I’m not entirely convinced Dogubomb didn’t develop Blue Prince as a personal gift to me, specifically. This exceedingly clever puzzler mixes together a shortlist of my top game genres and concepts: First-person puzzling with a straightforward facade that hides a seemingly bottomless pit of secrets, roguelite runs that perfectly balance permanent improvements with the growth of your own skills, drafting mechanics that capitalize on the best parts of deckbuilders without the baggage that comes with actually being one, and even tile-based map building reminiscent of my favorite board game, Carcassone. Even if there are things in that pile of Tom Stuff that don’t excite you as much as they do me, the combination comes together beautifully. I’m still rabidly peeling back the layers of this onion after dozens of hours, but I’m already certain Blue Prince has secured its place as an all-time puzzle great.
You play as Simon, a teenage boy who has inherited the stately mansion of his well-respected and somewhat eccentric great uncle, but may only claim that inheritance if he can figure out how to navigate the ever-shifting halls of the estate in order to find a hidden 46th room. It’s a fairly simple setup at the start (apart from the whole M.C. Escher shifting house thing), and while there are plenty of helpful tips scattered around for you to find, you are largely just set loose to see what you can piece together for yourself. It’s a great foundation, because while you don’t always know what the next step may be, your goals are always clear enough that I never felt like I was just wandering around in the dark.
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You probably will feel like you are wandering around in circles from time to time, though. The meat of Blue Prince is the drafting mechanic you use to explore the house: You start each day with a limited number of “steps” that are spent whenever you go through a door, and each time you open a new one you are given three options for which of the mansion’s many unique rooms will be on the other side. That means you are filling out the nine-by-five room floorplan differently every single time, connecting doorways and trying not to hit dead ends as you find helpful items and invaluable clues along the way. It may sound like nothing too outside the box, but it’s a real delight to slowly gain mastery over this system.
Some rooms are just simple hallways, while others play more varied roles that are split into colored categories based on type. For example, purple bedrooms often give you additional steps when entered, yellow shops can sell helpful items if you’ve picked up enough coins to buy them, and red rooms have negative effects (like obscuring your draft options) that could throw a wrench in your plans. Certain rooms may only appear when specific conditions are met, too, such as when you are drafting on the edges of the house or once you get deep enough in. It was fun to figure out which should be my go-to rooms early on in order to set myself up for success later, gathering items like keys to unlock doors or gems that can be spent to draft special rooms, and then using that prep work to make targeted dives toward a room or lead I was eager to hunt down.
It’s a real delight to slowly gain mastery over the drafting system.
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The actual “puzzles” take on a variety of different forms within those rooms, but all of them are as entertaining as they are devilish to solve. Some have very straightforward math or logic problems, there are a few literal puzzle boxes to find, and others require a slightly more complicated combination of button pushes or lever pulls to solve whatever that room is doing. But fully self-contained challenges like that are side dishes to what Blue Prince truly has to offer, and the most interesting stuff feels closer to incredible first-person puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds. It asks you to really look at the world around you, take notes on what you find, and then use that knowledge to make connections where you can – and it does so in that expert way where something can feel completely cryptic at the outset and then brilliantly achievable when you finally crack it. That might mean looking through documents to find the combination to a safe, decoding why certain objects are where they are, or using the function of a specific room to get past an obstacle somewhere else.
That last part can lead to the only real point of frustration I found with Blue Prince, however, which is that the best-laid floorplans of house mice and men can come crashing down with a few bad draws. Don’t get me wrong, there are very real and effective ways to help mitigate the randomness of which rooms are offered to you – both in terms of learning what to prioritize and when you should or shouldn’t take risks, as well as in permanent upgrades I won’t spoil that can make future runs more consistent. But, plain and simple, sometimes you will need a room that lets you turn left, do everything in your power to set yourself up to get it (including collecting dice that let you reroll the rooms you draw), and still be as stuck as Zoolander when you’re ultimately given your options. Those bad breaks are infrequent, but it still stings when an otherwise-good run ends because you just never saw the room you were looking for.
(Tangentially, I also really wish you could save and quit mid-run without having to cut your progress short by ending your current day entirely, or at the very least that opening the menu stopped the in-game clock from ticking. Runs can often stretch over an hour, which makes dipping in and out of Blue Prince a hard proposition – though this is only really a problem since I was playing on a desktop PC, as consoles and even the Steam Deck would let you suspend it if you need to go do something else.)
There is so much to discover that any given run is rarely a waste of time.
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Thankfully, any pain from that randomness is mitigated by the fact that there is just so much to discover here that a given run is rarely a waste of time. You may not have been able to draft that specific combination of rooms you were after or reach that certain square you wanted to, but odds are you still entered some new rooms along the way, and doing so almost always added to the growing list of mysteries I have jotted down across a pile of handwritten notes. “Beating” Blue Prince took me about 15 hours, and getting to that 46th room is absolutely a satisfying puzzle to solve on its own, but I also have far more goals now than I did when I first set out. There are safes to open, doors to unlock, books and letters to read, clues to decipher, and loads of lore to uncover.
It’s impressive how all of these optional puzzles are woven into and around the path of the “main” one – some are hiding in plain sight from the first minute, just waiting for you to realize they are important, while others drop an unassuming string of crumbs in your way that lead down a deep and unexpected rabbit hole when followed.
Blue Prince was an incredibly difficult game to talk about with friends who were also playing because the randomness of the drafting mechanic, combined with your own personal sense of curiosity, can send two players down very different paths. One time when I was around five hours in, I excitedly mentioned I’d unlocked something to a friend who had already played 40, only to learn they hadn’t even found that thing yet. And yet, this fractal abode doesn’t frustrate by randomly withholding things either, because clues can often be found in multiple forms or places; Once again, you’re always making progress toward something.
As you do get deeper, Blue Prince’s initially light-touch story also begins to shift more directly into the spotlight. Discovering more about both your character’s great uncle and the larger history of their family starts off as a little fun set dressing, but it eventually becomes as rich and compelling a reason to keep playing as any puzzle. The worldbuilding here is doled out with a patience I’m not used to seeing, with tons to learn about your relatives, the manor, and the nation it’s located in, but none of that is ever forced down your throat. That made anything I could glean about important historical events or complex geopolitics feel like a win that would almost always help me solve future mysteries, not just some “lore” to read about in books or letters and then move on from.
Still avoiding spoilers like laser tripwires in a Mission Impossible trap, that story and its themes smartly tie into your actions in a way few games are able to pull off so successfully. Piecing together the messy history of an extended and sometimes estranged family is rarely a linear process - Simon wanders through the house he has suddenly inherited finding bits of information told from conflicting points of view, and often in the entirely wrong order. Trying to make all of the right connections as he goes from a boy simply solving a fun puzzle so he can win a prize to one who understands the real reward this mansion holds reflected my own journey with Blue Prince, which is the sort of subtle brilliance you don’t see in many games.
