing the IGF build was solve the laboratory puzzle, the

one with the levers.

I couldn't get power in to the laboratory.

You know what I'm talking about?

I could also not solve that, yeah.

And then like day six playing through with the full build, I just, it just happened.

It just lined up.

Here's the RNG again.

If you solve that, the door to Blackbridge Grotto outside opens and you can go in there.

And then there's another puzzle in there where you're trying to find these microchips, which I only learned about via, I think it's from a new clue.

Somewhere in there is how I found out about the microchips.

You find the microchips.

They're spread across the grounds.

It's like three of them.

You have to do something with a candle.

The first one I found by mistake, which is I just had the magnifying glass lighter thing.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Oh, that thing's good.

And there's something in the Apple Grotto that you can, yeah.

Do you have the thing that lets you light torches?

I didn't know that there was something in the grotto.

Oh, yes, I have done that.

I, that was my first gadget, actually.

I, and I, and I won a bunch of money from the church from the church, yeah, that's awesome.

I, I, I think in my current game, I have that, I have it, the piggy bank ready to open, but I just keep not using it.

I'm gonna wait.

Yeah, that's the way to do it because I learned, I, I, I got it so early that I didn't know how much I would have wanted 100 gold.

Of course, oh, of course.

Anyway, so yeah.

How did we get how the fuck did we?

Oh, there you can find the background communication between

the trio of people who your mother, Mary, and her two companions, her two radical companions, her terrorist companions, being like, all right, we're setting all this shit up.

Set up some fake names in the email system.

So some of the emails that you're reading about like new employees are actually just her with fake names to like throw off the detectives who are trying to look into all this shit.

Yeah.

Anyway, who you like get a glimpse of

when that shit happens.

It's really creepy.

Wait, wait, sorry.

Who is that?

But I really enjoy it.

The fucking detective.

Do you know that?

Oh, it's the guy in the hat.

The guy who shit

writes in the book.

It's the guy who's like,

you said that you had a copy of the history of Orindia that was not censored.

This is still the censored version.

I need the real version.

Yeah, that I'm also trying to afford that.

that's where the RG still gets you is like getting the library and then getting the bookstore and then also having 50 gold.

Having a ton of gold.

Yeah, exactly.

So eventually, like the way the economy works in that game gets a little more manageable because after you hit room 46, you're given an allowance and you can keep finding these tokens to upgrade your allowance by two every day.

So like you get a starter point, basically.

Like I'm starting at 16 a day, I think.

You both get the quest bedroom upgrade.

The quest bedroom.

No, I didn't.

No, I took the other one.

I took the

powerful.

Every time you get to the antechamber, you get two more allowance.

Oh, that's incredible.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

I think I took the one that generates re-rolls because I like generating re-rolls.

Damn.

We'll check out the website to give you plus two dice.

Oh, I haven't.

I have no idea.

I think it's less than that still.

I think it's less than that for me.

24.

Oh, that's so good.

That's pretty good.

I did get the

Holy Grail lab.

Wait, the what?

Sorry.

The Holy Grail, like, lab combo of every time you dig up trash, get one added to your allowance.

And then I didn't find a shovel.

That's how I build my allowance.

That is my allowance building technique.

I think I'm at 12 or something.

Yeah.

It's been a while since I played.

Yeah,

the root cellar, shovel,

and then trash dig up.

I have not been able to get that.

I get, although I do get

root cellar, shovel, and kennel.

Do you both have the kennel i don't have the kennel yeah i don't have the kennel you posted a kennel picture like right when you first started playing and i was like what the fuck is that yeah i got it from the drafting area

a dog what is a dog i don't know from dog

do you know what the kennel does no

it's anytime you use the shovel um in a room it unlocks all the doors in that room oh my god That's great.

It already makes all that's great because it means that makes me want, I'm a green room person the green rooms are my favorite rooms because you get to dig in them and they're nice and they're outside sometimes I mean always they're somewhat outside even the the one in the middle it has a top that's all yeah so no uh no paintings in the green rooms though no pictures true but you know what do I need the pictures for at this point you know yeah you don't need them anymore we've gotten a little we were we were gonna okay we are gonna start yes so we're gonna

it's okay I just was like wait a minute our we've we've been asked the questions by our lovely listeners

And also because I want to get to the bottom of this too.

I want to know how much of the picture I've got.

So I got that first edition of the book you mentioned, The Orindian History.

And when I read that, I was like, oh, this game, they're cooking.

I already was like that, but then I was like, oh, they're doing like fancy techniques.

They're making a really nice souffle.

Things like that.

Basically, you get, there's like, it's like in five parts.

I am looking at what I have now, and tragically, I don't have the first page, which is driving me crazy.

The foreword says,

I don't want to read it.

I'll just tell you what the, I'll just summarize it.

There's a, there's a, there's a country named Urindia, yeah.

Or there was a, sorry, there's a, there's a continent or a set of islands, the eastern islands of the planet are named Urindia, which, by the way, the moment I walked into the whatever schoolroom, the third or fourth grade, and you see the map of the world, and you're like, no, wait a second.

No, no, wait a second.

That ain't Earth.

There was a lot of like, I was looking at the globes and being like, oh, those continents don't look quite right.

And then I got to, for me, it was getting to the, in the secret room after the antechamber, there's a world map which has a puzzle that I still need to solve.

I'll send you to solve that.

Yeah.

And I was like, that is not, hold on.

That is not Earth.

So in the very first one, the first chapter of this book is called Ajera, A-J-E-R-A.

And what you learn is the first king of all of the realms was a guy named Oris, O-R-I-S.

and he was really popular he unified the whole place

and

he he tried to he went from like the center of the continent all the way across the all of the islands all the big continent islands that are that are what we know is called Orindia though I think that the second edition of the book has that blocked blacked out also so that's all very sad I believe so the um and that so the it goes on from that to talk about how in the second era of this kingdom, it was sort of divided amongst, I think, three

kids.

Yep.

The important regions being Orinda Aries,

which is like

kind of the main one, and

the one that we know and love today.

Arch Aries, the north, the sort of like...

I'm getting sidetracked now.

This is the problem with this game.

You get like little glimpses of the, like, what's going on in these places through, through, of all things, stamps on letters that you like use the magnifying glass to look at.

Was it eight months, eight countries puzzle or whatever?

Is what I is

one of the first post-game puzzles I spent a lot of time on.

Okay.

I think I've just figured you said that and it just, no, it's fine.

It's fine.

I'm learning.

Eight months.

Yeah, eight months, eight puzzles.

Or eight countries.

It's called something like that.

I forget the eight realms.

Eight realms, yeah, something like that.

Okay, yeah, sorry.

Eight realms and eight

is what it's called, which I think maybe is what helped solve something for you.

It was.

There was Arinda Aries, Arch Aries, and then the third was Araja, which is the

southern realm and where

Oris is from or Auris's people are from originally.

Yes, importantly.

The ancestral home is how it's described.

After that,

there's like a period of

like these are sovereign nations still.

There's like

the third era page is basically just talking about like trade between them and like they started getting linked through the north mountains and the southern shores of Araja reached all the way to Arch Aries, stuff like that.

But the big thing you learn is a little after the

There's like a the fourth era, they have this like populist king, basically, in

Orinda Aries.

In the censor version, that's

very censored.

Yeah, this is the most censored thing.

Yeah, that is super censored.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so he, the, the big thing is, like, the capital is moved to the secluded mountains of Reddington.

Or, sorry, from the secluded mountains of Reddington to the public stage of Oris, leaving castle and court behind.

Hmm.

But people love it, because he's like a guy that people like.

Well, yeah, except for the dissenting voices that planted the seeds of discontent, which took root in the lawns and gardens of the nobles of Fenn, or as I have been instructed to say, the Grand City of Fenn.

Sorry, you mean these voices planted the seed which took root in the Grand City of Fenn?

That's what mine says.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, funny.

Interesting that it doesn't mention the nobles of Fenn being behind it, huh?

How much does it talk about the era of ruin?

Hmm.

What's your chapter five called?

Uh-huh.

Oh, it does say Error of Ruin.

Yeah, it talks a lot about the Era of Ruin, right?

Yeah, all about, we learn all about the Era of Ruin.

Yeah.

After the passing of King

Deselet III, the fourth era came abroad to an end.

Thankfully, the king died.

Blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.

Okay.

But then that whole, basically, the whole rest of the era of ruin is uncensored.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, because it's good that it was ruined.

Right.

Yeah, no, totally.

What ends up happening is it's.

Hold on.

I have this.

Prince Learson.

The what?

Theft?

Prince Learson?

The self-proclaimed Prince Learson?

That's blank here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

Declared himself the true monarch.

And basically, things devolved into a civil war.

And I'll just reach this last sentence.

The declaration was bolstered by a what number of supporters?

A surprising number of supporters due to the fact that Desi Le 4 shared his father's good name, but little of his virtues.

That's the current king in Desi Le 4, who turned the gardens of Fenn, once a center of splendor, into a battlefield as the cries of the innocent echoed through the city's streets, stained in red.

And then there's an image of the pacification of Fen.

Throughout all this, like, you've, I

presumably,

because

you have to get past room 46 for the

bookstore to unlock, which is how you get this.

You've kind of put together that red is the national color of the current, like, and ruling regime of

the English, surprisingly.

Oh, yeah, everyone's like, everyone's favorite color.

I know.

I don't like yellow.

I don't like black.

I don't like yellow.

Get those out of here.

Well,

I don't like blue because that's the color of those fences.

It's not.

Well, no, that's the thing, right?

This is not.

This is the thing.

Blue is a new color.

Wait, is

blue is new?

Yeah, it was black.

No, that was

before Fen Aries.

That was when it was still called

Orindia Aries or whatever.

