#simon blue prince

[the-bar-sinister]

There he is!! My special little mystery guy!! I love him so much!!

[mushroomlasagna]

Been watching a friend play Blue Prince and it is. a time. I think that kid can digging in the ground for tubers.

[bread-lord-khubz]

happy anniversary of the release my favorite game ever!!!! ily blue prince you continue to bring joy to my life (even if your rng killed my grandma)

[lanathema]

Blue prince clocks part 1

I've been (slowly) making my way through Blue prince, and I think I've found most if not all of the clocks in the house?

Some of them are decent, others are a little odd, and one or two boil my blood just slightly. there are way too many to go through all of them, so I'm just going to do one or two per post and see how that goes. First up! The entrance hall! no spoilers there, if you've even started the game once you've walked right past it.

First off, huge props for making it keep time properly, even in the accelerated passage of time the game operates in for game play convenience. Almost of not all of the Clocks in the game display the accurate in game time, which is more then I can say for a large number of other games I've looked at.

It has 2 weights, which are... very skinny, normally a clock of this size has weights double (or more) the diameter of these ones, even while full of lead or other particularly heavy metals. The weights don't move, but that makes sense game wise because you can spend you can spend however long you like in the mansion on each run and if they did they'd probably end up phasing through the floor.

(^^^^ an example of the skinniest weights I could find for this kind of movement)

Honestly the only Critique I can level at this one is that the pendulum seems to connect really low on the mechanism, on that rounded bit on the bottom. I've never seen something like that before and I have no idea how that would work with an anchor, but it does swing within an acceptable range of motion so honestly? pass on that bit. the house is eclectic enough as is, you're uncle, grandfather, or whoever coming up with a weird new movement is not the most far fetched idea.

Overall I'd give this clock a solid 8 out of 10, it functions, swings, and does the other things you'd expect of a clock. I only wonder how it gets would up between visits cause you can spend weeks if not months exploring the mansion, and it never runs out. Unless Simon lifts the weights himself, Somebody is sneaking about making sure all the clocks are working properly, and I salute whichever brave soul decided that was a good idea in the labyrinth every other clock is found in.

[lanathema]

Blue prince clocks part 2

First actual room, the den! this room had so many different clocks, therefore a lot of fun things to talk about! First off, the simplest;

Two clocks on the same wall set to the same time. not too odd, these could be set to different time zones for easy reference, say if a family member is in another part of the country and you want to easily know if it is a good time to call them or if you're going to be cussed out for waking them up at 3 in the morning. convenient! 9/10 good clocks doing what they do best. Notably these tow (and every other numeral clock in the game I've seen so far) use the actual IV roman numeral for 4, which was not the case for large swaths of clocks produced in Europe, which used IIII instead (the rest of the numerals were the same) . Notably big Ben uses IV, but especially older clocks tend more towards IIII.

Nobody can really agree on the exact reason why, but it is a thing. moving on! The (not really) carriage clock!

On a bookshelf is this glass beauty, who's pendulum does not move, presumably because it was too small to bother animating, but the hands still work. While similar to a mantle clock, this desk clock really gives me carriage clock vibes, which are really cool! They usually wind up in the back, so a lack of winding holes in the front are completely normal. 6/10, triggered a good tangent, but the immobile pendulum is sending me.

This is one I've worked on previously, but there are more fancy looking ones that resemble the in game one better. Carriage clocks were some of the first mobile clocks ever produced, in that they used escapements instead of pendulums for timekeeping and could therefore be used on moving platforms like boats, cars, and namely, carriages! before pocket watches were as reliable and ubiquitous as they became, a portable clock you could take with you was invaluable, and hence the carriage clock was formed! here you can see the escapement in question, just like in a watch it would twist back and forth as the clock ran, independent of gravity.

(the balance in this one is a little off because it has a broken pivot that needs repair, hence it being in my shop) Next up, exactly where it should be, is our first mantle clock!

This thing is tiny, but it looks very well made. numerals are not a requirement for reading a clock accurately, and some watches also go with the nude-faced look. notably I do not see any winding ports on this one though, so I am tempted to call it quartz instead of mechanical, although it is certainly thick enough to house a proper mechanical movement. 7/10, cute, but raises an eyebrow.

yes that is another grandfather clock in the background, but it is identical to the one in the front hall I covered in Part 1. Besides, there is a monster in the room to discuss. The monster.

I hate everything about this clock, and I do not say that lightly. it takes up an entire wall, the numerals are practically overlapping one another in the 7-8 o'clock area, making it much harder then necessary to parse, everything is exposed to the open air, which would make properly maintaining it a nightmare of its own. The gears do nothing as this is quite obviously a cheap quartz movement as nothing else would even be able to fit in the centre with all the rotating gears, two of which would require incredibly complicated holding mechanisms just to let them turn because their middles are holes!

the only thing fitting back there is one of these babies, double A battery not included.

The hands are also ridiculously oversized, they would have to be made out of foam or hooked up to some kind of industrial strength quartz mechanism to even have a chance of working properly. see the little white collars in the above image? that's what normally holds the hands, and you could close a fist almost completely around either one of those mechanisms. 1/10, is technically a clock, and it even (somehow) works in game. Rant over, I'm going to go find any other room in the game to stand in, away from this crime against horology.