05: Blue Prince Spoilercast

What's good, Internet? It is May 27th, 2025, and this is not a shifting manner 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 Selby Bullitt, who has been here before. It's me, your cool gay aunt. 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... Wow. Shot fired at me. Wow. That literally sold me right here.

Look, it's just true. I have been the whole time. If you didn't know, I have been the whole time. I also have been doing video game podcasts since The Otts started doing a video game podcast 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,

We found your Shenmue 1 and 2 Let's Plays. Shenmue, that's 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... uh 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 Club Plus. And then I just want to shout out you just as of this recording, like yesterday released. the Repo multicam stream from when 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. 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. 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. If you've 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 fine. I wish those came at the end. Keith, we're going to have to have a shop talk about getting into multicam editing and 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 computer. That's too many cameras. It was too many cameras. That's so hard, dude. That's so, so hard. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about The Blueprint. this is your warning we are going to talk very spoilery thoughts about blueprints i think probably in um increasing uh degrees of spoiler spoileriness because

I think that's probably the way to do it, you know, start with the stuff that's like, hey, you open that, you turn on that game for the first time, what's that game, what do you think about it? And then eventually you hit credits, or you hit credits after you open Chamber 46, right? 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 i think sylvie

It sounds to me, Sylvie, like you're the deepest in. I don't know. You haven't had the game for a really long time. Yeah, so I beat the game during IGF last year. But beat the game meaning hit 46. So, let me slow down. A third of the game? It seems like a third of the game, but it's an interesting one. It's a weird game. It's a weird game. For people who don't remember from our conversations around Blueprints, or who didn't,

I listened up to other folks talking about it. The very short version is The Blueprints is a first-person puzzle game set in an ever-changing mansion. It's run-based like a roguelike, and it has tile.

uh placement gameplay like something like betrayal uh at house of the hill the board game um 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 of these safes to get letters that are inside of them and figuring out what 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 you know, podcasts, people online. I listened to the side story episode where 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 like a board game. You're right. It's so board game. It's a board game. 100%. To me, it feels like playing a piece in a board game, kind of start to finish. You did, you, like, 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 learn is about a museum cable. Do they know? Some really fun color to include 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 we 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 gotta play that on friends of the table i think it's like a crazy eight meets old maid meets Fish Meets War. Crazy Old Fish War is a counterweight prequel about the Apostolician Empire. Yeah, there you go. Perfect.

That's so funny. 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 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 reap 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 earn stars or fruit or something. regularly and so i get an extra resource or something like that yeah charlie i think that the the best analog like you said is those legacy games that did it start with pandemic legacy but yeah definitely prominent one risk legacy was the first one

Was that a fad? Those were great. I loved all of those. They're still happening. In fact, one of my favorite games coming out, I'm waiting for my copy of it, is Earthborn Rangers. which is by Earthborn Games, which was the brainchild of 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 the Arkham Horror CCG, which is also, or LCG, whatever it is, also a tile flipping tile based exploration puzzle but earthboard rangers is also a really really cool legacy thing a different

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.

um but yeah uh so lots of board game connections there but then i was gonna 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 Orindia, I felt myself

This game may turn you into Charlie Kelly from the Pepe Sylvia clip so quickly and so powerfully. 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 guy. Yeah, I'll wait to talk about that until later. I'll give, like, a big final warning about what that is. 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're talking about. I still haven't been to that room, but I have a picture of it. This is my favorite room, I think. 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. Right, Sylvie? Yeah, the gallery is- I love the gallery. The gallery is the most, like, Professor Layton magic puzzle thing I've come into in the game, and I was really happy about it. It really is.

have you found the gallery? So I tragically have only been to the gallery one time and I have been unable to draw it again and so I haven't been able to solve it. thing in the gallery can be solved in the gallery, which is a weird thing to say. It's a fucking strange I got the sense that that was true, but it was dinner time, and I had like three more rooms to get to the antechamber, and I was like, I'll fuck up.

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 game. I understand it might be exploitable in some way. That's okay.

You know, fuck it. Adam, Adam, 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 for you. Oh, wow.

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, and then getting your steam back? Your team stops. It's a lot of like, um, 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 dead ends. But 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 keep? Because I am at the point in this game where a lot of stuff rolls over. 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. 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, um, south-facing runs only. And you just go, fuck, what the fuck? I... 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 gold. Sorry, I didn't mention that part.

The really impressive thing about this game is how crucial and impossible getting into the antechamber feels before you finally do it. How 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. Yeah, it's at least regular. It's like going from...

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 fly out, I might get struck out a few times. I'm gonna get on base. It's gonna happen. Maybe I need to do three or four runs, but I'll get there. You know? So my, like, the... This game almost ruined me, but I was able to persevere. I made it into the antechamber.

On day like, or I'm sorry, I made it to the locked door for the first time. On day like 15. Sorry, to the locked door to the antechamber or to the locked door? Outside the Andy James. Yes, okay. uh 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 horrible, bad luck, no progress. Not even making any progress on puzzles.

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 in 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 from 15 to 35.

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 that? Can I tell you about the dove room? Yeah, I was going to say, oh, do you mean, yeah, you can rotate the house. Can I tell you about the elegant compass? Tell me about the Elegant Compass.

three times a day when you've got it you can uh rotate rooms i don't know about the regular compass is that a gap i thought i had all the it's a showroom it's like 50 bucks in the showroom yeah i've been to the showroom a few times, but I've never seen that piece there. That's great.

Number one item in the game, moon pendant. The moon pendant is incredible. I've seen that. Yeah, I've actually never bought anything from the showroom. I think my favorite thing in the game is actually tied to the chess puzzle, which is, um, there's a... For people who haven't played this or have played only through the Room 46 stuff, there's a puzzle about あー You can light these torches outside. take an elevator, they reveal a secret elevator, you take the elevator down and you find

room in the depths below the castle. The castle is actually below the manor also. Yeah. Crucially. Crucially. But if you can light all four of those torches, 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 it. They're rarer. The more rare, the more powerful the piece is. Oh, yeah. The king is in the throne room in 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, you know, 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. lets you remove a cough from a room permanently. What? Wow. You can only use it like three times and then it breaks and they're like it

It will never show up. You can only use it three times across the entire... your entire game you know forever 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 i'll never use how many you know how many rooms is it crucially important to be able to pull for free. It's not that many rooms. That's right. That's exactly right. 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. It's so tragic what I did. I can't wait to talk about the pictures. 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 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 to the pool?

