Playstation, Xbox,  PC, Steam Deck
$29.99 (releasing April 10)
Dogubomb

Blue Prince is a startlingly original puzzle game that marries compulsive roguelike mechanics with exceptional art and storytelling at an incredible scale. It begins with your arrival at the Mount Holly estate, a sprawling mansion owned by the late Herbert S. Sinclair. You’re his grandnephew and if you can find the 46th room of the building, you’ll receive it all.

Now, some will say you should play this game completely blind – in effect, that you should skip their review. It’s true that there is an intense delight in discovering the world and mechanics of Blue Prince, and if you want to preserve that in its entirety, you should return here later. But before you leave, I can reassure you of two things. 

First, there are no jump scares or horror in Blue Prince. No twitch reflexes are required, nor any platforming, and there’s zero time pressure. To be fair, I’ve only played it for twenty hours; it’s possible these things might creep in later, but I really doubt it. Second, I won’t reveal any puzzle solutions, or anything from later in the game. I’ll be focusing on the game and puzzle design, and while I talk about the story in a general sense, that’s because it deserves critical appraisal. So with all that said…

The main activity in Blue Prince is exploring the mansion’s 5×9 grid of rooms. Every time you open a door, you have a choice of three rooms to “draft” – that is, to add to the mansion. Choosing a closet will offer two useful items but zero further exits, while a bedroom might offer one further exit and give you two additional “steps” (steps are consumed every time you move between rooms).

If you don’t like the look of your choices, too bad: you can’t back out after you’ve tried to open a door. The challenge, then, is drafting a network of rooms that gives you both the route and the tools to reach the antechamber to the 46th room, at the north end of the mansion.

There are many, many rooms to discover along the way, all gorgeously rendered in the game’s cel shaded art style and lushly filled with furniture and knick-knacks. Some are homely, some are grand, and some are positively eerie. Just wandering through the mansion is deeply atmospheric, the closest we’ve gotten to Susanna Clarke’s endless, shapeshifting world of Piranesi.

Rooms often have notes, pictures, and newspaper clippings. These are all illustrated beautifully, with spare yet crafted prose. This is not a hunt-the-object game where you poke through endless drawers and cupboards, though. Things you can collect or interact with are clearly marked, and paying attention is rewarded but not absolutely essential. 

While rooms all have the same square footprint and are compact enough to be run through in a couple of seconds, they’re characterful and unique. Even identical copies of the same room “type” can look quite different depending on their placement in the mansion, their combinatorial possibilities reminiscent of the old Hotel Magritte screensaver. 

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of things to collect. The first are consumables: gold buys things from shops; keys unlock doors; gems draft special rooms (e.g. hallways with multiple exits); food grants extra steps; and dice refresh your choices of rooms to draft.

The second are items you can keep, like a spade for digging into piles of dirt that can contain useful things, or a sleeping mask that grants five additional steps every time you enter a new bedroom. Again, there are many, many items.

Some rooms are explicitly marked out as containing puzzles: the parlour hosts a logic puzzle, while the billiard room has… something else. Solving them gives you a modest reward. The impressive thing is that these puzzles never seem to repeat and get slightly tougher every time you’re successful, to the point of becoming really quite tricky.

Rooms can also contain environmental puzzles: pulling levers on machinery, activating switches, and the like. These aren’t too hard providing you don’t overlook the instructions usually posted nearby, like I once did.

As you move further north into the mansion, things become trickier: more doors are locked, rooms seem to cost more gems, your step count dwindles. Drafting becomes an exercise in trade-offs: do you choose a room with certain rewards but heads in the wrong direction or a garden that’ll make future gardens cheaper to draft? These choices are influenced by your ever-changing situation: the chapel costs gold on every entry, but that’s not a problem if you have no money.

Eventually, you can’t continue. Sometimes it’s when you’ve run out of steps, but more often it’s because you’ve literally hit a dead end and there are no more doors to draft from. Since Blue Prince is a roguelike, this is perfectly fine and normal – you just start a new “run” the next day with an empty mansion and empty pockets.

But even after hitting a wall, it’s still worth exploring. I’d often backtrack through rooms to try using new items, and the mansion is only part of the Mount Holly estate…

All this would be interesting enough, but the game contains systems layered upon systems. To take just one early example, rooms interact with each other in obvious and bizarre ways, lending a whole new dimension to the ability to place rooms manually versus their static placement in more conventional puzzle games.

While it can be difficult to figure out the function of some rooms, there are always clues. Sometimes I’d solve a puzzle on a hunch then read a note literally spelling out the solution a few runs later. Blue Prince is unusually generous in giving puzzle purists the space to do everything from scratch while happily lending a hand to anyone stuck. It’s one of the most subtle and elegant hint systems I’ve seen. In fact, the game is so generous that there are apparently no individual puzzles that absolutely require solving in order to reach the 46th room; there are always alternate paths, even if that means starting a new run.  

As with other roguelikes, you can unlock persistent upgrades that smooth over repetitive parts of the game. Behind these overt incremental assists, it’s also clear that Blue Prince tips its scales away from pure randomness, pulling you toward your quest northwards. Yes, you get better at picking rooms and understanding systems, but it gives you better or worse rooms and items whenever it likes.

