They say you can tell a lot about a person based on their favorite joke, although I hope that’s not the case, because mine goes a little something like this:
A guy dies and opens his eyes to find himself sitting in a circle of people in folding chairs, surrounded by flames. A red dude with horns and hooves steps into the circle and says, “Hi, I’m the Devil, and just to let you know, things here in Hell don’t work quite the way you might have assumed they would.”
The guy breathes a sigh of relief, thinking this doesn’t seem all that bad. But then Satan says, “First things first, everyone, let’s go around the circle so we can introduce ourselves and share one interesting fact about our lives.”
So, what interesting fact would I share if damned to an eternity of forced extroversion and social interaction? I dunno. I’d probably start with this: I have a long-running chat with my friend Lauren that’s composed mostly of sharing our daily results from our mutual favorite online puzzles. You know: Parseword, Hank Green’s 4x3, Uncrossy, Waffle, Numble, Stackdown, that sort of thing. It’s a way of touching base every day even if neither of us feels like talking, and it’s a good reminder to get some mental exercise in.
A while back, as we were talking about puzzles, I nudged Lauren outside of her comfort zone to try a new video game I’m obsessed with, with the hook that it involves a lot of the sort of lateral thinking we both enjoy practicing, but also because I knew her kid would love it as much as I do. A summer sale clinched the deal, and for the next few weeks, our entire mode of conversation shifted as we did our best to dance around the details of the game to avoid spoilers while also supporting each other’s exploration.
Blue Prince is a hard game to describe, for any number of reasons. Remember Myst, the game from 1993 that pretty much single-handedly created the market for CD‑ROM drives? OK, imagine if that game were actually as good as you remember it being. (It isn’t.)
Bottom line: Blue Prince completely defies any attempts at cramming it into a genre-shaped box. At gunpoint, though, I’d have to categorize it as a roguelike puzzle game inspired by the art of Christopher Manson, with strategy and resource-management elements reminiscent of board games like Catan, some mechanisms that evoke more story-driven tabletop RPGs, and a strong drafting mechanic borrowed from collectible card games. Its title is even a bit of a multi-layered play on words, meant to evoke the blueprints that affect so much of the gameplay.
Here’s the problem with that introduction to the basics of Blue Prince, though: if you’re not a gamer, everything I just said makes me sound like I’m having a stroke. And if you are a gamer, everything I just said makes me sound like I’m having a stroke while tripping on acid. Like . . . all of those words make perfect sense, but not in that order.
A slightly less confusing description would be this: Your great-uncle has died, and he left you his estate in his will, with the condition that you must find the 46th room in this 45-room manor before taking ownership of it. You discover rooms by opening shut (and sometimes locked) doors, which triggers a draft of three seemingly random cards from which you pick to determine what room is on the other side of the door. Some rooms have one point of ingress and egress, some two, some three, and rarely four (the last of which are costly to unlock), and you have to think about how those entrances and exits line up with rooms you’ve already placed.
If you don’t find Room 46 in one day (you won’t; trust me), you’re evicted to a tent pitched on the estate grounds, where you have to camp until morning. Then you start over, mostly from scratch, the next day. Much of what you bring with you from one play session to the next is knowledge, understanding, and whatever notes you’ve managed to scribble in the notebook you keep to track your conspiracies and hints and so forth.
It’s the sort of game that makes you mutter to yourself, “Aha! I’ve unlocked Her Ladyship’s Chamber today! If I can just draft the office before I run out of steps or gems or keys, I can finally solve that chess puzzle under the reservoir below the manor and figure out what the heck it does! I just need to find a banana or apple first.”
But what does any of that have to do with audiophilia? There are two connections, actually: one literal, one more metaphorical.
It was Penelope Jane, my American/English/French bully-mix puppy, who first noticed the literal connection. Penny is an audiophile—and no, I’m not even slightly kidding when I say that. But that, perhaps, is a story for another day.