I think that's the, 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... The, um... The laboratory going? I have to show you a map I built. I have to show you a map I built. Oh, that is the funniest thing I've ever done.

I'll find it in a second, but you keep talking. Oh, wait, I found it. I found it. I found it. I want y'all to tell me, I want you to describe for me what you're looking at here. Oh my god! Wow. What do you see here? You're building aquariums like tunnels. That's right. You also have some tunnels. I do have some tunnels. Yeah, I was going to say, the tunnel is actually not as big as the aquariums. They just go north-south, but 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, kind of like a T-shaped door. And then an aquarium's count is every color of Every color type of the door, every tile in the game is either purple, it's a bedroom, or orange, it's a hallway. They're mechanical and thematic colors. Yeah, they are both, 100%.

And so what I fucking did was... I had a lab, I was running an experiment in laboratory that said each time you play a hall connected to another hall and Add three aquariums to the tile pool. Oh my fucking god. That's insane. Tunnel breaks that. Tunnel makes that. Well, 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. And then it's like, oh yeah, I can go 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 four i've gotten 45 out of like one blank space like four times anyway i i'll take a screenshot of my phone house because i took me

it's 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, instead of any system that runs RNG, there's 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% or 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 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? 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 then moving towards a different game in some way. If it started giving you more steps every time you lost or something, I think that would not be the experience that they're going for. Here's my tragedy with the pictures. Tell me. Pictures in this game are there's two paintings in every room that you put down. Yeah. Two sketches, I guess. So... i um and the the the way that they integrate that into the to why that's happening i think is so good uh but that's a that's secondary

So I'm compulsively screenshotting. Uh-huh. things in this game, little bits of notes, interesting, every page of every book that I read, 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 uh and on the wall are two pictures there are and yeah like an arrow that goes to one picture that goes like

Like, has, and one of them says doesn't have, or something. It's some obvious thing. It's with and without. Yes, thank you so much. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. And 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...

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.

It's not for that. It's not for that. It's not for that. It turns out... They just both use the grid of the... They both just use the grid. The 46... step grid or the 46 uh 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 bear 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 they are. It matters where they are, not the letters. I've seen people do it the other way too, Keith, which is they go, alright, well the first time I went into the parlor, I got... Car and car. which means the parlor has to do with the letter T. And then like, oh, but then on day seven,

I got fire and fir tree, which is an E. So maybe seven has to do with E. And I'm 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, uh you know when i was last really playing the game about a month ago i had i had like 38 or 40 of the letter I had all the letters, but I didn't know where they were. And I was like, how do they fit?

onto this chess puzzle downstairs. I couldn't figure it out. People were like, you know, I asked a friend and they were like, you know, 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. when I finally figured out How all these things fit together.

And I finally solve the message. I go through, you know, four or five runs to get everything in the right order. And even before I had it fully figured out, I realized... At this point, did you think it was the chess 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... uh the chess puzzle when i figured out what it did say which is um If we count small gates, eight dates, crack, eight say-

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. Uh-huh. I had already got three. They're tied to various. Did you know that it's a hint for another puzzle? I had gotten the Apple one because of a magnifying glass in the dark room. 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.

west gate. There's the other gate. All of the safe puzzles are 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 working. What a solution is.

So, uh, this game loves homonyms. That's why I like it so much, baby. Like, a ton. Yeah, it's so much fun. You solved the drawing. Oh, 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 just saw the game. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

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 letters you're trying to find as 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 here. Yes, I would love that. It's just we've had 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.

Each of them under their feet has a measure 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's two feet. So he's got the smallest gait. 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 I think that's 0415. I just wrote it down. I've put it 0415 so many times. The actual nice thing about this is that's a free gem every run, buddy. Yeah.

They patched that out too. Wait, did they? Yeah, they just stay open now. It's not that you don't get the reward, it's just that you don't have to enter the thing every time. It's really nice. I thought that it was a new puzzle when I first encountered it. Of course. There's also the other one that I like is in the... It's the office that has the busts, and you have to find the guy whose name is, like, Count Gates.

March of the Counts. Yeah, March of the Counts. He's Count Gate. You don't need to know the gate part to know that, but if you look at him in the Great Hall, his name is is Count Something Gates, you know? The Great Hall, a room that I constantly think there must be something else going on here. I think it's just interesting information about the other rooms. Here's

But there's a guy named Major Key in there. There's got to be something. That's the study or the office one that you're talking about? The office one, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a hand pointing to that, guys. head above the safe, so I just counted them and put them in. And that's the thing, right? For me, that is the stuff that also helps counter the RNG. Sorry, not the Great Hall, 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. Explain 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, buddy. And on one of the pages You know, the character in the book is like working through 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'm 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 yeah especially where you're at in the game i think it just it starts to You're sort of like, oh yeah, I knew this. Or like, oh really, I did all that and what I get is

So I do think 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 brainpower I spent because I already spent the brainpower on a different part?

Sounds like that keeps happening. The silver lining... Yeah, it's... Yeah, really. The silver lining, though, is that... So I didn't do it because I didn't have time. I haven't. But... So... Figuring out that the... 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. And sometimes they're right next to the pictures. You now know how to place the chess pieces. It became immediately apparent what the actual solution to that chess puzzle was. 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 if 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 games universe so far? There's a lot going on. For extra comedy points, as you take turns, the other hosts can deafen themselves so nobody's fragmented understanding can inform the others.

Oh my god, that's evil. This is a great question to have asked me six weeks ago. You just don't remember any of it now because it's been... take a break it's 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

um and getting deeper into it six weeks ago and then i got busy and i was playing other games and 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 uh 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, yeah. Great-uncle. So you are a young boy. You show up to an outrageously huge mansion.

uh 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 manner and title. If you play his little game. It's like Brewster's Millions situation. 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. Uh-huh.

