I have sat down to write about gaming, and write about gaming I shall.

I engage with gaming in waves. From time to time I’ll get really into a title, for example Death Stranding 2, and play it for hours in the limited free time I’ve got. Then I might start a few smaller titles at a similar time, riding off the momentum from the first one. At some point the wave breaks, and I’m back to barely touching a controller. Combine that with an almost limitless catalogue of games on PS+ and Xbox Game Pass and you have a recipe for nihilistic disengagement.

Maybe this time will be different? I have taken out a PlayStation Plus Premium subscription to see if I can truly get the promised value. As a sporadic gamer it feels hard to justify, although so far I’ve already downloaded £87.49 worth of games so breaking even shouldn’t be that much of a chore.

First up, a puzzle game which generated a lot of buzz a few months back.

Blue Prince

Sounds like blueprints, right? That’s kind of the point. Blue Prince is a first person puzzle game where you are tasked with exploring a house. Sounds easy? The house isn’t exactly finished. Each day you start in the entrance hall and decide which door (of three) to open. Upon opening a door, you are given a choice of three different rooms to draft. Each room comes with its own abilities, bonuses, and even penalities. The more rooms you draft, the more complex the interactions in the system become.

Your eccentric uncle has passed away and left you his mansion, on one condition. You have to find the 46th room in a 45 room house. Each day you will attempt to create a perfect run, picking the rooms which allow you to fill out the plan for the house while collecting enough gems, keys, and money to keep going. Gems are important as certain room types cost one or more gems to draft. Keys allow you to open locked doors, a phenomenon which becomes increasingly more common as you get to the higher ranks (rows of rooms on on the plan).

This is a game of layers. You could randomly draft rooms and hope for the best, but before long you will cut yourself off or run out of resources. Every time you cross the threshold of a room you use a footstep, and when you hit zero steps the day ends. One of the conditions of your presence on the estate is that you cannot be in the house overnight when the layout resets.

At the end of each run you get a summary/evaluation page showing your layout and giving a title to your efforts. This game can be both immensely frustrating and rewarding in equal measures. You’ve got one path left. You take a deep breath in and draft…a closet. Goddammit!

Eating food found around the manor allows you to recover some steps. Occasionally rooms can be beneficial if you meet certain criteria, such as the dining room. A meal will be served there, but only if you reach the 8th rank of rooms. That is just one example of the many room-player interactions. There are certain complimentary room combinations, too, although you won’t find out about these until drafting certain other rooms with helpful books and information leaflets.

There are even smaller puzzles within this puzzle game, including the parlour where you have to solve a logic puzzle to win gems locked in one of three boxes. This is a game which you need to play to fully grasp, and one that gets more rich and complicated the more you play.

Baby Steps

This is an odd one. As part of PS+ Premium you can trial a game for free for an hour. We used to call them demos, and they were free, but now they are “premium”. One game available with an hour trial is Baby Steps, a very strange game which you play a hapless layabout who is transported to the wilderness and forced to walk in the most awkward way possible. The left trigger operates his left foot, and the right his right foot, and the thumbstick allows you to shift his weight in a particular direction.

This means you will fall over. A lot. Eventually you get the hang of “walking” on the flat, but almost immediately you are faced with climbing a big hill. This leads to some hilarious situations with ragdoll physics. It’s a gruelling game but it is satisfying when you make some small modicum of progress. Watching a guy slide down a muddy river after tripping over a boulder is quite funny. The story seems rather bizarre, but unfortunately I didn’t get much of it in the hour that I played.