Orinda Aries becomes Fen Aries after the Fen, the nobles of Fen take over because of this civil war.

They erase the word Orinda Aries and replace it with Fen Aries from all of the books.

Okay.

So it becomes Arch Aries Nuance and Fen Aries when previously it was those two and Arinda Aries.

So, and Fen is red.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I spent the whole game being like

red is the bad color and blue is the old good color, but it's not.

Black is what Arinda Aries was.

It was the black kingdom of the black kingdom and blah, blah, blah.

Well, so I'm starting to get into some of that now because what I've been most recently uncovering is sort of related to the aftermath of this stuff where Marigold, Simon's mom,

seems to be part of some sort of rebellion group or like something like that.

Like she, she's doing spy shit is the impression that I get.

Or revolutionary stuff.

She's definitely involved with the heist week talked about.

And they're using in some of these notes and stuff, you're finding like that they're using code names of like

Like I've seen Learson used in one of these notes before about

the

sort of subversive action that they're doing and like the thing that you mentioned about the the color black being the sort of like old like pre-fracturing color is clicking for me now it because I found a note talking about when we get to the in the um the closed exhibit which is a cool room especially if you figured out how to turn off or have a key card

I the first time that I got um

into

the room after the antechamber, uh, that was my final room with, and I had a key card, and it was unbelievable.

So good.

Nice.

You find something in there where they talk about go, there'll be three guards.

Two have white, one has white gloves, two have black gloves, and void the one with the white gloves.

The two with black gloves have been instructed to bind themselves and let us in.

And it's like, oh, okay.

So there is more than just, this is more than just TF2.

It's not red versus blue here, which I will say, my first part playing this game, I was very much like, I can't believe this is the backstory of the Manco

and all the stuff that happened in the TF2

comics.

Wow, I can't believe Simon grows up to be the scout.

There's sort of a limit to that's very funny.

Sorry, I thought about him being the scout.

Yeah, what would have happened to him to make him what if he started talking and had the scout's voice in the blueprints?

It'd be really funny, right?

Um, when my freaking mom calls,

oh God,

um,

but I will say that there's a sort of a limit to this.

You know, so the story is the thing that you just said, right?

Which is like, there was once a good old king that everyone loved, everyone, and he moved to the capital, and the nobles didn't like that because it was him connecting to the people.

Classic noble thing to dislike.

Nobles,

he dies.

Shitty son is a classic Crusader king's thing, right?

Shitty son takes over.

No one likes shitty, likes the shitty son.

The nobles use it as an opportunity to try to take over.

And they do because the shitty new king does a massacre

in Fenn, and so, and that brings in outside forces to support the Fenn, even though the Fenn fucking sucked.

That's in the book that you read.

That's the Nuance and Arch Aries get involved after that fight because so many civilians were killed, because it was a massacre.

Instead of being just like a fight in the battlefield between armies, it becomes...

So.

Hey, uh-huh.

Why is there

like four square miles of infrastructure underground?

So that's the other half of the story that we haven't really told,

which I'll get to.

One, there used to be infrastructure like that everywhere in the world.

Fenn destroyed all the railroads, is a thing you can learn in the post-game.

Right, because they're very serious about each

country should only have one kind of thing.

They are very serious about that.

Like, genuinely, that is like a political belief of theirs, seemingly, right?

And yeah, they also, yeah, so they destroy the railroads.

They like push everything towards singular, you kind of locked step, locked step identity, etc.

The other half of this, the why is there all this infrastructure underneath?

So

the castle or the manor is built on top of the original castle of Auris.

Yep.

You see it in the in the fortune teller thing like right away.

You see like an underground lake and like a cat.

That's That's the fucking castle from King Oris.

So, when

Desi 4, I'm trying to remember this all.

I have notes.

When Desale 4,

it's tough.

It is.

When Desily 4 loses the war against the Fen,

that family flees south to Erijun, Eraja, Raja.

Araja.

So it's tough because there's also Ijara, isn't there?

Well, there's J-R-E, which is J-E-A-R-I, J-R-I, J-R-E.

So the royal family flees south, and then over generations, over centuries, they

end up being

tied in with the royal family there.

You'll find in the foyer, one of the one of the statues is like J.R.E.

so-and-so.

J.R.E.

is like a duchess or something for the Eurasians.

One of those people, I want to say

your great-grandmother, the Baroness Aurave,

was the one who came and built Mount Holly to begin with.

And she did it using magic from the south, because that's where the magic in the world is from.

Actual

blueprint magic, like

house maneuvering magic.

It comes from then, from them.

And that's the generation that starts to build the weird, twisty, strange house that that then Herbert grew up in.

Herbert, your gay grandpa, or your gay grand uncle

builds, you know, your grandpa is super wife guy.

Your grandpa is the most wife guy guy I've ever seen.

I did not get it that Herbert was gay.

It's with Hartley, the valet.

There's like two letters.

Yeah, there's like two letters.

Did you give him like a house?

I think there's a letter where

he's like, hey,

I'm releasing you of your service.

You can have this place.

Well, and that's the letter where he says, like, I thought about saying a thing to you,

but, you know, we've gone so long not saying it aloud, it doesn't need to be said.

And then you can find something from Hartley that kind of says it in the other way.

I don't remember that part of it.

What I remember is I thought about making like the house manager your new house manager, but I thought that she wouldn't find that funny.

And neither would you.

It's very funny.

Yeah.

I have to, oh, God,

I have it somewhere.

I do.

I have so many screenshots.

I have like 400 screenshots.

I spent a long time.

Again, this game makes you crazy.

I have so many.

Yeah, it's impossible to find.

The only thing that my screenshots are useful for is knowing what order I saw things in and nothing else.

100%.

I spent a long time thinking that

the great uncle was having sex with the grandma.

No.

I don't think that's.

Well, I also thought he was a murderer.

Not in a while.

Right, sure.

So it's not a big jump, I guess, actually.

There's like so much of this game is like the when you go to the West Wing, there's so much like, because there's like a lot of grief that seeps into things about your grandmother who passed away.

And like, this, you had a lot of letters, like, this used to belong to the, the, um,

was her title Baroness or just Lady?

Baroness.

Baroness is right.

Yeah.

Um, like a lot of letters about, like, oh, since the baroness passed away, the west wing isn't as like maintained or stuff like that.

And so like you, I, first going into this game, was like, oh, okay, this is, and it's still doing these things.

It's just not only doing these things where it's like about loss and like the

way like the way that Herbert or I mean originally I thought it was Herbert morning and then it turns out it's Simon the grandfather mourning.

Yeah.

Well so the

have y'all gotten the puzzle?

I had to look this up.

This is what I couldn't do myself.

The Erajian language puzzle?

Do you find the letter in the tube?

I just got the letter.

Okay.

I just, that's another thing I found before we started this, which, you know, spoil for me.

I don't care.

I told you before we started recording.

I'm like, ready.

I'm a fine being spoiled on stuff.

I don't remember the specifics of the whole letter, but I did end up looking it up.

This was weeks and weeks and weeks ago.

But it's the thing that basically tells either Mary or

I don't remember the whole family tree.

And I think it's Mary.

I think it's your mother.

If it's not your mother, it's your grandmother or something.

Yeah.

That she is not,

that she is a royal from the South, basically.

Right.

That she has that blood and that power or whatever, blah, blah, blah.

I had some vague implications of this, but that's as far as I guess.

Yeah.

I also found the funny thing.

In any case.

Okay, you did find that.

You're totally right.

It starts off saying, I know we spoke often of this day, and I don't think there's anything I can say of the past 40 years that I haven't already attempted to tell you enumerous enumerous times in the past.

Half-stated gratitudes, always interrupted with tactful and polite repudiations from you.

I had always known this final letter could give me the perfect opportunity to finally express myself uninterrupted by you and unfettered by social graces, but I don't feel the inclination to say aloud what has always been unsaid between us.

Ugh.

It hits.

That's good shit.

It hits.

It hits.

That hits crazy.

Here's your old man, Yowie.

They're so old.

One of them's dead.

He's fucking dead, man.

In any case, that is the whole backstory of the stuff.

And then, yes, your mother is like, your mother gets radicalized entirely when she has you.

Classic story about how having a kid changes you.

And, you know, the, I mean.

She tries to throw you under the bus, though.

Wait, when?

There's a point where she's being accused of

political

of like writing a political book with the Blue Prince book that gets her in a little bit of trouble.

And then she's like, no, no, I just wrote this about my

son.

This is about my son.

Oh, bro.

Yeah.

This is about my nasty little girl.

It's not about.

It's not throwing.

You're a child.

Yeah, that's a cover story, bro.

Sorry.

The thing I was going to say, though, is I do kind of think there's a limit to this.

Also, there's like, there's like two paths for me to go.

One is, I want to talk to you more about your great grandma who built the whole place.

And there's stuff.

There's like a, I want to show you a video of the big final area of the game because it's wild.

There is some stuff that I is it the sanctum that you're talking about or is it after that?

The Atelier.

Are you familiar with that?

Okay, no, I believe it's called the Atelier.

I'm trying to remember.

Like Rhiza.

I've heard of her.

I'll just show you a

screenshot.

I'll show you two screenshots.

Yeah, please.

And then, yeah, I'll show you the screenshots.

And then I'll tell you what it is, and you can kind of go on your own time to investigate more.

There you go.

Oh, oh, my fucking god.

I've heard about this.

I've heard about this.

This rules.

These are, I'm sorry, I said interior photos of the manor, except the whole thing is all blue and white, like a blueprint.

That is the whole kind of big final area, I would say.

There's a big thing about this in the fortune teller, in the last fortune teller.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

I've been trying to figure out how to go to the rumpus room more.