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. Because they seem like they're tied to secrets in a way that's like, ooh, she visited and disappeared. Right, exactly. There's like implied blackmail. And you're not sure who is being blackmailed at first.

And very cleverly, 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. in a bad way yep uh Unless you really really really decided to go for solving the one in the shelter. There's an outdoor room. One of my favorite places. Yeah, it's great. 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 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 are going to be really useful.

or the classroom, which fills the manner of classrooms that help you solve the dartboard puzzle. Again, I just did math on all those. Also the deep floor. Yeah, me too. I also just did the math. Although, without the classrooms, you'll eventually need to brute force it and then, like, reverse engineer. Which is what I did the first time. The first time I played this game, I did not get deep into the classrooms. I 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, it looks like a bomb shelter. It has a radioactive icon on it, right? 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 should have enough food down here to last this amount of time, and then here's when you can come out. And then I can't remember 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. What? Some more stuff. Well, there's some more. Is that what you're at, Keith? Do you think that what she has done is written? No, no, no. There's other stuff. There's other stuff. But it seems like the heat starts with a 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 launch.

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 dead somewhere or if I missed something. I... I've opened five or six saves.

So I still have more safes to go. Around 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. My understanding is she's alive. Yes. I can say more about that. And that she's written a letter saying, I hope to see you. Yeah, totally. 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. And I am the blue prince. I am the blue prince, you know, so. And all things being said, I'm the blue prince. The blue is my color. So yeah, that's the first layer of it, I think. Yeah. Sylvie, do you want to fill in more? Yeah, um... Do you want me to talk about the sort of why she's radicalized and the geopolitical situation? I know that she was involved with those terrorists, but I don't know how.

You know about her fake names? You know about her fake computer logins? Sorry, is it, uh... Hold on, I just found this today, actually. Is the name Kirk Darin? It's been a while since I've... There's a few names. Kirk Darin is a pseudonym. And I'm like, great, I don't know who the fuck Kirk Darin is. If you eventually find... Do you know where the, oh my god, what is it actually called? Where the satellite dish is? Have you been to the grotto? That's fine, go ahead.

I think it's called the Grotto. The Blackbridge Grotto. Oh, I actually, I found another thing about this. The one that's like the permanently unlocked room. Yeah, I got that, but I still don't know what I'm doing with it. I found a piece of paper that says grotto in red and it's circled. Very important. Yeah, it's 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. Oh, which implied that that's a possible function. Yes, exactly. It's a room in the... It's outside. It's hidden in between the front gate and the campsite. It's on the left-hand side if you're going that direction. um 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 yeah uh finding the locked apple um orchard finding my own tent um And seeing that.

Yeah, got it. 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 into the laboratory. You know what I'm talking about? And then, like, day six playing through with the full build, 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 microchip.

You find the microchips. They're spread across the ground. There's like three of them. You have to do something with a can. The first one I found by mistake, which is I just had the magnifying glass slider thing. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you have the thing that lets you light torches? I didn't know that there was something in the grotto there. That was my first gadget, actually, and I won a bunch of money from the church. From the church, yeah, that's awesome.

I think in my current game, I have that. I have it in the piggy bank ready to open, but I just keep not using it. I'm going to wait until it's... Yeah, that's the way to do it, because I learned... I... I got it so early that I didn't know how much I would have wanted 100 gold. Of course. Ugh. Of course.

Anyway, so yeah. How did we get... Oh, there you can find the background communication between... the trio of people who your mother, Mary, and her two radical companions or terrorist companions being like, all right, we're setting all this shit up. set up some fake names in the email system. Some of the emails that you're reading about new employees are actually just her with fake names to throw off the detectives who are trying to look into all this shit. Yeah. Anyway.

You, like, get a glimpse of in some cutscenes. Oh, yeah, that's creepy. Well, that shit happens. And it's really creepy. Wait, wait, sorry. But I really enjoy it. The fucking detective. Do you know the guy? Oh, it's the detective. The guy who's... The guy who 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.

It's that's, that's where the RNG 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. Did you both get the quest bedroom upgrade? The quest better? No, I did not. No, I took the other one. I took the... Every time you get to the antechamber, you get two more allowances.

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. I got the boot of R to give me plus two dice. I have no idea. I think it's less than that still. Mine's 24. Oh, that's so good. That's pretty good. I did get the, the, the... You have 24. Holy Grail lab. Wait, the what? Oh, sorry.

The Holy Grail, like, lab combo of every time you dig up the trash, get one added to your allowance, and then I didn't find a shovel that time. That is 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've played, so. 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. I don't have the kennel. You posted a kennel picture like... Right when you first started playing it, I was like, what the fuck is that? Yeah, I got it from the drafting room. A dog. Awesome. 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.

in a room. It unlocks all the doors in that room. Oh my god. That's great. That's great because it means 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. There's someone outside. Even the one in the middle has a top that's off. No paintings in the green rooms, though. No pictures. True, but you know what I need the pictures for at this point? Yeah, you don't need them anymore.

We were going to... We are spiraling again. We are spiraling. It's okay. I just was like, wait a minute. We've been asked 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 like a really nice souffle things like that Basically, it's 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 country... That's what I was going to tell you. Sorry, there's a... There's a continent or a set of islands, the eastern islands of the planet.

are named Arindia, which, by the way, the moment I walked into the, whatever, school room, the third or fourth grade, and you see the map of the world, you're like, Now, wait a second.

no no wait a second that ain't her 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 awesome yeah And I was like that is not hold on

That is an honor. 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 Orris, O-R-I-S. And he was really popular. He unified the whole place. Um, and, uh, he, he tried to, he went from like the center of the continent all the way across the, all of the islands, uh, 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 blacked out also. So, that's all. Very simple. I believe so. And so... It goes on from that to talk about how in the second era of this kingdom, it was sort of divided among, I think, three siblings. The important regions being Orinda Areas, which is like... Kind of the main one and the one that we know and love today. Arch Aries, the North, sort of like...