Penny took a lot of interest in the game during my first few days with it, focusing on it with the sort of attention she normally reserves for Hiroshi Yoshimura albums, nature livestreams, and agility-course competition videos. Within a week or so, though, she’d largely lost interest in the game. Or so I thought. I was playing one night after her mom had gone to bed, and suddenly Penelope opened her eyes, lifted her massive cranium from out of my lap, and fixated on the screen with rapt attention.
What struck me as weird about that at first was that she was stone-cold asleep when I turned the key that opened the door that led to the room that grabbed her attention. What was it that roused her from her slumber?
You’ve probably already figured this out, haven’t you? It was the sound. Every room in the game has its own distinct sonic fingerprint, from your footfalls on the varied surfaces to the cumulative energy of the space itself, down to any mechanical noises that may or may not be present in any given space. By and large, once Penny has internalized the sonic flavor of a room, she loses interest in it, and she only takes interest in the game when I venture outside the manor into the grounds around it. Nature sounds apparently never get boring.
Her appreciation for the sound design of the game really enhanced my appreciation for the same. Which is all the more surprising when you consider that Blue Prince was largely the work of one man, Tonda Ros—not a game developer, mind you, but a filmmaker who was inspired by Indie Game: The Movie to try his hand at development over the course of eight years, just to get some of the crazy interactive ideas in his head out into the world.
In other words, this is not a AAA game developed by a massive studio with a budget of a billion dollars or more (and yes, if you’re not a gamer, it might surprise you to discover that billion-dollar budgets are a thing, even before marketing costs are factored in).
That realization changed the way I interacted with Blue Prince, drawing me out of my narrow focus on which cards I was dealt and how many steps I had left before bedtime and immersing me more in the highly stylized reality of the world itself. I started noticing just how much the sound was responsible for driving the mood of the experience, especially the brooding, atmospheric, dark-post-jazz Trigg & Gusset score, which owes so much to the work of Jonny Greenwood, especially the score for There Will Be Blood, yet manages to be completely its own thing.
The way the score mixes with the incidental sounds is also simply perfect, although there was a hot minute there when I was willing to criticize one element of the sound design I’ve since grown to love.
“If this game were mixed in surround sound, or even Atmos,” I said to my wife one evening as I was making my way down to the fallout shelter I’d built that day to shield me from the negative consequences of red rooms (just roll with it; it would take me 5000 words to fully explain what that means), “it would literally be the perfect game. Like, legitimately literally perfect.”
“I mean . . .” she said, in that way that lets me know she’s a little scared the next thing out of her mouth is going to sound silly, “won’t the home-theater system do that thing that makes stereo into surround sound? Dolby Logical 2D/4Z something-or-other? Does that only work on movies and music?”
Sigh.
I was ashamed of myself for not thinking of that during any of the numerous times I’d crossed the bridge from the main house to the outbuilding and felt a brief moment of disappointment when the sound of the burbling creek didn’t move behind me but just sort of evaporated to the sides of my head. But to be fair, I’m so accustomed to games being on the bleeding edge of immersive audio technology that I haven’t needed to upmix the audio output of a PlayStation game since sometime around the release of God of War—the first one, mind you, from 2005, not the 2018 relaunch or the upcoming remake.
“It’s called Dolby Surround,” I said.
“No, no, not the old LaserDisc one. The new one. Does this receiver not do the new one?”
“We’ve looped back around to the beginning in terms of the nomenclature,” I shot back. “It’s just called Dolby Surround again.”
“That’s not confusing or anything.”
And she had a point. But I turned on Dolby Surround anyway . . . and then turned it back off within 30 seconds. The thing is, Blue Prince’s elegant stereo mix doesn’t seem to be a budget limitation, but rather an aesthetic choice. Extending it into the Y and Z axes destroys so much of the magic. The thoughtful and deliberately stereo soundscape is a perfect audio complement to the game’s 3D-rendered-but-flat-shaded graphics, which evoke a sort of color version of the video for “Take on Me.”
And upon that realization, I was prepared to declare Blue Prince the perfect game once and for all. But as it turns out, my evolving perspective on the game hadn’t reached its final form yet. Far from it, in fact. And this is where we take the whole audiophile hook of Blue Prince from the literal to the more metaphorical connection I promised above. And this may all seem a little tenuous at first, but it’s actually the reason I wanted to write this screed.