Yes, I mean, that is, this is, this is a bizarre one to even get to.

And that is the, this is the

place that the baroness built to begin with, who is the Baroness Arvae, your great-grandmother, or your great-great-grandaunt or whatever.

Can we fucking talk about how

hard the first fortune teller hits?

Oh, it's an all-time moment.

Oh, dude, when you're playing this game and you...

Did you get the before or after the security room?

After.

After.

Okay, because the security room hit me first and I was out of my mind.

The security room was when I was like, oh, okay, there is so much more happening here.

Oh, wait, only because there was a sudden cut scene when you go into the security room for the first time.

Holy shit, wait, what am I being watched?

Who's watching?

Do you remind me of that?

I don't remember that.

You go in and it cuts to a third-person perspective that's revealed to be a camera watching you.

Right.

Yes.

And it's like, I just didn't expect that to be in this game at all.

But then, yes, you get to

the rumpus room.

Yeah.

It is the rumpus room.

But we need to, you know.

Yep.

There's a.

And what happens?

There's a fucking big style fortune teller, Tom Hanks' big style.

What is that guy's?

It is.

It is.

Oh, my God.

I used to know this.

Begin to Z.

Oh, it does be going to Z.

It's not Zardaz.

That's a different movie.

It's the Great.

Zoltan.

Zoltan Zoltar.

Zoltan or Zoltar.

Zoltan, I believe, is from Dude, Where's My Car?

Fuck.

The Great Zoltan the Great.

Zoltan the Great.

Here's how I know this.

When I was an undergrad, I went out to a diner in the middle of the night once, or like a Ruby Tuesdays or something, with some friends, and

they were doing the classic power scaling thing that you talk about a lot on Media Club Plus, Shalice Media Club Plus.

And it was between increasingly ridiculous characters.

It was like, you know, who would win in a fight, Batman or Nick Fury?

And this is pre-Marvel movies, Nick Fury.

This is like Nick Fury in the Howland Commandos, you know, guy with salt and pepper hair and a pistol.

And eventually they got to who would win in a fight?

The incredible Hulk or the great Zoltar, Zoltan, from fucking Big.

And I was like, I can't have this conversation anymore.

This is nothing.

You're not having a conversation.

You're just saying words.

This doesn't mean anything.

This isn't going anywhere.

Zoltar is a fucking machine.

He's a fortune-telling machine.

Yeah, this is.

This is even funny.

It's when you pull out the Cameron Kunzelman, I would beat Superman in a fight and beat Superman in the real world.

That's right.

Yeah.

Anyway,

it is Zoltar.

I said Zoltan.

Google gave me confusing results.

It is Zoltar.

The great Zoltar.

Yeah.

So you go to...

Oh, it's both.

Oh.

There's also a Zoltan.

This is, I mean, in big and Zoltar, the reason you got confusing results is because there is also a Zoltan.

Oh, yeah.

I see that.

Yeah, dude,

so you go to the rumpus room.

There's a fortune teller machine.

You can put a coin in, and it's like the fucking craziest cutscene in a game.

This is a style.

Blueprints is in a lineage of games that have been coming out since like

it was cheap and easy to access like 3D.

This is like a post-unity game where there was an era of video games where they were suspiciously absent of

NPCs that you would have to have hired someone to animate.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

This has

what were what were then called walking simulators, for instance, often.

But even in Mickey Walkman Sims, you would have like a game that was an action game, but like you wouldn't have like a populated city center or a town hall.

You know what I mean?

It just wasn't the type of game you would, you'd have enemies and you would have yourself, and that would be it.

I was thinking like a lot about the like 10 years ago era of the quote walking simulator while playing this like big, like, um,

if Jack was here, they'd know this Eidolon.

I think they're literally credited on the Wikipedia page for that.

Eidolon was a big one.

That was like a flashpoint for the anger, I feel, like, around walking simulators.

Yeah,

and rips.

Yeah, that game was the game rips.

Uh, also, like, when I was it started getting scarier, I was like, oh, getting big kitty horror shows.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

Um, but

yeah, sorry.

There's this kind of game where there's a lot of story going on, and there's just this thing in the back of my mind of like, there will never be anyone here in this game, there will never be another person.

Like, you play Fire Watch or whatever,

or Gone Home or whatever, and you're like, it doesn't.

One thing that I know is that no one will ever show up because that's like a whole other person you have to hire, right?

At least to make this game.

And when all of a sudden there was the

like animated animatronic with voice acting

out of nowhere delivering this like wild cutscene in a

in doing like

super creepy horror adjacent kind of

future telling

and

as it was foretold

I am awakened at the sound of a droping coin

You find yourself face to face with the great Alzara.

And I suspect you wish me

to look into your future.

The image is becoming clear.

I see a boy.

A boy standing on a shore of white sand.

He is looking for something.

Something he was told he would not find.

I see a black cat tied to a red flag.

I hear the wind blowing,

but the flag does not stir.

I see

a door marked by a rogue moon.

A door that is always locked, yet has no key.

It is the door you have been searching for, yet will not find.

It hosts

beyond the dark waters.

What you have heard here has been foreseen

by the great Alazara

until the dawn of the following day

I will have nothing more to say.

I blew my whole mind.

It blew the whole game.

The thing that you're seeing is like yourself standing on a beach in the dark and there's a castle in the distance and there's like strange flags and he's giving the wind, but the flag does not stir.

Yeah, that's that shit.

Like, the secret is good.

Yes.

And then you see the house in ruins.

Like, there's all sorts of visions that you see, and it's like, oh, they

are going for something slightly bigger than what I thought they were going for that can have these inflection points where they're going to push hard on the story.

And one of the ways this game really succeeds is like how many times they're able to convincingly broaden it.

And like, it's just like by huge amounts, the game's scope will widen like in an instant.

Uh, one of those moments is the fortune teller, one of those moments is getting underground.

Uh, getting underground.

Oh, God, the first time I broke open the uh outside hallway into the underground, like, storage place, like, I got the super sledgehammer or whatever the fuck it's called.

You know what I'm talking about?

Oh, yeah, and like you break in there, you're like, holy shit.

I think I'd already had the gem cave by then, which is like, okay, that's cool.

I get some, I get some gems, that's nice.

Um, but opening up and being like, oh my god, there's like

there's like a reservoir under here.

That's what it meant in the pump room.

Oh my god, you know, huge, incredible moment.

Um, uh,

there's uh,

this is a this is a smaller thing, but just to call out, since we're talking about the underground, one of my favorite moments in the game so far is uh, so you get underground, there it becomes clear that the antechamber is just like half of the thing that you need,

And

getting underground becomes a big part of solving the second half of that puzzle.

And there's this cog puzzle that you have to solve to get across a bridge.

And

each of the spokes is like

either a place where you can do something.

an empty wall that is like a dead end or a corridor to go somewhere else and one of them that looks like a dead end isn't

oh yeah it dips in a little bit and goes to the left exactly the one you're talking about when i i went in there and i accidentally like went too far to the left thinking i was gonna hit a wall and ended up in a whole other room it blew my mind

you're gonna unlock the door from that side too right at that point

yeah i don't know if it's i actually don't know if it's possible to go in from the other way to like go through you can't can't you have to find the secret way in okay i unbelievable well here's the thing i don't think i found that secret i when i played this game in the early build i got to the the secret the north left i guess we haven't said this out loud the point of the game at the beginning of the game is to reach the the furthest the the the manor is an eight by five grid the center the kind of third uh column in the eighth top rank is your goal at the beginning of the game you get there there and you find a key for the basement, and it goes, Hey,

you're actually going to go to the basement.

To go up, you must go down.

So you have to find a way into the basement, which I'll talk about in a second, and then solve this cog puzzle that Keith is talking about.

Then walk through this huge, strange

underground tube and find your way into another secret room that includes another lever.

Sorry, the way you get into that top room, the antechamber,

the eighth rank room in the third row or the third column, is you have to find levers in the in the manner that are uh in certain rooms so certain rooms will always have the right levers maybe you need to have a broken lever to attach to it or a key to open the door that the secret lever is in but you come to know where they are um and you go it so you get the final lever is underground you hit that then you can go back up and go in to the the thing it reminds me the most of doing

the final run in um uh keith outer wilds outer Outer Wilds, where you're like, oh, I know what to do.

I know what to do.

I have to do the run.

And that moment of like, okay, first I go here, then I go here, then I go down, then I solve this, then I go get the thing, and I hit the button, I come back up.

Oh my god, I did it.

That is the one moment that actually does feel like Outer Wilds to me.

I saw that comparison earlier.

I was like, that's not really what I feel about it.

Yeah, I bought the game based on that comparison and then spent many hours being like, what the fuck?

What the fuck are they talking about?

I get it.

Oh, you mean I remember stuff when I play again?

Yeah, it's like that.

Yeah.

Maybe that is the experience for somebody else.

It's just not the way my experience.

I didn't experience those games.

There are moments.

Anyway.

But they come

so much later that

it felt like someone was lying.

100%.

So then you go back up and you go through that North thing.

And that's what the cogs that Keith is talking about are there.

And the first time I played this game early, I don't think I found that little secret room.

So there's another way to do it.

And I think it required me to go up and down the cogs.

The cog can lift and lower.

I learned about the up and down, but I couldn't find a solution that

incorporated.

I think they maybe drained the reservoir more or something.

I don't remember.

Because there's a second layer to it there,

which is a whole other puzzle that I have not solved.

It sure is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here's the thing that fucked me up, my run, my great tragedy.

On the day the game came out, I had a friend

say in a group chat,

oh my God, I hate where I put the foundation.

Am I fucked?

I put it in like rank seven.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Oh, no.

Well, it depends on what you want for it, right?

Totally.

