Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread.

I beat Blue Prince this weekend! Yes, I had a lot of help from guides, and yes, there’s an exhausting-looking postgame, and yes, it felt a bit anticlimactic when you haven’t really grokked the overarching plot. I don’t care. I beat it. And with my Donkey Kong Bananza finally out, I think I’m ready to finally start Alan Wake 2.

It wasn’t easy beating Blue Prince, though. Much of the trouble, for me, comes from the fact that it’s a roguelike. You have to solve the puzzles in a big, sprawling mansion, but because you draft the rooms in the mansion yourself—and because you can only draft rooms in a pool that changes with every in-game day—it’s extremely easy for one of those days to wind up entirely pointless. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of puzzles, but almost all of them are dependent on things largely out of your control. This can include needing to have two rooms in the pool, needing to draft two rooms next to each other, needing a room solely because you need to have it to unlock another room, needing clues for one room’s puzzles that are scattered between one or several other rooms, needing specific items for one room that are only found somewhere else, needing rooms that can only be drafted in a specific part of the blueprint, and needing a permanent upgrade that’s the reward for an entirely different puzzle. It is overwhelming at times, and at a certain point can just feel too tiring for the satisfaction to come through.

Though sometimes that does come through, and you actually get not just one, but several good die rolls. And thanks to having preplanned knowledge of what I wanted to get, I could do my best to build better setups. It meant that there were a number of in-game days, at least three, where I managed to achieve more than one milestone at once. Maybe I’d find a Wrench that made certain rooms more likely to appear at the same time that I found at least one of those rooms for the first time. Maybe I’d get the blueprints for totally different rooms. Or maybe I’d manage to reach an illusive room, only to find a key, only to find additional puzzles for the critical room it unlocked. Far from the many, many runs of Blue Prince where nothing got done in what was well and truly an actual waste of time, these felt empowering and exciting. And I felt proud for being smart enough to plan this strategy, since I was still the person doing the drafting.

This experience is not new to Blue Prince. I have found it every time I’ve played a game in the roguelike genre, whether this, Hades, or Balatro. In fact, it’s a core appeal of the genre. These are games that dole out content randomly and expect you to react to that random allotment. Sometimes that means you get a bad hand, and that sucks, but sometimes you get instances in which two or more boons or items or powers or whatever synergize. It can feel absolutely incredible because they’re unexpected, sometimes rare, but give an incredible sense of progression or empowerment. I don’t remember everything (almost anything) that happened on Day 81 of Blue Prince, but it clearly went so well that it was important enough for me to screenshot. And that’s today’s prompt: if you remember, tell us about a run in a roguelike that went incredibly well for you. I’d love to hear about your luckiest gamble and your best sudden burst of progress.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend? And just as always, be sure to read Lily-Bones’ latest Game News Roundup!