When Lauren and I started playing the game, we both took it at face value that this was a teleological game. It’s right there in the letter you first read before you begin exploring the manor. There is a defined end goal. Once you find the 46th room, you’ve achieved that goal. You’ve won. Congrats. You’re all smart and stuff. The house is yours. Roll end credits. Move on to the next game. Or maybe start over from scratch to complete some side quests you missed the first time around. My wife is currently on her sixth playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 and can tell you a lot about that approach.
If you’re already a week or so into the game, what I’m about to say may seem like a spoiler, although I promise you it’s not. The ending of Blue Prince—this mysterious, convoluted, perplexing goal you’ve been working toward, this compulsion that’s caused you to fill pages and pages of Field Notes with ramblings and scribblings and diagrams and color-coded lists of fuse-box lights—is really just the beginning.
I started to get a sense of this as I was approaching “the end.” I knew which rooms I needed to get to and through to find Room 46, or at least I thought I did; I just assumed—given how many mysteries remained—that I was a long way from finding some essential piece of the puzzle before I could put it all together.
And then, one evening, Lauren messaged me, “Welp. We got into Room 46. The manor is ours.”
And she refused to say anything else.
I’d just assumed that she and her son had spent many more hours playing the game than I had—or were simply way smarter than I am—because we’d started playing within a few days of one another. But the next time I played, all of the pieces fell into place for me to make my way into Room 46 myself, and that’s when I discovered that the ending of this complex puzzle truly is just the beginning.
But that’s only true if you change your perspective. It’s only true if you allow your attitudes to shift from goal orientation into something more open-ended and even more lateral. It’s only true if you stop focusing all of your energies on figuring out elusive game mechanics and allow yourself to get wrapped up in the larger family mysteries and geopolitical conspiracies that feel like so much window dressing when you first start playing the game.
Maybe I wouldn’t have gone here had my brain not already concocted such a strong connection between Blue Prince and the experience of sound, but I can’t help comparing it to what happens when you’ve finished building a good hi‑fi system.
Or, I should say, what I think should happen when you’ve finished building a good hi‑fi system.
What’s the goal of a stereo system, after all? The real goal? The meta, if you will? In my opinion, it should be to deliver sound from the sources that interest you, as neutrally as possible, with the full audible spectrum covered. Good dynamics are a must, as are good imaging and soundstaging, low noise, inaudible distortion, and the elimination (or at least minimization) of distractions.
But that’s not how we treat things, is it? I often get emails from readers asking for shopping advice, enticed perhaps by the listening impressions detailed in my latest review. And I take a sort of heuristic approach to dividing these interlocutors into one of two categories.
It doesn’t take long to figure out whether I’m dealing with someone who’s legitimately distracted by some performance limitation of their system and looking for advice on how to solve it on the one hand, or, on the other hand, someone who’s simply bought into the myth that there’s always something greener on the other side of that hill, and that next gear purchase might be the one to finally unlock sonic bliss.
Much like Blue Prince, assembling a high-fidelity sound system starts as a teleological process and at some point morphs into something more dialectical. By that, I mean once you have a system that fits the criteria I laid out above—it plays the sources you want to play, and it sounds damned good doing it—you can technically hang up your Mastercard and enjoy your music until a power supply kerflooeys or an amp craps the bed or lightning runs in on a temporarily unprotected circuit and wipes out your media PC. Or until, perhaps, you decide you want to dabble in a source you’ve never really had much interest in before.
Notice, though, that I said, “You can.” Not that you have to. The more passionate you are about hi‑fi, the more it makes sense that if you have some walking-around money burning a hole in your pocket, you want to blow it on your hobby.
But does that necessarily have to be on a new DAC or amp or preamp, assuming the one you already have works just fine? Of course it doesn’t. There are all sorts of ways to engage with your sound system that don’t involve unnecessary upgrades of gear you already own.