I think a lot of people want it in the middle because it allows you to kind of like restart a run if it's gone bad, you know?

I think seven is probably fine.

What I said immediately was like, huh, you know what?

I don't think you need it.

The foundation for people who've only played a little bit is a room that you can place down that has an elevator that goes to the basement from inside the manor.

You don't need it to get into the into room 46.

No, you don't.

You can do it all without it.

And I was like, I think I can do this without it.

And someone else was like, How the fuck could you do that?

And I got, I did it.

I did it.

I did it all, except I couldn't get into the antechamber.

I didn't get, I got down there.

I saw the door switch.

No, I just, I, it was the bad, it was like, you know, I bricked the run.

You know what I mean?

I just didn't get a door handle or a

lever, an antechamber lever.

And I was like, fuck, I was so close.

And then the next run, the foundation finally came.

It was like 18 runs in.

It just wouldn't drop for me.

I was like, I don't know where the fuck my foundation is.

I'm going to have to do it.

I talked a big game.

I'm going to have to do it now.

Which is, I think, faster.

Where'd you end up putting it?

And I think that now, where did I?

I think six or seven, somewhere.

Mine's rank two.

Mine's literally one away from the entrance.

You can see it

in that full house I posted earlier.

It's so funny.

I guess, yeah, we could both.

So you should be able to both see both.

Oh, I see.

So I had a similar thing with the foundation where I had heard people talking about having a bad spot for it.

So I also was nervous to place it.

And I finally ended up placing it level

four,

space four.

So four up and one over from the entrance, which is okay.

But what kept happening was that I kept fucking running out of steps.

Like it was, I had to go back so far.

So

I'm in the middle of

I used a blessing to delete the foundation.

Oh, wow.

Which I found by mistake and then had to repeat.

And so I'm currently foundationless and just like waiting for another good opportunity to place it somewhere like rank seven.

Yeah.

I think we've talked a lot.

We had a question that came in that was like,

this is from Gary, who says, Hello, questters.

I got to the final chamber in the mansion once, enjoyed my time, and set the game down.

I saw hints of further mysteries and puzzles to dig at, but ultimately decided to leave it there because

I was satisfied and didn't want to spend many more runs digging deeper.

What's one fun or confusing post-game puzzle you think you could tease without context for someone who scratched the game but missed much more of it?

We even at this point explained a lot of those, I think, actually.

But I want to say one more that I think is fascinating that was like,

huh?

And this isn't like a direct, this is the solution but it's actually tied to the atelier thing i said before in a in a roundabout way

have you ever y'all brought a watering can to the library

um

huh i think maybe by accident i haven't noticed what if i told you you could use no i haven't what if i told you you could use the watering can on something in the library huh well i've always

hoped that there was something more to the library else in the library yeah there is a little bit more it's not a ton, but it's it's it leads to something else that's very and actually last time I played I can't remember what it was I got it maybe Isaac will remember because I was like

I was trying to find new things.

This is like the last time I was playing regularly and I was in the library and for some reason I got it in my head that maybe there was a book that you could pull to like open a secret door like in movies.

Right.

And yep, interesting.

Well, here's the thing.

That ended up being like 90% true, but I can't remember what I found or where I found it.

I only remember telling Isaac.

I thought that there might have been a secret book to pull in the library.

And actually, in the same run, it was this, but I don't remember what it was.

It was so long ago.

Do you, okay?

Do you remember all the different shrine blessings that you can get?

So there's a room you can place outside called the Shrine.

Do you remember what the Shrine is?

I only have a handful of them because I haven't pulled the Shrine a lot.

But there's, I've gotten like a food one, a steps one,

and I've gotten one where you can delete a room,

and which I think is very funny that you can use it on the foundation.

I think that it's honestly, it's the only thing it's good.

It's there secretly so that you can figure out that you can use it on your foundation, because I don't think it really matters for almost anything else.

And there's one, there's a bad one that I haven't gotten, but I heard about that like makes red rooms more common, maybe or something.

Yes, but there's a value for that that I can't.

What is the reason you would want to do that?

I think I have that one right now.

That's the general, right?

God,

is that one called the general?

Because I think that's the one I currently have.

Um, there's some reason I forget at some point.

I was like, oh, I actually am glad I have red rooms.

Maybe it was a lab lab experiment thing, and I just don't remember.

Um, maybe I'm wrong about this.

Uh,

so there is a um,

there is a

uh

a shrine blessing you can get that says, and this is what I'm guessing you you got, maybe.

It's the blessing of the berry picker, I think.

No, it's not the berry picker.

Fuck, what is it?

Oh, it's the blessing of the monk.

Ending your day inside a room in the manor allows you to draw that room in the grounds the next day.

Have you done that, Keith?

I have gotten

that.

That's the one.

Do you remember what room that you landed in?

I think that that's how you do the

get you get rid of the

foundation.

I think that that that will let you get rid of the foundation, I'm pretty sure.

Yes, yes.

So you could also

put this as a spoiler cast.

You're both good with me just saying shit,

yeah, because I think I know what you're about to say.

What do you think I'm about to say?

You can put the antechamber somewhere.

No, I don't think you can put the antechamber somewhere because you don't draw the antechamber.

You don't,

it's only, I think it's oh, maybe you can put the antechamber because it's rooms that you're in.

It's

staying in.

I haven't done it with that.

That's okay, because that's where my mind immediately is.

Of course, yeah.

You could put the

what is the hidden, the one with the books that you can put.

The bookshop.

The secret passage.

No, the secret passage.

Oh, secret passage.

But how could it add a book to the shelf?

It adds a book to the shelf.

What?

That's great.

See, here's why I never would have thought of that because

I've put the secret passage against the dead end before, and it just

a dead end.

Uh-huh.

So in my head, it was just like a waste waste of a secret passage, but that's very interesting.

No.

Okay.

But no, giving me a new mission that I figured out.

I figured out some other thing.

Okay, I was thinking you maybe figured that out because you would have seen the extra book and been like, what do I do with this?

No.

Yeah, I just had the idea.

I was just like kind of stuck with puzzles, and I was like, what if there's like a secret book somewhere that I can pull?

And I got something.

I got something, but I don't remember what it was.

Maybe it was in the bookshop.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Any other post-game puzzle things to shout out?

I mean, I guess the other big one, are y'all both doing the

Realm Sigil puzzles?

Yeah, I've only gotten one.

I am in the middle of that right now, dude.

That's such a pain in the ass.

I've only gotten one, and that's, I didn't mention it because it wasn't a huge deal, but this is how I learned that

the old king was the black king and not the blue king.

Because the first one that I did was the

blacks, their color was black.

Right, Yeah, are we doing it?

Are we talking about the puzzle boxes or about

the sigils in the sanctum?

The sanctum.

The sanctum.

That's what it's called.

Okay, okay, it's called.

Yeah.

Because there's enough.

The puzzle boxes also correspond to the room.

They do.

You actually get the black puzzle box in that room.

You do.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

Exactly.

And then that.

Those are very.

And you get a postcard from Herbert being like, and then I went over here or whatever.

So.

Thanks, Herb.

Thanks, Herb.

Thanks, Herb.

Oh, God, the little, the notes, the, the, oh, um, journal between Herbert and Simon, uh, where,

like, what's the kids?

That's actually something I'm curious about.

Is like, what's your favorite, like, text thing you found in the

favorite, like, little bit of writing earlier between

Herbert and

Hartley.

Yeah, uh-huh.

That one is up there for me.

I really liked the letter.

I just got the one where it's from Herbert to marigold about like we'll keep simon safe and like i'm proud of i there's a bittersweet pride in the woman you've become

um it's good yeah it's really nice there's some really like the the letter writing in it is really fantastic i think um i i liked the letters

from um

Mary to her mother from college.

Oh, I don't have a friend that's.

I believe those were in the Dovecoat.

Oh, I don't

know.

I think I only read one pretty recently, and I don't know that I internalized whatever was in there.

Yeah.

What do they talk about?

What's her deal?

They talk about.

Oh, wait, the college is

in Mount Holly.

So it's like being in the huge mansion and

being cooped up in the little dorm, even though the house is so huge.

And having convinced Herbert to

to add the dove coat to the rotation so that

she can take care of the doves while at school.

Talking about

Herbert gave her a gift of doves, of doves.

I can't remember why.

They were wedding doves.

And

she says that

she got the hint.

And so I think that it's about getting married to the unknown to the grandfather.

And then

there was a real, there's a, the last one is like, I'm doing better at school.

It's getting cold here.

I have to send the doves home.

So she has to like let the doves fly back to her house.

And then adds like, if some of them don't make it back, don't tell me.

Interesting.

But I really like those.

Also, puzzle that I haven't solved.

The statues in the tomb.

What is going on there?

Oh, I love that puzzle.

You have everything you need to know to solve.

Yeah, I just have the timing in, I think.

It's really, it's like a raising and lowering of the things and the

order of operations you got to find.

Tell me what you think the puzzle answer is, Keith.

Okay, so there's...

I may be overthinking this because there's corresponding statues in the house.

You're overthinking.

Okay, where else?

You're overthinking.

Where else do those figures show up?

It's a room I know you've been through a billion times.

We've talked about it.

Well,

they show up in the rooms corresponding to who they're angels of, is what I thought.

Well, okay, well, where else do you see the angels?

Kinda.

The church?

The church?

Do you remember what's in the church?

Ding-a-ling-ding.

No.

Well, pews, but the

where do you see them in the church?

I don't remember.

I can't

remember this one.

Yeah, right they're the stained glass windows in the church oh okay and each one just has a number on it oh yeah there's like one somewhere yeah it's nothing to do

the farmer sure it's literally just an order yeah thing but then there is an additional there is another different uh thing which is you can light the candles in the tomb see that i got immediately as soon as okay so

day one

I've talked about how I immediately went outside to explore the grounds before going into any room and I found the tunnel.

