Games like Blue Prince make me wary. With a 90+ rating on Metacritic, this is a game that has met with widespread critical and mass approval, yet it left me feeling a little bit underwhelmed. Blue Prince is a puzzle game first and foremost, presented in the form of an exploration and walking simulator that uses random tile placement as its core mechanic. If you’ve read all of the glowing opinions already, let me temper your enthusiasm just a little bit.
Blue Prince is set in a mansion that has exactly 45 known rooms, and one secret, super special 46th room. The conceit of the whole game is that our unnamed character has been bequeathed this mansion by a mysterious uncle, but only on condition that they explore the mansion until the 46th room is discovered. The twist? Well, this is no ordinary mansion, and every day, the rooms will change layout completely, with the player drafting from three choices (on most occasions) as they trigger each exit of an existing room.
This puzzle is an intriguing and satisfying one. You can reach what Blue Prince calls “The Antechamber” quite easily, but early in the game the room simply won’t open. To access it, you’ll need to solve several of Blue Prince’s sub-puzzles and mini-quest lines. Without being so specific as to spoil anything, these include puzzles that link power from one room to another, puzzles that involve keycards and some that involve secret rooms and permanent new routes through the mansion.
You have a limited number of steps each day, and when those steps run out, so will your run. On some occasions, it won’t actually be the amount of walking you need to do that ends the run, rather, it might end simply because you run out of things to do — either because you don’t choose rooms that have appropriate puzzles in them, or because you actually run out of open doorways through which to make progress.
During your earliest days in Blue Prince, you’ll still be learning the game and working out the quirks that each room brings, and some rooms are strictly better than others. Bedrooms (with a purple border) generally increase your step count but often feature dead ends. Outdoor rooms (green) are almost always good, whilst orange ones offer one to three exits but little else. There are many dead end rooms that have powerful effects — like breaker boxes or storage rooms — and then there are red rooms.
Red rooms vary, but are always bad. The gym and weight room will sap your steps, the archive will force you to draft from two visible rooms and one hidden one going forwards, whilst the dark room prevents you from seeing any of the rooms you’re going to be choosing from when exiting. There are a few others, like the dead end bathroom, but in general getting two red rooms to choose from (out of three) when you leave a given room can be a run-ending situation.
Blue Prince has some roguelike features, meaning that there are things that carry from one run to the next, however in Blue Prince, it feels a bit less directly impactful than in most games — and some of it is what you learn rather than what you get. Discovering a new room will permanently add it to the pool of available rooms — which is good — whilst discovering a floppy disk and using it in a terminal will allow the player to permanently upgrade a room of one kind. Some other features are conditional, such as the cloakroom that allows one item to be saved from one day to the next (but requires that room to be drafted on both days) or the mail room, which allows you to send yourself a parcel.
What is perhaps more important is that the players learn some of the key puzzles so that they can be more easily solved on the next run. You’ll learn the key to a certain maths puzzle quite early, and the method for resolving what happens in the boiler room a bit later. Many of the other puzzles come with longer lead times, and Blue Prince recommends that you write these things down in a real-life journal. I recommend that you do so too.
If this all sounds lovely and happy and twee, then you’re right — it is. Exploring Blue Prince’s rooms for the first time is quite a pleasure. You’ll find the cel-shaded graphics both charming and comforting, with many rooms of the mansion laid out in interesting and welcoming ways, despite their small size. Many of them contain small trinkets such as gems (used for unlocking certain blueprints) or keys (unsurprisingly used for doors) as well as other things that I’ll leave you to discover on your own.
And this is where some of Blue Prince’s issues start to come to the fore. For starters, you’ll come to know exactly what is going to be in every room and what’s more, exactly where it will be. The initial excitement of discovering new rooms fairly quickly gives way to the mundane act of navigating through a room you’ve seen four or five times before (at least) with not even a change of decor, let alone orientation or function.
The random nature of the rooms that spawn is also a bit problematic. Whilst you’ll always have three rooms to choose from, the further through the house you progress, the more chance you’ll have of needing to spend gems to pick one or even two of them. This links to the fairly random nature of the items themselves — yes, some are highly repetitive and will always spawn in a given room, but chests and some of the rooms (like closets) will spawn random items. It occasionally feels like the later room spawns simply assume that you’ve got access to items (like keys and gems) that you don’t. Equally, sometimes the choice of blueprints you get will be of absolutely no use to you at all.
There are lots of times when I played a day of Blue Prince and enjoyed it. Where I made progress and felt like I had both made all the right choices and had the luck of the draw. These days (about fifteen to twenty minutes each) often led me to solving puzzles or finding cool, more rare rooms to explore. As often as not, I’d jump straight back into the next day and hit several dead ends, discovering no items, no new rooms and nothing at all that felt like progress. When this happens two or three days in a row and I can’t see any way that I could have made different choices, I began to wonder what on Earth I was playing Blue Prince for.
So, there you have it. There’s a very clever puzzle and an intriguing story somewhere within Blue Prince for those who persevere long enough to unlock it. Unfortunately the random nature and the slow-to-build rewards from one game to the next could hamper your progress and have a tendency to frustrate. That said, there’s real satisfaction to making those small traces of progress when you do, and with each day taking a relatively short amount of time, you might still want to reserve just enough hard drive space to keep going back to this one.
Blue Prince is available now for Windows PC, Xbox One Series S/X & PS5