I'm getting sidetracked now. This is the problem with this game. You get little glimpses of what's going on in these places through, of all things, stamps on letters that you used a magnifying glass to look at. It was eight months, eight. countries or whatever is what i is is the 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

Yeah, eight months, eight possible, or eight countries. It's called something like that. Eight realms. Eight realms, yeah, something like that. Okay, sorry. Eight realms in eight months is what it's called, which I think maybe is what helps solve something for you. It was. There was Orinda Ares, Arch Ares, and then the third was Araja, which is the sudden realm in play. Which is actually where Oris is from, or Oris' people are from originally. Yes.

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. 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, the fourth era, they have this, like, populist king, basically. And, um... Or in Diaries. In the censored version, that's... fucking gone very censored yeah this is the most censored yeah that is super censored yeah yeah yeah um And so he, the big thing is like the capital has moved to the secluded mountains of Reddington, or sorry, from the secluded mountains of Reddington to the published stage of Ores. leaving castle and court behind. Hmm.

And 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 Fen, or as I have been instructed to say, the grand city of Fen. Sorry, you mean... These voices planted a seed which took root in the grand city of Fen. That's what mine says. Oh, interesting. Yeah, funny. Oh, okay. It doesn't mention the nobles of Fen being behind it, huh?

How much does it talk about the era of ruins? What's your chapter 5 called? Oh, it does say Arrow of Ruin. It talks a lot about the Arrow of Ruin. We learn all about the Arrow of Ruin. Yeah? Um... After the passing of King, uh, uh, Desolée III, the Fourth Era came, probably to an end, thankfully the king died.

Blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Okay. Basically, the whole rest of the Arrow of Ruin is uncensored. Oh, interesting. 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? The what? Prince Learson? Uh, the self-proclaimed Prince Lear Seth? Seth blank here. Yeah, sorry.

Declared himself the true monarch. And basically, things devolved into a civil war. And I'll just read that sentence here. The declaration was bolstered by a what number of supporters? A surprising number of supporters due to the fact that Desilife 4 shared his father's good name but little of his virtues.

That's the current king in Desilée 4, who turned the gardens of Fen, 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 presumably because you have to get past room 46 for the Buckstore to unlock, which is how you got the you've kind of put together that red is the national color of

the current and ruling regime. And everyone's favorite color, surprisingly. Everyone's favorite color, I know. I don't like yellow. I don't like black. I don't like blue. Get those out of here. Um, well, I don't like blue, because that's the color of those fennarius. Oh, no, that's the thing, right? This is the thing. Blue is a new color. Oh, wait, it's... Blue is new. Yeah, it was black. That was, that was, that was. before Fen Aries. That was when it was so-called Orindia Aries or whatever.

Orinda Ares becomes Fen Ares after the Fen, the nobles of Fen, take over because of this civil war. They erase the word Orinda Ares and replace it with Fen Ares from all of the books. Okay, so it becomes Arch-Ares, Nuance, and Fen-Ares when previously it was those two and Irinda-Ares. So, and Fen is red. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I spent the whole game being like... I misunderstood a lot of that. Red is the bad color, and blue is the old good color, but it's not. Black is what Orinda Ares...

It was 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 something like that. She's doing spy shit, is the impression that I get.

or revolutionary stuff she's definitely involved with the heist we talked about and they're using in some of these notes and stuff you're finding like that they're using codenames of like Um, 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 color black being the sort of, like, old, like, pre-fracturing color is clicking for me now because I found a note talking about when we get to the...

The closed exhibit, which is a cool room, especially if you figured out how to turn off or have a key card. The first time that I got 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 three guards. One has white gloves, two have black gloves. Avoid 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 uh 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 doubt about him being the scout. What would have happened to him to make him...

What if he started talking and had the Scouts voice in the Linn blueprints? It'd be really funny, right? Where'd my frickin' mom go? Oh, God. Um... But I will say that there's a sort of a limit to this. The story is the thing that you just said, right? Which is like, there was once a good old king, everyone loved, 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 kings thing right shitty son takes over 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 Fen, and that brings in outside forces to support the Fen. even though the friends fucking suck. That's in the book that you read. That's the nuance and Arch Ares get involved after that fight because so many civilians were killed because it was a massacre.

Um, instead of being just, like, a fight in the battlefield between armies, it becomes da-da-da-da-da. So, hey, uh-huh, why is there, um, like, four square miles of infrastructure underground? Uh... 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 railroad.

is a thing you can learn in the postgame. Right, because they're very serious about each country should only have one kind of thing. They're very serious about that. Genuinely, that is a political belief of theirs, seemingly. And, yeah, they also, yeah, they shrug the railroads. They, like, push everything towards singular, kind of lockstep 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 Oris. Yep. You see it in the fortune teller thing right away. You see an underground lake. That's the fucking castle from King Oris. So, when, when Desalee 4, I'm trying to remember this off, I have notes, when Desalee 4, it's tough, it is, when Desalee 4 loses the war against the Fen, that family flees south. To... Era... Era... Era... Era... Era... Era... So it's tough, because there's also a Jara, 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 statues is like JRE so-and-so. JRE is like a duchess or something for the Eurasian. One of those people, I want to say your great-grandmother, the Baroness Orvei, 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, like, blueprint magic. Like, house... maneuvering magic. It comes from them and that's the generation that starts to build the weird twisty strange house that then Herbert I grew up in Herbert, your gay grandpa, or your gay granduncle. Yeah. Your grandpa is super wife guy. Your grandpa is the most wife 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. Does he give him like a house? I think so. 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.

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 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 it somewhere. I do. I have so many screenshots. I have like 400 screenshots. Again, this game makes you crazy.

so 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 um i spent a long time thinking that uh that the great-uncle was having sex with the grandma. No. I don't think that's true. Well, I also thought he was an older for a while. No, I don't think... Right.

Sure. So it's not a big jump, I guess, actually. Because there's, like, so much of this game is, like, 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. Baroness is right. Yeah. 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 of all 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 the the way like

The way that Herbert... I mean, originally I thought it was Herbert morning, and then it turns out it's Simon the grandfather morning. Well, so the... Have you all gotten the puzzle? I had to look this up. This is what I couldn't do myself. The Arajan language. puzzle. No, I just got the letter. 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 finally 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 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 um 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, blah, blah. I had some vague implications of this, but that's as far as I got. Yes, yes. Yeah. I also found the Harley letter. In any case... Okay, 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 over the past 40 years that I haven't already attempted to tell you in numerous times in the past.