I found that it was too dark to see in the tunnel, so I was like, I'm absolutely eventually going to get something to light things.

So, I was looking for something that could light things my whole playthrough.

This is how you unlock the tunnel.

It's like the first

thing that I was able to add to my draft pool was the tunnel, which you find in the tunnel by lighting the torch in there.

Oh, I'm gonna go do this right after we're done recording.

Uh, and so I've had that the whole I've had lighting those candles in my head the whole game.

So

once I finally got the tomb, I recognized a lot of the candles as lightable candles.

So I was, I did that.

Right.

Right.

So then there's another thing, which is there is another order you can move the statues in, is what I will say.

Okay, so there's two.

There's two solutions to that.

The first one is the one that you can do basically immediately.

I guess as soon as you open up the West Gate and get to that spot.

The second one comes from a letter in, oh, where do you get this?

Where do you get that letter?

I think there's two letters down there.

There's the letter from your grandmother that's in there, and then there's also like great Uncle Herbert's funeral letter.

It is, it is, yes.

Well, and sorry, in the,

I think it's

the thing that I think that I'm getting ahead of a little bit is you're both in the middle of solving the sigil puzzle.

The realm sigils in the sanctum.

Yeah.

After that, you have the information you need to go solve the letter, or the map puzzle in room 46.

And that's what gives you the order for the statues

in

the second order of the statues.

And is that have to do with the raising and the lowering of the tools?

That is the city.

Yes, you also, it is just what the order is that you raise and lower them in still.

But it's a different order.

Instead of viewing the numbers in the church, you get another list, and you don't get, it doesn't,

it says their names.

It says like, oh, it says like, I was gifted these statues, and I was gifted, you know, person A, person B, person C, person D, or whatever their angel names are.

And then you have to do, you have to then cross-reference that with like the lunch box that has the chimney sweep on it from the, from the shop, from the, you know what I mean?

Like, oh, then her name is Babby.

You know what made it's a real dig through your screenshots type podcast.

You know what made me think that this was a more complicated thing than it is, is that the groundskeeper, when you unlock the apple orchard, has his little journal.

Yes.

And he talks about like convincing Babbitt.

What is their name?

Babbage?

The house manager?

Babbage.

Trying to convince Babbage to change which angel is in the

interesting.

What is the one green room that you can spawn from the center tiles?

The cloister.

The cloister.

Yeah.

Which I don't quite...

God, how do you get in there?

There's a button.

There's a secret button.

Oh, it's really funny.

Right, right, right, right, right, right, right.

Yes, yes.

God.

There are, which is the other way you can learn their names because that was one of the ones that I did learn their name was via the upgrade for, because I'd upgraded the cloister to be the cloister of

whoever, you know?

And that was like, oh, I guess that's her name.

That's her statue.

So yeah, so I was thinking that it was to learn all their names and what they were for.

Right, yes.

Well, you do sort of, but not really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For that second one, that happens a lot.

Yes.

Sylvie.

Can I talk about a very funny upgrade decision I made?

Because I was like, oh, there's probably good lore in here.

So there's the parlor.

And I don't know if you guys got a chance to upgrade

one of the main rooms.

And you pull it super early

almost all the time.

So of course, I was like, what if I, oh, there's this, you know, you don't really want more red rooms, but I'm kind of tantalized by this funeral parlor upgrade.

Oh, no.

What is it?

And what that

the funeral parlor is

you get one gem for each red room in your house if you get it right, but if you get it wrong, you lose 20 steps or 30 steps or something like that.

I just took the one that gives you an extra gem.

Well, I wanted to see what was like, because there's a coffin in there now, and there's like a little, like, there's like a poem about like that, like his left, presumably written by Herbert, but like it's not 100% clear that like an in-memorium poem.

And I was like, oh, that's really curious.

That's That's really interesting.

And I was like, oh, yeah, but this is also like probably clearly not connected to anything.

And now I just have to live with this.

So did either of you get the Geist Bedroom?

Yes.

That is the one I found.

Yeah.

I took Quest Bedroom, which is the one that gives you

the bedroom is so good.

Yeah.

I really sat and I love ivory dice.

But did you scare yourself, Sylvie, when you took the Geist Bedroom?

I haven't actually been in it yet.

Okay.

Can I send you screenshots of what's in there?

Please.

Walk in.

Is there a goose?

There's a fucking

goose.

Yeah, there's a whole

thing in here.

Hovering over the game.

Oh, my God.

That rules.

There is a fucking

angel of death.

That's crazy.

Ghost.

I thought my game was broken and or I was about to be attacked in real life by the Guru.

I thought I was done for.

I thought I was toast.

That's nuts.

I'm going to read another question really quick.

Yeah, please.

Howdy, side stories.

I'm curious what, if anything, Blueprints remind you of in terms of other media.

The reason I ask is that everyone I talk to seems to have different and

completely different opinion on this question.

For me, it's the first thing ever to truly remind me of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

Also, what was everyone's favorite puzzle?

Figuring out the clock tower really made me feel like a genius and a half.

Happy puzzling.

Sorry, what was the first bit of the question?

The very first

remind you of in terms of other media, other stories, other books, other games, other

movies?

For me, there's a little bit of the prisoner here because there's a little bit of the prisoner in everything.

Showing that in both positive and negative ways.

I think

it scratches a lot of the prisoner feels like it's in a

that you've slid into a surreal world of politics and power.

But I will say the part of the thing that happens there, and I was kind of getting towards this earlier, but didn't fully get there, is like

you, okay, so you

there was once a good old king, king of the of

the black country.

Then he get his stupid great-great-great-grandson loses it because he overreacts and kills a bunch of civilians.

And then the evil nobles take over.

So far, I think that's pretty coherent, right?

Classic thing in history: well-beloved king, shithead descendant, no petty nobles, nobles take over.

And then, and then what?

You are a descendant of two different noble lines at that point.

I believe that that's how that works out.

You're kind of tied to the original line, but you're also tied to, I mean, I guess the original line, Oris is the head of all three lines, all three countries, basically, but you're tied to the southern kingdom.

And you're kind of like, it is kind of a revengeist, like, what if we could bring the old king back story?

Now,

they do switch it up because it's like, well, we're going to find a new way, the blue way.

And blue stands for truth, and it stands for creativity and the open sky.

And they don't let her write the book.

And, you know, all that stuff is fine, but like,

I don't know that it hits.

It's cool that there will be a prince who opposes

the shitheads and the authoritarians of fancy.

Herbert's not that great of a guy.

Herbert's not that great of a guy.

But I like that.

It doesn't feel like an accident.

So it doesn't feel like totally fine.

What accidentally had the wrong scope?

This game, there's a couple ways this game could end.

And I'll talk about at some point, I will talk about the kind of choice ending that it gives you.

The big cutscene that you can get, there's like one when you get into room 46, and there's another one.

I'm guessing y'all have not got, yeah, you couldn't have gotten the throne

room stuff yet because you haven't found the grotto.

No.

you take the throne, you can take the throne, and you have the new crown, and you have the scepter, and look at you, you're the new, you're the new blue prince, you're the king, right?

That is where it goes.

You find the you find the crown in room 46, right?

Like, that's like you, oh my god, look, I'm tied to this great heritage of blah, blah, blah.

And the whole process is you learning it.

But then what you didn't, then one of the doors isn't open up, and there's not like a loyal military there that can help you expand your power and overthrow overthrow the

fascists.

And there's not like, oh, everyone will love you now because you solved the great thing.

It's just that you get to be the new king that's taking over inside of this secret hidden manor castle thing.

But it's not, I don't know what to do with it.

And I don't know that it has, which is fine.

It doesn't need to have a big political message at the end.

And clearly what it is, is the story it tells is one of like, you know,

you know, kind of internet scene fighting between a king and nobles.

The nobles also, we didn't really go into this too much.

They destroy the railroads.

They increase class disparity.

They stratify things even further.

You know, the rich get richer, the poor get poor.

Like all that stuff is there.

And you clearly are a symbol against that.

But like, I don't know, man, unless you can let me make rooms appear above the enemy tanks and make them fall.

I don't know what I do with this knowledge.

And that's maybe that's a sequel game.

Maybe that'll be a final thing that I don't know.

And that's fine.

But that's kind of part of it.

The character blocks is going to.

Right.

that is part of why it reminds me a little bit of the prisoner, which is like identifies the methods of authoritarianism and information control and turning, you know, turning you against yourself and your allies and the psychological and emotional suffering, super true.

But you kind of like go a step above that, and it's like, and what comes next is not a question it can answer.

It can just express the frustration of

kind of a dire political moment.

And I think that that is

valuable and fun and good, but it's not, it's not, that's the one thing I wish it took a step further.

It's meaningful that the character that you play as is 10 years old.

100%.

Yes, you are a child.

And

there are some things that you can see that like the

great Elzara, is that his name?

I said it earlier.

I forget

that

he can show you stuff that seems like it's from the future and not just...

And some of that looks like you're pushing towards some sort of counter-fend revolution.

Yeah, you're like an anti-pope.

So, like, prepping for it.

Yeah, you are like an anti-pope.

Exactly.

I think maybe that's enough.

Maybe it's enough.

Maybe the idea is enough people will, all they need is the symbol.

All they need is the push, or the, all they need is the steward to fabricate a reason for the cast's belly or whatever.

That's all what the steward does.

I mean,

it's interesting given we do get that there's like an active and violent revolutionary force within the kingdom.

Yes.

Maybe that's what your mom is off doing, actually, secretly.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Because that's what she was doing before.

