I got to Room 46 after 19 hours.
What do I get for that? A cutscene, wherein the missing mystery lady recites here Red Prince poem. You see, she was your mother all along, and you were the Red Prince, but now you're the Blueprints. How fun, a reveal and a pun.
This means nothing to me, I don't know anything about any of these people except vague af stuff. All I know is they're rich aristocrats, and maybe the mother is some kind of dissident in hiding or something like that, which probably means she's a lib. I want to say these characters surely must suck, except that in order to suck, they would have to have some personality first.
It's great when you get to the (or rather, an) ending of your mystery game, and it answers nothing, but hints vaguely at more mysteries, none of which I care about. Instead I get cringe. Why would I want to continue? It didn't pay off this time, surely next time will be another Sherlock-ass non-reveal about non-characters.
Doesn't help that the game isn't that interesting mechanically. You probably solve about half a unique puzzle per hour. Meanwhile you're replaying and redoing the same shit over and over, thanks to the roguelite structure of the game. It's mostly resource management; the core mechanic is you pick a room, there's resources in there that could help you open more doors and make more rooms, until you run out of resources/doors and have to start over. This is fine and somewhat interesting, except pretty soon you're spending most of the time looking for the same old trinkets in rooms you've already seen many times, so the interesting bits are but a fraction of the playtime.
There are worse games, but still weird to me how much praise that game got.
Recommended to play instead: Obra Dinn (mystery), Into the Breach (puzzle roguelike)
Meanwhile My girlfriend (doesn't play games, let alone puzzle roguelikes about rich white people) and I (hate puzzle games) are super obsessed with this game and have pumped in 100 hours in, like, 3 weeks😂
Big fan of the puzzles and how unique they are. Especially the end game has been top notch entertainment. We legit play 5 hours per day and only responsibilities are holding us back haha.
I especially loved how the game evolved from day 1 to day 50; as we got more permanent resources, we were more capable of buying items, which then allowed us to actually fuse them together into better/plot necessary versions. This was pretty rare in the early game, but then got easier to access, now that we are in the late game, and this, in turn, allows us to engage with other mechanics that we technically had full access to already, but can now make use of it at an increased rate.
Essentially just the roguelike aspect of it, but really well done imo. It helps that it isn't about damage numbers and hordes of enemies for a change, sure, but it also just did well in that regard in general.