Half-stated gratitude is always interrupted with tactful and polite repudiations from you. I'd 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. 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. One of them'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 um yeah uh and She tries to throw you under the bus, though. Wait, when? There's a point where she's being accused of, um, of, uh, political, um... of 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. Yeah, of course. This is about my nasty little son on a bus, dude. It's not about, that's not throwing you a child.

Yeah, that's a cover story. I'm 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 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 i want to show you a video of the big final area of the game because it's wild um there's some stuff that is that the sanctum that you're talking about or is it after that it's the atelier

Are you familiar with it? I believe it's called the Italian. I'm trying to remember. I've heard of her. Can I just show you a screenshot? I'll show you two screenshots. Yeah, please. 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, dude. I have heard about this. I've heard about this. This rules. These are, I'm sorry, 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, 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 a bizarre one to even get to, and that is This is the place that the Baroness built to begin with. Who is Baroness Arave, your great-grandmother, or your great-great-grandaunt, or whatever. Can we fucking talk about how... hard the first fortune teller hit. Holy shit. When you're playing this game and you... Did you get that 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 than I think there is. sudden cutscene when you go into the security room for the first time holy shit wait what am i being watched who's watching 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... to the rumpus room yeah it is the rumpus room but we need to you know There's a fucking big style fortune teller, Tom Hanks' big style. What does that guy say? It is. It is. Oh, my God. I used to know this.

It does be going to Z. It's not Zardoz. That's a different movie. It's The Great Zoltan. 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 on Media Club Plus. Chow's 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 and the Howlin' Commandos. You know, a 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. This isn't even funny. That's when you pull out the Cameron Consulman, I would beat Superman in a fight. Exactly. That's right. Anyway. It is Zaltar. I said Zaltan. Google gave me confusing results.

It is Zoltar. The great Zoltar. Yeah. Uh-huh. So you go... Oh, it's both! Oh. There's also a Zoltan. This is, I mean, in big Zoltar, the reason you got confusing results is because there is also a Zoltan. Oh yeah, I see that. Yeah, do the best one, man. Um... 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 like they were suspiciously absent of... NPCs that you would have to have hired someone to animate. Right. Right. Yeah, this has what were then called walking simulators, for instance, often. But even in the walking 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 have enemies and you have yourself and that would be it. I was thinking a lot about the 10 years ago era of the quote walking simulator while playing this. Big, like, um...

If Jack was here, they'd know this. Eidolon, I think they're literally credited on the Wikipedia page. Yeah, Eidolon was a big one. That was like a flashpoint for the anger, I feel like, around walking simulators yeah um yeah the game rips uh also like when i was it started getting scarier i was like oh getting big kitty horror show vibes for sure yeah um 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 Firewatch or whatever or Gone Home or whatever. And you're like, 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. uh at least to make this game uh and when all of a sudden there was the like animated uh animatronic with voice acting uh uh out of nowhere delivering this like wild cutscene in a

And doing, like, super creepy, horror-adjacent kind of future-telling. And, as it was foretold, I am... and the sound of a dropping coin. You find yourself face to face with the Alzheimer. And I suspect you wish me. to look into your future. A boy standing. I'm fine get tied. door that is always locked. It has It is the has been foreseen. by the great Avasara. Until the dawn.

I will have nothing more to say I blew my whole mind blew the whole game like the thing that you're seeing is like yourself standing on a peep in the dark and there's a castle in the distance and There's, like, strange flags, and he's giving, like... I hear the wind, but the flag does not stir. Yeah! That's that shit. Like, it's a secret door. It's 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 have these inflection points where they're going to, like, 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 just by huge amounts, the game's scope will widen in an instant. One of those moments is the fortune teller. One of those moments is getting underground.

Getting underground. Oh god, the first time I broke open the... outside hallway into the underground storage place. I got the super sledgehammer or whatever the fuck it's called. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. I love that thing. Shit. I think I already had the gem cave by then, which I was like, okay, that's cool. I get some gems. That's nice. But opening it 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 smaller thing, but just to call out, because we're talking about the underground, one of my favorite moments in the game so far is... 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 corner 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. I know exactly the one you're talking about. When I went in there and I accidentally 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. Are you going to unlock the door from that side too, right at that point? I actually don't know if it's possible to go in from the other way. You can't. You have to find the secret. Way in. Okay. Well, here's the thing. I don't think I found that secret. When I played this game in the early build, I got to the secret, the north level. I guess we haven't said this out loud.

The point of the game, at the beginning of the game, is to reach the furthest, the manor is an eight by five grid. The center, the kind of third column in the eighth top rank is your goal at the beginning of the game. You get 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, um... 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-ranked room in the third row, or the third column. is you have to find levers in the manor that are 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. And you go in. So you get the final lever is underground. You hit that. Then you can go back up and go in. to the thing. It reminds me the most of doing the final run in Keith Outer Wild.

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

fuck are they talking about? Don't you mean I remember stuff when I play a game? Yeah, it's like that. Maybe that is the experience for somebody else. It's just not the way I didn't experience those games. There are moments, 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, when 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 cog. The cog can lift and lower. I learned about the up and down, but I couldn't find a solution.

That incorporated going up and down. I think I maybe drained the reservoir more or something. I don't remember. Because there's a second layer to there. Which is a whole other puzzle. That I have not solved. I'm sure I have- Yeah. Here's the thing that fucked me up around my great tragedy. On the day the game came out, I had a friend, Rupse, in a group chat. Oh my god, I hate where I put the foundation. I'm like, fuck. I put it in like rank 7.

Oh, that's beautiful. Oh, no. Well, it depends on what you want for it, right? Yeah, 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 back. 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 bricked the run, you know what I mean? I just didn't get a door handle or an anti-chamber lever.

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, fascinating. And I think that now, I think...

six or seven. 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 up one and then right to the left. You should be able to see both of them. 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. 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, questers. 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?