So, so yeah, that's the prisoner comes to mind for me, even though it's not really.

I mean, it is a show about running into weird rooms and being, where the fuck am I?

So,

how about y'all?

Any other touchstones that you feel like it reminds you of, either gameplay-wise or narratively, or aesthetically?

Also, the music is so good.

We even talked about it.

The music is good.

The music is very good.

I mentioned a couple earlier, just game-wise.

Like, uh eidolon big shout out to that i think it it unfolds its story in this in a similar way um that is like really really fun to see um

any number of horror games there's like a little bit of like

I'm trying to think of like what the puzzles really remind me of.

And I think Professor Layton, some of the more lateral thinking puzzles

are

what comes to mind.

But for the most, like, that game also does a lot of stuff that's very straightforward, so it's not going to be one-to-one.

Because

Latin puzzles are so self-contained and the blueprints, yeah, like, uh, so

like everything kind of relates to the different uh overarching narrative bits, uh, it's hard to find something more relevant than Sylvia, what you said earlier of the uh Pepe Sylvia meme, uh, or like, yeah,

is that way maybe like

a weird sort of walking simulator noir or like procedural where I am always looking for clues.

I'm like wandering around looking for clues, thinking about clues, tying uh string to things.

Like,

yeah,

in that vein, I guess I could say like the conversation starring Gene.

Hell yeah, it does.

Or like, um,

there's a little bit of, I feel, you feeling like Elliot Gould's character in the long goodbye, where you just kind of like keep finding out extra things and being like, oh, well, hold on a minute.

That's really good.

This changes everything.

He owes money to who?

Yeah.

You do feel like that type of character while playing these games in a way that's like very, very fun and satisfying.

One more question here, and then I'll talk about the last little thing.

I want to get your opinions on it.

Unless, Keith, do you have anything?

Oh, I guess what's everyone's favorite puzzle?

Let's answer that part from Morgan also, because I think that that's a fun way to talk about parts of this game.

Not that we haven't talked about some of our favorites already, but.

I mean, I think just like the one that people will run into first that I really enjoy is I love the dartboard puzzles.

I think it's like really cute and fun.

The way that those get harder and harder, and you're like, Excuse me, what am I doing now?

is very fun.

Yeah.

When the bullseye starts lighting up and you're like, hold on a minute, what the fuck?

And then you crack it and you feel like the smartest person alive.

And then a different shape shows up and you're like, well, hold on a minute.

I really love the gallery in room 8.

Yes,

I don't know if I want to get too far.

I don't want to get too far into it.

I will just say room eight rules.

Getting into

the gallery and be the gallery is just a room with four big weird surrealist paintings on the walls, and then a place you could put some letters in.

And it's a set of letters.

It's not just free typing, but you have to kind of like interpret what you're seeing and look for a thing.

Really hard, but some of my really hard.

And I don't know that it's great puzzle design, except what it did make me do was immediately message the only other person who I knew who was playing the game at the time, who was also in the IGF, to be like, hey, did you fucking figure this shit out?

And we spent like three hours like bouncing ideas back and forth until we got it.

And that felt incredible.

So

I think

it was solving

the safes without

like the external clues and just trying to solve each one.

I solved

at least five safes without

any external clues for any of them.

And that was a lot of fun.

And once I had figured it out, after the second safe, I realized that they're all

like dates.

And

it became

about

finding where in this room is there a date?

Like, where, what can I, and, and then that becomes limiting in its own weird way.

Um,

and that, that, I think that was the most fun that I had.

Um,

one that I also really enjoyed is the

it's a, it's an annoying puzzle, and it's one you can brute force, but the finding the sanctum key at the bottom of the reservoir

is

so much fun.

How did you brute force it, or how could you brute force it?

Well, so the way you you can brute force, so with the reservoir, when you drain it, there's a pump room, you can drain it.

That's part of the puzzle.

I'm counting that as part.

That's also very fun.

There are a bunch of

chests that you, you cannot, there's an item called the sledgehammer, for anyone who hasn't played it and is still listening to this,

that will, that can let you open chests without a key, but it doesn't work for these specifically.

You have to use your keys, which are usually a thing used to open new doors to draft with.

So

the way you can brute force it is that these chests don't close again.

They're permanently open at the bottom of the reservoir.

So you can open all of them if you want to.

I have since gone and done that because I was like, well, what if there's something else?

There's nothing.

I got the two things that are down there.

But

the

big mechanic of it is basically

related to clues you get in the house about what memos can be trusted and what ones can't.

And in each box, there's usually a memo, either blue, red, or green,

that'll have some sort of statement that is either true or false.

It's kind of an extension of the parlor game, where

there's three boxes, two are either truthful or false, and vice versa.

And so you're basically given this like breadcrumb of like, it'll either be like, you'll get a blue one that says the

box with the sanctum key is in a box with this this symbol on it and you'll know that's true because you found a thing earlier that says all blue memos are true all red memos are lies yep

but then if you didn't find the thing that says handwritten red memos are true

you wouldn't know that, oh, I found a red memo that says there's an allowance token in this box, but it's red, so it's probably not.

I was like, oh no, someone handwrote that, so it is in there.

And it's just very satisfying, I guess, to when you get to that and

you remember those rules that you've been sort of like breadcrumbed throughout

your time playing the game.

I find those are the most fun for me as the ones that feel like a longer payoff.

There's a lot of attention paid to like constructing a puzzle reality.

This is a game that is like

building a system of rules and it's like feeding you new information that you have to be filtering through the like puzzle realities that you've already learned.

Like talking about the safes and the memos,

there's a memo that you can find early on that gives you a save code, but it's on typed red memo, which means that it's a lie.

And

I spent a long time having remembered that code, but forgotten that I had found it on red paper because I only later learned that red memos are lies.

So I had written down this safe code that I would try at every safe.

And I'm like, where is the safe that this is to until I finally drew that that

Room again and realized fuck this was was on red

yes

God

There's one more question I want to read that I think is fun.

I'll just read the first part of it, which is this is uh This is sent in from Jonathan who says

Buildings can be really weird how they're designed how they're actually built how they change in use has anything particular stuck with you from the physical buildings you've you've lived or worked in before?

What is the most blueprintsy?

I was in a weird building that we've ever had as individuals.

Okay,

I have two answers.

I have like

a really literal answer, and then I have

maybe a more,

I have two good answers.

The first one, one of the first places that I ever lived was

a like three-family house that was obviously only constructed to be a three-family house, like well after its initial construction.

And so, my apartment that I lived in was three floors, two rooms per floor, but also it was a split level.

So, the bottom floor was the basement, and it was basically two bedrooms and then at the top, and then the ground floor was two bedrooms, one of which I used as an office, and one of which I used as a living room.

And then the basement was a kitchen.

And it

was such a fucking weird apartment.

It was so weird.

Like four small bedrooms and a basement kitchen.

The other thing is that my grandparents live in a huge fucking house.

And

they recently sold that house.

This is like basically I spent a ton of my childhood in this house.

But they lived in a place you could call it a manor if you wanted.

And it's a sort of place that like had

a

green room in it.

Like you could go to, we called this the sunroom.

It was always 110 degrees in there, and it was full of fake plants and weird old dolls.

It had a

on the top floor was a,

we called it the puppet room because it was a playroom, but it had a built-in puppet theater in the wall.

No, thanks.

Oh my god.

And jigsaw.

You know, speaking of jigsaw, it also had an architectural feature

of the late 1800s, which is when it was built.

There were secret tunnels between the rooms.

Oh, my God.

There was the computer room and the library.

It was closed up when I was a kid, but there was like a panel in the mahogany that if you hit it in the right spot, it would open up.

And it was like an anti-burglary measure.

You could like crawl through from the computer room to the library.

That is wild, like a panic that is crazy, yeah, like a panic basically, yeah, wild.

Um, God, I don't think I can beat that.

And I think that that's yeah, I don't either.

Cherry on top, each of the bedrooms, they're they're not exactly themed bedrooms, but they all had like different color palettes and materials and vibes.

Okay, so each of my aunts and uncles had the had a bedroom that was like tailored to them.

Like my uncle Kurt,

he was obsessed with horses and he rode horses his whole childhood.

And he called it the horse bedroom because there's like pictures of horses and there's like

riding accoutrements like on the walls.

Right.

And that was

one step for every horse you've seen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, four steps because horses have four steps.

Yes, sorry, right?

Of course, of course, of course.

A horse, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the name of the

book that you find in that room.

Exactly, yeah, yes.

Huge, creepy basement, too.

Like secret weird rooms in the basement.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, yeah.

I would say my...

Go ahead.

No, I think the closest I have is more of a I had a moment that felt like Blueprints, less so that I was in a Blueprints-like place, which was the one year I spent in university

walking to class in the winter only for someone to be like, Why don't you take the tunnels to class like everybody else?

That is a classic Canadian thing.

Western also had tunnels like that, I think.

Yeah, and I had no idea the same thing happened.

Yeah, I had no fucking idea.

I was wearing a ski mask to class because it was so bad out, and then I was getting there and seeing people like pristine and being like, What's going on?

Yeah,

I was the one who was really chill.

Did you start these cold tunnels?

Were they cool?

No, I didn't actually.

I couldn't find the interest.

There was no one to ask?

I didn't have a lot of time.

I still hadn't placed the foundation or drained the

film.

Yeah, so it was kind of hard.

Didn't have the

I kept drafting the Dota room and that just kind of a lot of my time.

Did you just email a faculty member?

Where are the tunnels?

Gives you one bottle of Adderall each time you see it.

Did it also give you I skipped orientation?

Oh, buddy, yes, I did.

God, I think for me, it's something similar, which is like, I grew up in in malls a lot, partly from being in New Jersey and working in malls and stuff, and partly because my dad, for a little while there, had stores in a couple of the local malls.