And to be clear: they can involve unnecessary gear upgrades if you want them to. My livelihood is somewhat dependent upon enough of you buying gear you don’t really need, so I’d be shooting myself in the foot if I convinced you to never buy a component ever again just for the sheer dopamine hit of acquiring a shiny new thing.
What I’m saying, though, is that there are all sorts of ways to explore new highways and byways on your audiophile journey that don’t involve swapping your amp out for one that has an additional 0 on the end of its MSRP.
A $50 smart lighting dimmer, for example, will enhance your enjoyment of your listening room far more than a $5000 DAC will. At least in my experience.
For that matter, have you put any thought into your seating? It can make a massive difference in your listening enjoyment, and it’s an aspect of the listening room that we rarely talk about. Especially if, like me, your legs go all the way to the ground and you find most human-sized seating woefully uncomfortable.
And what about the room itself? If you’re reading SoundStage! Access, I’m going to guess you don’t have a lot of dough to drop on acoustical treatments, although those are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time, contrary to literally everything else in the world.
But you don’t actually have to buy even the more affordable prefab acoustical treatments to improve the acoustics of your room. In fact, I’d argue that the best place to spend your money when it comes to acoustical treatment is the $75 it costs to pick up the fourth edition of Floyd Toole’s Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers, Rooms and Headphones, even if you only intend to read chapter 12. Absorb the knowledge therein, and you’ll find that you can solve a lot of problems just with the judicious placement of bookshelves, furniture, floor coverings, draperies, and some DIY treatments made from $25 Quikrete form tubes, some fabric or wallpaper, and a bit of spray adhesive. (Dr. Toole’s book even shows you right where to place the latter for full effect.)
More than anything else, though, I think the biggest impact you can have on your audiophile journey—after you’ve finished the necessarily teleological bit, of course—is deepening your understanding of how this stuff actually works.
Internalize Ohm’s law. Meditate on it. In the words of Jeffrey Lebowski (the Big Lebowski, that is, not the Dude), tattoo it on your forehead. Understand the fact that if you’re legitimately hearing differences between two competent class-AB amplifiers, it’s probably due to their interaction with your speakers. Make future purchasing decisions, if any, accordingly.
Knowing is half the battle, as they used to say at the end of every episode of G.I. Joe. But learning is, in my experience, at least three-quarters of the journey. Knowledge is an end. Learning is the means to that end. But it can become an experience to appreciate in and of itself.
When you understand how this stuff works, you’re no longer a slave to the impulse to upgrade that’s baked into our consumerist culture. You can upgrade on your own terms, in a much more informed manner.
And much like I’ve done with vinyl over the past few years—which, if I’m being honest, was a journey I started at Doug Schneider’s prompting just so I could better inform my readers, not due to any real interest on my part, at least not at first—you might find that the process of learning, of discovery, of increased understanding takes you down avenues you didn’t even know were there to explore.
At some point, I imagine, I’ll stop playing Blue Prince. Not that I’m confident I’ll ever solve every puzzle or uncover every clue about the family drama or political intrigue at the center of the entire game, mind you. Tonda Ros has said, “There are certainly mysteries still in the game, and there will probably always be some mysteries in the game. And in order to preserve that mystery, I will probably never fully acknowledge whether or not everything has been solved.”
And I hope he doesn’t. But a little over a month into exploring the game, I’m starting to get the sense that I’m maybe another two or three months away from reaching the point of diminishing returns, where the effort required to piece together new threads of half-formed hypotheses is outweighed by my itch to dig into one of the other games I bought during last year’s Steam Summer Sale but have yet to even install.
I’ll say this, though: even if I’m done with Blue Prince by the time this story is published, I don’t think it’ll ever quite be done with me. The game has changed my perspective on a lot of things that have nothing to do with gaming. It has changed my perspective on my relationship with my dad, with whom I don’t have a lot of time left. And with my mother, whom I lost 20 years ago this year.
And, as I said above, it’s changed my perspective on this hi-fi pursuit that is so important to me that I made a career out of it.
But more than just about anything else, it has made me 100-percent certain that my puppy is an audiophile. I’m really serious about that. I’m going to be dining out on the story behind that realization for years to come. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll tell it in full here soon.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