We haven't 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 roundabout way. Have y'all brought a watering can to the library?

Um... Huh? Maybe by accident. I haven't noticed. 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 right and actually last time i played i can't remember what it was I gotta, 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. 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 blessings are 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, 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 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 is 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 though yes but there's a value for that that i can't what is the reason you would want i think i have that one right now that's the general right Is that one called The General? Because I think that's the one I currently have. There's some reason. At some point, I was like, oh, I actually am glad I have Red Room. Maybe it was a lab experiment thing.

I just don't remember. Maybe I'm wrong about this. So there is a shrine blessing you can get that says, and this is what I'm guessing you got, maybe. It's the blessing of the berry picker, I think. No, it's not the berry picker. Fuck, what is... Oh, it's the blessing of the monk. Uh, 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? Uh, 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... You get rid of the foundation. That will let you get rid of the foundation, I'm pretty sure. Yes, yes. So, you could also put, this is 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 else. Oh, I don't think you can put the antechamber somewhere, because you don't draw the antechamber. You don't... You don't totally draw... I think it's... Oh, maybe you can put the antechamber. Because it's rooms that you... It's the last room you stay in, right? I haven't done it with that. That's where my mind immediately went. Of course, yeah. You could put the...

What is the hidden, the one with the books that you can pull? The bookshop. The secret passage. No, the secret passage. Oh, the secret passage. But how could... And it adds a book to the shed. It adds a book. shelf what that's great i'm see here's why i never would have thought of that because i've i've put the secret passage against the dead end before and it's just a dead end uh-huh So in my head, it was just like a waste of a secret passage. But that's very interesting. No. Okay, I-

But no, this wasn't the thing that I figured out. I figured out some other thing. Okay, I was thinking maybe you 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 kind of stuck with puzzles, and I was like, what if there's 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? I mean, I guess the other big one. Are y'all both doing the... The realm sigil puzzles? Yeah, I've only gotten one. I am in the middle of that right now, dude. It'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... The blacks, their color was black. Right, yeah.

Are we talking about the puzzle boxes or about the sigils in the sanctum? The sanctum, that's what it's called. Because the puzzle boxes also correspond to the room. You actually get the black puzzle box in that room. You do. Yes. Okay. Yes. Exactly. And then that. Those are very funny. 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 oh it's so cute that's actually something i'm curious about is like what's your favorite like text thing you found in this what's your favorite like a little bit of writing earlier between Herbert and Hartley. 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, there's a bittersweet pride in the woman you've become. It's good. Yeah, it's really nice. There's some really, like, the letter writing in it is really fantastic, I think. I like the letters From... uh, married to her mother from college. Oh, I don't know if I've read those. I believe those are in the Dovecote. Oh, I think I only read one of those. I think I only read one of those. 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. Uh, and having convinced Herbert to, like, let, to add the dove coat to the rotation so that, um... She can take care of the doves while at school. Talking about... Herbert gave her a gift 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 grandfather. And then... There was a, 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 just 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. Ah, interesting. But I really like that. 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 all the time in, I think. It's really, it's like easier than you think, honestly. It's just an order of operations you gotta find. Tell me what you think the possible answer is, Keith. Okay, so there's... I may be overthinking this, because there's corresponding statues in the house. You're overthinking it. Where else? 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, where else do you see the angels? Kinda. Uh, the church? The church. Do you remember what's in the church? Ding-a-ling-ding. No. Well, the pews. But the altar... Where do you see them in the church? I don't remember.

I can't think this way. They're the stained glass windows in the church. Oh, okay. And each one just has a number on it. Oh yeah, I should have a picture of that somewhere. It's like one, the farmer. It's literally just an order thing. But then there is an additional, there is another different thing, which is you can light the candles in the tool. See, that I got immediately as soon as...

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, and 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 going to go do this right after I'm recording. And so I've had that the whole... lighting those candles in my head the whole game um so uh 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.

Is what I will say. Okay, so there's two solutions. 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 Westgate and you can get to that spot. The second one comes from a letter in... Where do you get that letter? There's two letters there's there's the letter from your grandmother that's in there and then there's also like great uh uncle herbert's like funeral letter it is it is yes well and sorry in the i think it

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. After that, you have the information you need to go solve 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 does that have to do with the raising and the lowering of the tool?

That is the same. Yes. You also, it is just what the order is that you raise and lower them in still. Okay. But it's a different order. Instead of doing 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 lunchbox 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 blah, blah, blah. It's a real dick through your screenshots type puzzle. You know what made me think that this was a more complicated thing that it is, is that the groundskeeper, when you unlock the apple orchard, has his little journal, and he talks about convincing Babbage, the house manager. Babbage.

I'm trying to convince Babbage to change which angel is in the... Oh, 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. Um, 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 upgraded the cloister to be the cloister of... whoever, you know? And that, I was like, oh, I guess that's her name. That's her statue. Yeah, so I was thinking that I would have 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 helps a lot. 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. I don't know if you guys got a chance to upgrade. One of the main rooms. One of the most important rooms, yeah.

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 it 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, has left, presumably written by Herbert, but, like, it's not 100% clear that, like, an in-memoriam poem. And I was like, oh, that's really curious. That's really interesting. And I was like, oh.

yeah but this is also like probably like clearly not connected to anything and now i just have to live with this so did either of you get out of the geist bedroom Yes, that is the one I bet. I took Quest Bedroom, which is the one that gives you... I wish I'd taken Quest Bedroom. Quest Bedroom is so good. I really sat and thought about this. 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? A spooky goose? Yeah, there's a whole ghost in here. hovering above the barrel and there is a fucking like angel of death That's crazy. A ghost. I thought my game was broken and or I was about to be attacked in real life by the Green Reaper. I thought I was done for. I thought I was toast.