This returns us to Blue Prince’s slot machine-like core, where there’s always a chance you might get just the room you need, or even better, something you’ve never seen before. This is so powerful that I repeatedly blew past whatever mental time limits I set for playing, the pull of “one more room” and “one more run” just as addictive as Civilization’s “one more turn”. I personally try to stay away from these mechanics because I don’t like what they do to me. I shudder to think how they could supercharge builders like Dorfromantik, Carcassonne, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig. It’s as if someone took the mechanics from Candy Crush and used them for good.

Absent its story, Blue Prince would resemble these games much more closely. Inscryption, another excellent puzzle game, also has a story and shares quite a lot with Blue Prince besides: they both have addictive roguelike deck-builder mechanics that depend heavily on luck, and they’re both stuffed with environmental puzzles. But while Inscryption’s story unfolds linearly outside of its main card game, Blue Prince’s story is non-linear. There are a few cutscenes, all very atmospheric and uncommonly well-edited, but the story mostly is told through notes, books, photos, and other bits and pieces scattered across all the rooms. Crucially, the order in which you encounter these fragments is semi-randomised, based on what rooms you’re presented with and draft, and what you notice inside them. 

To press the point, while Blue Prince’s story is non-linear, it isn’t procedural. The gameplay is procedural, but the words on the notes and newspaper clippings are fixed. This enables a much greater degree of specificity in storytelling and worldbuilding, but ensuring it’s at all comprehensible when people can encounter it in any order is deeply impressive. There’s a reason why non-linear hypertext and experimental fiction isn’t very popular – it’s really hard to do well, Inkle‘s games being a notable exception.

None of this would matter unless the story was any good. Fortunately, what initially looked like a cliched tale ended up becoming a far more complex picture of obsession.  

Perhaps this isn’t surprising in a game where a mysterious man has designed a fiendish series of puzzles for his grandnephew (the classic narrative strategy of “these are puzzles because they were designed as such”) but the story is as much about the playing of games as it is about the person who designed them. It’s about how obsessions are indulged by those willing to take advantage. It’s about the expectations we place upon ourselves and others. It’s even about generational trauma. Others will read the story differently, and I’ll admit I haven’t seen all of it – I don’t think anyone has, yet – but it’s sophisticated enough that you can read plenty into it.

The story is most definitely not about the actual functioning of the mansion. Viewfinder, a technically wondrous puzzle game, was hurt by its impulse to rationalise itself. By accepting magic as a natural part of its world, Blue Prince is much more like Professor Layton or Myst, or Lorelei and the Laser Eyes‘ stylish magic realism. 

The theme of obsession threads into the gameplay. My notes file was bursting at the seams as I tracked half a dozen mysteries at once. Solving some of these more diffuse puzzles required testing and discarding hypotheses, and wandering through the mansion across multiple runs. I have several unfinished mysteries that would take many more runs to completely unravel, and those are just the ones I’m aware of. A downside of their sheer quantity and abstraction is that I was sometimes unsure whether a particular mystery was solvable given the information I had, or if I needed to pull the “new room” slot machine lever a few dozen more times.  

Blue Prince’s scale is so massive that some reviewers are still making major discoveries even after clocking hundreds of hours. I’ve designed alternate reality games like Perplex City with hundreds of interlocking real world and online puzzles that took years to solve, so I recognise how Blue Prince has distributed its clues across its many environments. What’s amazing is how they interlock with the game’s semi-randomised systems – systems that themselves are alterable.

When I think of excellent story-based puzzle games, Return of the Obra Dinn leaps to mind. The downside of Blue Prince’s aleatory, chance-based systems is that it lacks the hard clarity of Obra Dinn’s deduction-based tableaux. Randomisation can threaten the integrity of the player experience, and I suspect many players will process the story more as a vibe than anything coherent. Waiting for a crucial item or room to appear so you can progress one of the many mysteries can feel like wasted time, and the hidden steering can encourage bad habits. Why figure out a system when you suspect the game will tell you the solution if you grind long enough? 

But the joy of discovering new rooms, of encountering and understanding new systems, is so intense, especially at the start, that it’s hard to fault the roll of the dice. The same steering that’s a little too helpful also compensates for the shortcomings of chance. More than once, an extra hit of story made up for an otherwise fruitless run. 

Towards the end of the game, I’d had such bad luck that I messaged a fellow reviewer despairing I was going to finish in time. In my very next run, I drafted rooms all the way to the antechamber, solved several major mysteries, and unlocked the 46th room, all in one go. It was such an unbelievable rush, it perfectly encapsulated Blue Prince’s dance on the knife edge between chance and control.

It took me 17 hours to roll the credits. Others have spent three times as long without reaching the “end”, though they’ve made more progress on other puzzles. When I return, I know there’s still plenty to discover.

Though Blue Prince is about obsession and games without end, it has at least one satisfying end. You can stop playing, if you like. But if you choose to continue, it has a sense of humour about itself. It knows that, after all, it’s only a game.

I played on Steam Deck with a review key from Raw Fury, the publisher. Usually I buy games myself or have access because I’m judging them for awards. This is an exception: I really wanted to write about it and I’ll be travelling during its launch. I realised the timing issue quite late, so I only had a few days to play after receiving access last week.