It does not anymore.

But

at those malls, there's like big back hallways, or like one of them, there was a, there was a

mall.

It's replaced now, but it was called the Ocean One Mall in Atlantic City.

I think I've mentioned it a billion times on Bluff City before.

Free people don't know Bluff City is one of our Patreon-only.

I guess that sounds true.

All of season one is free.

You should go listen to all of season one of Buffity City.

Yeah, season one of of Buff City.

Well, seasons one and two of Buff City are phenomenal.

They're so good.

Yes.

But one is available on

our YouTube channel for free right now.

You should go listen to it if you listen to nothing else.

Tinyurl.com/slash free bluff.

Still work.

There we go.

Love that.

And that is you to the Patreon page with all the free episodes.

That's amazing.

I think you can download those or you can at least stream them.

I don't know if you can download them.

You could use the app, which I now feel fine suggesting because of the recent court case.

You can now support us via the Patreon app, by the way, on Apple, on iOS, without Apple taking extra money or without it charging more, which is very funny.

Anyway, that mall was shaped like a big cruise ship on purpose on the outside.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it was like a pier, it was a pier going out into the ocean.

And so it appeared like a boat.

It appeared like a boat, exactly.

But it did also have these like outdoor drop, like long kind of behind and aside, like to the side, hidden kind of in the

hidden by columns and stuff kind of somewhat outdoor like covered driveways that go behind every one of the stores in the entire mall and it smelled so bad there it was the worst smelling shit i've ever it's the first time i ever saw a rat like it was like gross as shit back there you had to go out there take out the trash you maybe sometimes you like bringing stuff in that you had to bring in through the back of the store it was gross anyway you have given me a better answer now which is two jobs that I worked.

One of them,

it was similar, just the back area of a mall when I worked at Toys R Us, being able to go through and seeing all the storage and stuff and

all that stuff.

But also when I worked at a movie theater,

going up to

where the projectors were, because they're all automated now.

So it's just like walking through this

hallway that's above everything that's just got these like holes basically on each like like portholes basically into each theater so you can make sure that it's running properly, but no real doors.

It was very surreal.

I mean, there probably were ways to open them into doors, but I didn't know.

They were paying me minimum wage to give up popcorn.

There's not a lot of benefits to any job, but I do think that like one of the spiritual benefits to jobs in general is, regardless of how shitty the job actually is, there is something fun about being in the places that

the like customer-facing areas don't have access to, like all the little nooks and crannies.

And, like, you know, if you're in a restaurant, that restaurant might be like two or three times as big as it looks

because of the backroom and the kitchen and the,

you know, maybe it's a tiny little kitchen with a tiny little, but it could be secretly huge or a theater or a mall, all of these, all these weird little places that are way bigger than the customers that go there get to be in.

That's fun.

It is fun.

All right.

I'm going to tell you about what I think is maybe the end of this game.

Is that okay with y'all?

Yes.

I say maybe because of what it is.

So you've not gotten here yet for sure because I know neither of you found the throne room because I know neither of you have gotten to the grotto.

But there's a way to eventually.

Okay, actually, here's a thing.

You know the room with the crates.

You know the outside tunnel with the crates.

Yes.

You know, you can like the like dark tunnel that you can tune in.

You can light the candles.

Yeah.

You know that.

That's where you get the tunnel.

That's where you get the tunnel, right?

Yeah, I haven't been able to light that yet, but I know where you're talking about.

Keith, then, do you know how to clear the tunnel out?

No.

There's an experiment you can do that says when blank, you know, whatever the trigger is, the result is move a crate out of the tunnel.

If you clear that tunnel out, you eventually come to a series of doors.

I won't tell you how you open the doors, and then you'll get to a special door.

All the regular doors, you will immediately know how to open them, probably.

The next one, the last one, is the logo of the blueprints.

It is the Mount

Holly thing in blue, and it's locked, and there's a way to open that.

When you open that, you come to a new room, and in that room is a parlor puzzle.

Of course, it is a parlor puzzle with like in a new room that is like sort of like the room with all the doors, except that it's like archways that have like blue curtains hanging.

But it's three puzzle boxes and one turnkey, one wind-up key, like the parlor ones.

Um, those parlor boxes say the following things: there is a white box, a blue box, and a black box, which I think increasingly you can think about blue and black as having different

themes, right?

One says the white box is in the middle, and it says there are true, two true boxes in this room.

For people who don't know and have listened somehow to all of this without losing their minds,

these parlor puzzles, generally, the rules of the parlor puzzle game are, let's see if I can remember this.

There's at least one box with only true statements.

There are at least

two boxes with sorry, there's at least one box with only false statements.

And in one of the boxes is

jewels, gems that you use to open special rooms.

So there's one box that will either be true or false, and you need to determine which of the three boxes will have the gems based on the cards.

One of them will be a paradox, or one of them will be half true, or half not true.

And they'll often say stuff like, you know, in fact, in fact, let me just read one

because I'm sure I can just get a list of all of the parlor puzzles, you know?

I'll read like the third one so that you get the gist of it, right?

All right, here we go.

For instance,

one says you were in the parlor.

The blue box says you were in the parlor.

The white box says this box is empty.

The black box says this block, the box, the blue box is true, is what it says.

The blue box is, of course, true because you are in the parlor.

The black box, therefore, is true because it says the blue box is true, and that's true.

And that means the white box, which says this box is empty, is lying, which means the gem is in the white box.

That's how these puzzles work.

And there's like 50 of them or something.

And they get more and more convoluted as it goes on.

I'm very proud of my hit rate on those.

Me too.

I let me tell you, they're do or die for me now.

Deep in, they start to get to like really weird stuff.

I think I've only had, I think, I've

at like day 53.

I haven't pulled every day, but most days, and I think I only have two misses.

Interesting, wow, well done.

Let me tell you: first time I pulled that funeral pillar, I beefed it bad, but it felt like shit.

Yeah, funeral is right.

It felt

awful.

And then I pulled

the kitchen or whatever.

Hey, I did it like twice.

It's not like it's a habit.

I'm hearing this a regular play style.

No, this isn't Slay the Spire.

I'll save the scum the fuck out of Slay the Spire.

The middle one says,

there are two true boxes in this room.

That's the white box.

The black one to the right says, there is no end to this journey.

The blue one says, you have reached the end of your journey.

What do you do?

Oh, that rules.

I know what.

And there's different.

I know what Uncle Herbert would want you to do.

What would Uncle Herbert want you?

I think Uncle Herbert would want you to keep going.

Interesting.

Uncle Herbert seems to have been dissatisfied with not having done enough.

But is exploring this more

what you do with your life?

I don't know.

It's worth saying, too, an emerging thing in the post-game is a spiral that starts showing up in different places.

I almost throw constellation.

There's.

It's starting to get heavy for me.

There's a lot of spirals now.

What's the name of her bedroom?

Oh.

The

Baroness's Chamber or the Lady's Chamber or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just does it ever end up weird spirals?

What the fuck does that mean?

Does it ever end?

So

do you want to know what's behind these two things?

I'm going to.

Can I guess?

Yes.

One of them takes you to credits, and one of them takes you to a new day.

That is effectively right yes okay um well sorry sort of actually i think i actually think one of them i can be wrong one of them doesn't take you to a new day one of them gives you one of them gives you a new cutscene the black one this can you know uh it never it never ends or there was no end to the journey is is a cutscene the blue one has

a thing in it and I don't think it automatically ends your day, but you which I think is part of why this is interesting because it's

kind of demanding something of you.

Um, so if you open up, there is no end to the journey, you start twisting that fucking wind-up key, and it just keeps twisting, it keeps twisting.

You cut, it goes to a cutscene, it zooms in, you open the box, the box is empty.

But if you look in the box, uh, I think it shows the spiral is like on the uh, the top of the like the under the inside.

Yeah, here, I'll show you a screenshot really quick.

Yeah, So that doesn't cut away to the next day either.

But inside is simply, I will hide it.

There we go.

Is this

the kind of knot in the wood looks like a spiral, which is great.

The white box is empty, by the way.

The white box is the one that says

there are two true boxes, which, of course, is true, right?

That's a true statement

no matter what, because if it's if it's

if one of the other ones is true and the white box is true, that's two, right?

I guess the only way it would be false would be if all three of them were true, which would then make it so it couldn't be true, right?

So it's, I, yeah.

I love that you're making, you're deciding which one is true

with this choice, right?

Like you are affecting, like, go ahead.

Well,

because, well, like,

let me tell you,

please, please, please.

The other one has the original copy of the blue prints in it.

The

publisher sent back.

The hand-drawn version of it.

Yes.

Like the hand, it's all hand-drawn.

But it's on a notepad paper.

It's like the draft version of it.

And in there,

there is, you know, it's all the hand-drawn drawings, but there is

one more little complication, which is in one of the

pages, the prince, the little cartoon prints guy is looking at blueprints.

And if you zoom in on the blueprints,

it says the true box doesn't always contain the prize.

Oh, which is true.

That's which is true.

That's the example I just read.

That's actually on a note somewhere else.

Yes.

And so it means, like, I don't know, right?

So how do you interpret that?

Right?

So you have

basically two options.

It's that the white box is the one that's like, there's two, two true boxes.

The blue one is the blueprints copy, which is, is, is that a prize?

Or is a cutscene a prize?

Right?

You open the box.

Isn't that your, you open the box and get a cutscene?

Isn't that how progress has been denoted the whole way through the game?

The thing that I love is if you take the blue one and you say, you know, I've reached the end of my journey.

You know what?

I've learned everything I need to learn.

I'm done.

It doesn't signal that to you.