That's nice. I'm going to read another question really quick. Yeah, please. Howdy, side-storiers. I'm curious what, if anything, Blueprints reminds you of in terms of other media. The reason I ask is that everyone I talk to has a 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? What does Blueprints 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. Sure. 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 black country. Then 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, petty nobles, nobles take over. 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 revanchist, 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 want to 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 fans. 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 axe. It doesn't feel like a miss of... Like they accidentally had the wrong skull. 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 I'll 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 blue prince. You're the king, right? That is where it goes. You find the crown. In room 46, right? Like, that's like, 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? One of the doors doesn't open up and there's not like...

a loyal military there that can help you expand your power and 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, kind of internecine 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 poorer, 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, I don't know. And that's fine. But that's kind of part of it. That's 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 against yourself and your allies.

And the psychological and emotional suffering is super true. But you kind of go a step above that, and what comes next is not a question it can answer. It can just express the frustration. of a dire political moment. And I think that that is valuable and fun and good, but 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. A hundred percent. Yes, you are a child. And there are some things that you can see that, like,

The great Elzar, is that his name? I said it earlier, I forget. Yeah, it is. 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-fan revolution. Yeah, you're like an antipope. Yeah, you were like an antipope. Exactly. I mean, 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 casus belli or whatever. That's not what the steward does. I mean, do you get... It's interesting given... We do get that there is, like, an active and violent... revolutionary force within the kingdom.

maybe that's what your mom is off doing actually secretly i don't know 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 uh i mean it is 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 very good. I mentioned a couple earlier, just game-wise. like Eidolon big shout out to that I think it unfolds its story in a similar way that is like really really fun to see 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 like That game also does a lot of stuff that's very straightforward, so it's not going to be one-to-one. Yeah, because latent puzzles are so self-contained, and the blueprints are so... Everything kind of relates to the different overarching narrative bits.

It's hard to find something more relevant than what you said earlier of the Pepe Sylvia meme. uh or like yes maybe like oh 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 string to things. Fiat. In that vein, I guess I could say, like, The Conversation starring Gene Hackman. Oh, hell yeah, sure.

Or like, there's a little bit of you feeling like Elliot Gould's character in The Long Goodbye, where you just kind of keep finding out extra things and being like, oh, well, hold on a minute. This changes everything. He owes money to who? You do feel like that type of character while playing these games in a way that's very fun and satisfying. One more question here, and then I'll talk about the last little thing. I don't want to get your opinions on it.

Unless, Kate, to you, 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? It's 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 into that since Keith hasn't done that, but roommate rules. Getting into the gallery, the gallery is just a room with four big weird surrealist paintings on the walls. And then a place you can 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 with 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 bouncing ideas back and forth until we got it, and that felt incredible. I think for me it was solving the safes without

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. And then that becomes limiting in its own weird way. And I think that was the most fun that I had. Um... Mm-hmm.

One that I also really enjoyed is the... It's an annoying puzzle, and it's one you can brute force. But finding the sanctum key at the bottom of the reservoir was so much fun. How did you brute force it? Or how could you brute force it? The way you can... 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. That's definitely part of the puzzle, yeah.

There are a bunch of... uh 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 um 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. Um... 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 sanctum key is in a box with 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. 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, I don't know. Someone hand wrote that, so it is in there. And it's just very satisfying, I guess, when you get to that and you remember those rules that you've been sort of like...

breadcrumbs 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 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 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 it 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 uh room again and realized fuck this was was on red Oh, my God. Yes. 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...

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 particularly stuck with you from the physical buildings you've lived or worked in before? What is the most blue prince-y 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 three-family house. That was obviously only constructed to be a three-family house 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 it was 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. 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 had a... green room in it like you could go to what we called the sun room it was always 110 degrees in there and it was full of fake plants and weird old dolls Uh, it had a, uh, on the top floor was a, uh, we called it the, the puppet room because there was a playroom, but it had a built in puppet theater in the wall. No, thanks. Oh my God. And, um,

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 in 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 uh you could like crawl through from the computer room to the library

That is wild, like a panic tunnel. That is crazy, yeah, like a panic tunnel. Basically, yeah. Wild. Each of the bedrooms, they're not exactly themed bedrooms, but they all have different color palettes and materials. And vibes. Okay, Simon. Because each of my aunts and uncles had a bedroom that was like tailored to them. Like my Uncle Kurt.

who 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 theirs. like riding accoutrement on the walls. Right. It gives you each one step for every horse you've seen that guy. Yeah, yeah. You have four steps because horses have four. Sorry, right? Of course. Of course. Of course. A horse, of course. Yeah.

That's the name of the... The book that you find in that room? Exactly, yeah, yes. It's a creepy basement, too. Like, secret weird rooms in the basement. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. I would say I might... 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. Yeah. Uh, Western also had tunnels like that, I think. Yeah. And I had no idea the same thing happened. Yeah, I didn't know if I... 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? I was the one who was really chill. Did you start with the tunnels? Were they cool? No, I didn't, actually. I couldn't find the entrance. There was no one to ask. I didn't have a lot of friends. I hadn't placed the foundation or drained the phone, so I was kind of hard and didn't have the super sludge humor.

I kept drafting the Dota room, which kind of ate up a lot of my time. Gives you one bottle of Adderall each time you drafted a day. This is also giving I skipped orientation. Oh, buddy, yes I did.

god i think for me that it's something similar which is like i grew up in malls a lot partly from being in new jersey and working in malls and stuff um partly because my dad for a little while there had stores in a couple of the local malls just not anymore but um At those walls, there's, like, big back... Hallways or like one of them There was a mall that'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.

uh if we go down on buff city is one of our patreon only i guess that's not true all of season one is free you should go listen to all season one of buff city all seasons one and two buff city are phenomenal they're so good yeah One is available on our YouTube channel for free right now. You should go listen to it if you listen to nothing else.

A tinyurl.com slash freebluff. Still works. There we go. Love that. And it takes 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 can 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 but it did also have these like outdoor like 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 was the first time I ever saw a rat. Like, it was, like, gross as shit back there. You had to go out there and take out the trash. You had to... Maybe sometimes you were, like, bringing stuff in that you had to bring through the back of the store. It was gross. Anyway.

you have given me a better answer now which is two two jobs that i worked uh one of them it was similar just the back area of a mall uh when i worked at toys r us being able to go through and seeing all the like storage and stuff and all the 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, like, 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 out popcorn. There's not a lot of benefits to any job.

But I do think that 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 delight.

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 back room 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 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, they may be, because 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? The dark tunnel, you can light the candles. 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. Do you know, 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 blue prints. 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, uh in a new room uh 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 one Those part of the 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 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'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,

In fact, let me just read one because I'm sure I can just get a list of all of the parlor puzzles. I'll read the third one so that you get the gist of it. Here we go. For instance, One says, you're in the parlor. The blue box says you are in the parlor. The white box says this box is empty. The black box says 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. Right. 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 this. 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'm at, like, day 53. I haven't pulled every day, but most days. And I think I only have two misses. Interesting. Well done. Let me tell you, the first time I pulled that funeral, I beefed it bad.

Shit, yeah, funeral is right. It felt awful. And then I pulled over the phone for a 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, uh, there are two true boxes in this room. That's the way. 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 Uncle Herbert would want you to do. What would Uncle Herbert want you to do? 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? I don't know. 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. Yeah, I have a spiral 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. Yeah, Baroness's chamber, the lady's chamber, or something like that. Yeah, yeah. It's just, does it ever end? It's a weird spiral. What the fuck does that mean? Does it ever end? So, do you want to know what's behind these two things?

I'm gonna, can I guess? One of them takes you to credits and one of them takes you to a new day. That is effectively right. Yes. Okay. Well, sorry. Sort of, actually. I actually think one of them doesn't take you to a new day. One of them gives you a new cutscene. The black one, it never ends, or there is no end to the journey, 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

It's kind of demanding something of you. 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 into a cutscene it zooms in you open the box the box is empty but if you look in the box I think it shows the spiral. It's like on the top of the, like the under, the inside. Yeah, here, I'll show you a screenshot really quick.

So that doesn't cut away to the next day either. But inside is simply... all right we'll hide it there we go is this is the the kind of knot in the wood looks like a spiral which is great yeah uh the white box is empty by the way um the white box is is the one that says uh there are two true boxes, which of course is true, right? That's a true statement, no matter what, because 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, yeah. I love that you're making, you're deciding which one is true. Effectively. With this choice, right? Like you are effective. Yes, go ahead. Well, because, well, like. I'm going to give you.

You explain more. Please, please, please. The other one has the original copy of the blueprints in it. The... The hand-drawn version of it. Yes. 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 a one more little complication. which is in one of the pages, the little cartoon prince 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 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? So you have basically two options. The white box is the one that's like, there's two true boxes. The blue one is the blueprint's copy, which 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 going to 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 posts about this game? This person over at Aftermath wrote, does blueprints never end?

as an article 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, you keep digging at it, you keep digging at it. Maybe you'll find an answer to a puzzle you already actually solved. You know? But you can do this before you get to the blue world.

you could do this yeah that's right yeah i think that that's true yes yeah yeah 100 you just need to just need to have a lot and 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.

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. 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're two different kind 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, Alright, are you done? Are you satisfied?

It's a weird one. It's a weird one. That rules. I love that. that makes sense that like just looking at what 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 deeply in flux that as a 10-year-old boy you have no way of really impacting besides the material that your 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 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 blueprint I get to say at some point in my life, I'm the rightful heir to this kingdom, and I'm going to challenge this other group.

I guess that's interesting. That's fine. 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 the shit that I've talked about. Like, there's, like, the postgame, and then there's, like, the... post-game you've ascended the throne and then there's 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 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. Housemaster Simon. But I don't think that that's in here. I think the game is a little more open-ended than that, which I think is fun. 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 and 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 gotta tell. 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's a dead end. It's red. Yeah, it's terrible. It's bad. Actually, the real message of the game is 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? 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? White room, white room, white room.

Weight room. Weight room 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. It's on placement. 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 will activate, like when you have the, whenever you draft a... um bedroom you'll get like 10 steps 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 triggers you've set up via you've set up yeah you know

I think another, the other, 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 what 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 crazy. That was the thing I tried to do for a month before the game came out. I 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. 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.

Um, 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 tanker. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just want to be able to pour it out an empty pool and an empty reservoir. No. Okay. 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. You need to have that, you need to move the energy from...

the boiler room into it, and then you need that whole tank plus the other tanks to empty out the reservoir, or to lower the reservoir. I just bought the swimming trunks, I don't know what those do yet, but I assume they can swim in the pool. Boom. It says you need keys, though. I don't understand what it's talking about. Who can know? I kind of had another room thing that I've forgotten, and it's fine. There's so many rooms.

Oh, did either of you... So many rooms. Have either of you done... Maybe not... Okay, wait. You have done laboratory experiments on the computer. Yeah, yes. Okay, so I just remembered part of part of the thing that's not clear in the photo of the um The room. Sorry, not the room. The map. My aquarium map. 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 like, wait, did I miss that they were upgraded? No, it's not that. Okay. Do you know what happens if you succeed at an experiment too many times in a row? No. Does the radiation go up? Do you know what happens when the radiation gets all the way up? Is that what it... Okay, I've been in a... I've been drafting stuff before and I've seen it get wavy when I'm in a draft.

Does it make you get more red rooms? It is one of the coolest, best rewards you could have. When you succeed at seven or eight of them, 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, 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 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, if you want to... Keith and I have 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 x Hunter um Jack and Dre from Front of the Table are also on it um I'm sure if you've just listened to Side Story you're very familiar with with our dear friend Jack and

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 an intro. 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. Cool. Too long.

Too long. We needed it. Sorry to shatter the kayfabe again. We did. We really did. But we've been covering the 2011 Hunter x 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 x Hunter, so I'd really recommend checking that out. You can just look up Sylvie Bullitt 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 that 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 can put those games on one side of a spectrum and like uh the witness on the other and the blueprints is somewhere in the middle you know it is it's funny the the zero escape games how similar they are to blueprints in some ways and in other ways including the vibes totally different Absolutely. The ballpark, yeah.

Keith, where can people find you? You can find me at Keith J. Carberry on Blue Sky, keithjcarberry.contentburger.biz, I think, because of the horrible way that Blue Sky does everything. Sucks. And you can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash runbutton. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back in a couple weeks. Until then, to be continued.