It doesn't say, and now we're going to play the swell of the music and we're going to hit another cutscene and Simon's going to smile and his mom is going to show up and give him a big hug and it's gonna say, Thanks for playing.

You just have to turn the fucking game off.

Is this why I'm seeing so many, like, how do I know when I'm satisfied?

100%.

In fact, this game

over at Aftermath wrote, Does Blueprints Never End?

Um, uh, as an article, uh, that I think is probably worth reading and gets at a lot of these things.

And for me, this is the sort of like you have to agree that you're satisfied, or you have to give your, or you have to become fucking Pepe Silva, Pepe Silva forever.

Like, oh, you want to keep digging at it?

You keep digging at it.

Maybe you'll, maybe you'll find an answer to a puzzle you already actually solved, you know?

But you could do this before you get to the blue world.

You could do this.

W D, W, die.

W D, W Die.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I think that that's true.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

Because you just need to have the last tip and the do something in the throne, and then you need to know, well, you need to have the, you have to clear out the tunnel.

You have to do something in the throne room that's special.

And yes, 100%.

Because you get in the blue world.

But that the throne room has tied to the grotto, not to the Atelier.

Those are two different paths.

In fact, the Atelier, you also, I think, have to do something in the throne room, but to learn about what you're doing, but you don't have to do it.

They're not literally physically connected in that way.

They are two different kinds of endgame paths, so to speak, you know.

But yeah, I love it.

I love that.

That's the question it leaves you on: is like, all right, are you done?

Are you satisfied?

It's a weird one.

It's a weird one.

At rules.

I love that.

That makes sense that, like, just looking at

everything that I've been dealing with at where I am at in the game, I'm like, oh, okay.

Yeah.

That is the logical end point to this game is a sort of infinite puzzle that drives you crazy.

Or you being like, I've had my fill and stepping away from it.

It's interesting because the story is about a situation that's like deeply in flux that as a 10-year-old boy, you have no way of really impacting besides the material that your like weird gay uncle has handed to you.

And it's sort of like, we can't solve the narrative to this because it's happening.

It's happening out there somewhere.

Right.

Yeah.

All you can do is become, is get yourself in a position to theoretically act with greater authority in your lifetime.

Right.

Because I guess that's the, yeah, like that's the sort of big, for me, the, the question the game leaves me with is like, all right, so cool, I'm the blue prince i get to say some point in my life i'm the rightful heir to this kingdom and i'm gonna challenge this other group and i guess that's interesting that's fine that's that's a cool place to end a story it doesn't hit it with a hammer in the way that um

you might think there is another cutscene that can come up in between all this shit that i've talked about like there's like the post game then there's like the post game you've ascended the throne and then there's the the atelier and this thing i just talked about the blue door and so there's like almost a second ending that you could also say, cool, I'm good.

But if what you want is like to keep digging until you find the cutscene where you're like, and these, and all of my, all of the servants get to come back to the house and hug me or whatever.

Oh, Game Master Anthony ending.

That's right.

Game Master Anthony ending.

I don't think that's in here.

House Master Simon.

Housemaster Simon.

But I don't think that that's in here.

I think that I think the game is a little more open-ended than that, which I think is fine.

And if that's where it was going, then at some point you'd start waking up in the master bedroom instead of in the tent outside.

That's right.

Which could also be...

That would be kind of wild if after you got like the second deep ending, it was like, all right, you're inside.

You work your way out of the house if you want to go outside.

That would be.

Hey, if anyone wants to make a cool mod, that would be really fun.

I wouldn't want to live in this house, I got to tell.

I got to tell you.

I would not want to live in this house.

I like knowing.

Here's one.

I like to know where the bathroom is at all moments.

That's the big thing.

Sometimes there's not a bathroom.

I don't draft the lavatory very often.

It sucks.

It's a dead dead end.

It's red.

Yeah, it's terrible.

It's bad.

That's actually the real message of the game: it's bad to have a bathroom in your house spiritually.

Sometimes it just

makes you feel bad when you have to go into the bathroom.

It's a true statement sometimes.

No bathrooms, no gyms, no

masters.

What is the one that you dread?

Like, let's say you're in a dark room and you're placing without being able to see.

What's the one you least want to place?

Weight room.

Weight room.

Weight room.

Weight room.

Weight room without a doubt.

Without a doubt.

Weight room.

Yeah.

Because for anyone who doesn't know, weight room takes half your steps instantly.

It's not a take half your steps when you walk into it.

I've just lost a game that way before, or run that way before.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

And it kills you the first time you draw the weight room being like, well, I'll just not go in there.

It's not how it works.

It's the only room where that's not how it works.

Yeah, for negative stuff at least, yeah.

Because there's some positive things that'll activate.

Like when you have the, whenever you draw draft a

bedroom, you'll get like 10 steps that you don't need to go into it for that to activate.

But yeah, for negative effects, I think it's the only one.

But those tend to be like special s triggers you've set up via you've set up, yeah.

You know.

I think another, the other it this isn't a specific thing I dread, but it is it does always make me

say all sorts of curse words when it happens is when I'm trying to get the boiler room power somewhere, and I don't draw any rooms that are lit up in the draft screen.

That drives me that was the thing I tried to do for a month before the game came out and was like, I can't do it.

I just not, it's just not popping.

I'm just not getting the draw.

The RNG is killing me.

And again, thankfully, there's other stuff I could focus on, but every run, I was like, maybe this will be the run where I get to do da-da-da-da-da.

Nope.

I think that's the only time I've really felt myself butting against the RNG.

Because for the most part, I'm pretty accepting of the RNG.

It is just that, like, that is when I'm really like, okay, this is kind of killing my vibe a bit.

I just want to empty out the reservoir, but I need to have the extra tank here.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I just want to be able to get a tank.

Is there way to have an empty pool and an empty reservoir?

No.

Okay, I didn't think so.

Because you need every, I'm pretty sure you need every, you need to have the bonus tank in the boiler room or the pump room, rather.

And you need to have that.

You need to move the energy from the boiler room into into it.

And then you need that whole tank plus the other tanks to empty out the reservoir or to lower the reservoir.

About the swimming trunks.

I don't know what those do yet, but I assume.

Oh, it's pretty fun in the pool.

It says you need keys, though.

I don't know.

I don't understand what it's talking about.

Who can know?

God, I had another

room thing that I've forgotten.

It's fine.

There's so many rooms.

Oh, did either of you

either of you done

maybe not?

Okay, wait, you have done laboratory experiments on the computer.

Yeah.

Have you okay?

So I just remembered part of

part of the thing that's not clear in the photo of

the

room.

Sorry, not the room.

The map, my aquarium map.

Yeah.

I think it's this one.

Are those?

Yeah.

Do you have any guesses about the thing that I

hold on?

Let me look.

Because I was was like, wait, did I miss that they were upgraded?

No, it's not that.

Okay.

Do you know what happens if you succeed at

a experiment too many times in a row?

No.

Or enough time?

No.

Does the radiation get out?

The radiation goes up.

Do you know what happens when the radiation gets all the way up?

Is that what it...

Okay, I have been in a...

I've been drafting stuff before and I've seen it get wavy when I'm in a draft.

But I...

Does it make me get more red rooms?

What happens?

It is one of the coolest, best rewards you could have when you succeed at like seven or eight of them.

Um, all of the doors open as an emergency protocol.

What?

Wow.

Wow, radiation is good.

Oh my god.

You might need to have the shelter too, because I do in this run, and I don't remember.

But that's, yeah, yeah.

Uh-huh.

This game is so cool.

I think that's it.

I think that's going going to be our session.

And thank you for joining us for this one.

Can y'all tell people where to find you on the internet?

Yeah.

Keith and I are been part of a very long-running project over at MediaClub.plus that is starting to wind down at least our first season where we've been watching through the entirety of 2011's Hunter Hunter.

Jack and Dre from Friend of the Table are also on it.

I'm sure if you've just listened to Side Story, you're very familiar with with our dear friend Jack.

Have we decided

if this is just

a standalone?

I think this is a standalone at this point.

In fact, I think we're going to record it.

You'll hear Dre later then.

In a second, that will go in the front of this because we thought this would be a second segment.

Too long.

Too long.

We needed it.

Sorry to shatter the KFAV again.

We did.

We really did.

But we've been covering the 2011 Hunter Hunter.

We're coming up on the end of it.

We're in the post-Chimera Ant arc, the election arc.

It's been really fun to do.

We've covered some really fantastic bonus stuff over at friendsofthetable.cash on the Patreon, including a lot of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, some Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

I know that Jack wants to show us some Sailor Moon, given the connections that it has to Hunter Hunter.

So I'd really recommend checking that out.

You can just look up Sylvie Bullet anywhere

if you're looking for more me.

I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Instagram.

Those are kind of the ones.

And youTube.com/slash friends of the table and twitch.tv slash friends of the table, where if you want to see Keith and I being so good at solving puzzles, you should watch

our ongoing playthroughs of the Zero Escape series,

the escape room

sort of like sci-fi horror games,

more sci-fi than horror, games that came out on the DS originally and are on the PC now and kind of have a kinship to blueprints, sometimes mechanically, and then sometimes they're just,

it's a lot of puns.

It's funny, you could put like, you could put those games on one side of a spectrum and like

the witness on the other, and the blueprints is somewhere in the middle.

It's funny the Zero Escape games, how similar they are to Blueprints in some ways and

in other ways, including the vibes, totally different.

Absolutely.

That's different.

Wildly different.

The ballpark, yeah.

Keith, where can people find you?

You can find me um

at Keith J.

Carberry on Blue Sky, Keith J.

Carberry.contentburger.biz, I think, um, because of the horrible way the Blue Sky does everything.

Um, sucks.

Uh, and you can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/slash run button.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Until then, to be continued.