Knowing too much about Blue Prince kinda ruins the fun, but I can still confirm a few things right here: yes, that name is a pun; yes, the pun really sucks; no, you shouldn’t skip the game entirely just because of that—although you’d be excused if you wanted to. I’m sure you love something that has an even worse name, so suck it up. You’ll be glad you did.
Dogubomb’s new game is a puzzler, in more ways than one. It’s a puzzle game, but one whose most basic rules and structure are hard to explain, and one that doesn’t start to make much sense until after you’ve been playing it for a while—and even then still makes way less sense than you might hope it will. It’s a jumble of genres and inspirations, a jigsaw in its construction (but not in how it’s played), with different mismatched pieces forced together to form a surprisingly coherent whole. It’s about a house that sure ain’t no home. It’s an ambitious polymath that defies simple description, and that’s why you’ve already seen an entire textbook’s worth of articles about it online this week: it’s the kind of game critics love talking about, partially because talking about it is so damn hard. But hey, let’s take a crack.
Blue Prince is a country house mystery inside of an architecturally-themed “roguelite” deck-building game, and I don’t blame you if your eyes are already glossing over at all that jargon. At its most basic Blue Prince is about exploring a mansion, one whose layout changes every day, with you playing an active part in choosing the specific rooms. The house is a rectangular grid, nine rows of five rooms each, with the middle room on the top and bottom rows the only two that stay the same every day. The other 43 rooms are blank spaces waiting for you to fill them in; whenever you enter a room for the first time on a new day, you’re given three types of rooms to pick from (like, say, a bedroom, or a hallway, or a boiler room), and that room will stay in that same spot for the rest of the day. The goal is to get to that middle room on the house’s northernmost row—the antechamber, it’s called, presumably because it’s the last room you see before the game’s conclusion. Every time you enter a room you lose one piece of energy, though, and you can only lose so many before you get all tuckered out and have to turn in for the night. You start with 50 of them, and although you can replenish some throughout the day, if you run out of energy before you reach the antechamber, the day will end. You’ll restart from scratch the next day, with the house’s entire layout being wiped away, and without keeping whatever items you picked up the previous day.
That sounds way more straight-forward than Blue Prince actually is. Rooms can have up to one door per wall, or four doors total, but not every room has that many doors. Some only have one door, the door you enter through, making them dead ends. And the three options you can pick from when you enter a room for the first time are drawn randomly from an unseen deck of every room type available to you. That randomization means sometimes you’ll wind up having to choose between three dead ends, potentially closing off entire sections of the house before you even get to them. Some room types require gems to build, and if you don’t have enough gems you can’t pick that option; and once you commit to entering a new room you have to build one, and can’t back out, so you won’t be able to go look for a gem if you find out you need one. (It is best to always be prepared in Blue Prince.) Some doors are locked, and if you don’t have a key you won’t be able to open them. You can find gems, keys, and coins (which you can use to buy energy-replacing food or other items from specific rooms) scattered randomly throughout the house, or by solving puzzles in the parlor and billiards room, and certain rooms will always provide you with one (or more) of them once they’re built. You will have many days where you hit a dead end far earlier than expected, either because you don’t have the gems or keys needed to build or enter certain rooms, or sometimes just because the luck of the draw forces a lot of dead ends on you.
Eventually, though, you’ll build a series of connected rooms all the way to the antechamber. At that point you’ll make a cruel discovery: the antechamber’s doors are shut tight. It’s not just enough to get to the antechamber, you also have to hope you draw a specific room that day, when you have the resources you’ll need to build it, and that you will have found the specific item needed to use in that room to open the antechamber’s doors. A long, precarious chain of events have to fall your way to solve Blue Prince’s largest puzzle, and hey: good luck with that.
Blue Prince is almost impossibly deep. You’ll make unexpected discoveries after hours and hours of play, or weeks of in-game time. There are certain permanent upgrades you can unlock, which are the only things that persist from day to day. You might even wind up outside the house, but no closer to reaching the antechamber. It’s a hard game to explain or talk about, in part because it’s a hard game to really grasp—not because it’s too esoteric or confusing, but because it has so many secrets and is so reluctant to reveal them to you. It’ll get under your skin like Myst, and you’ll see its rooms when you close your eyes at night like it’s Tetris. And yet that doesn’t mean you’ll be any closer to solving, or even understanding, its central mysteries.
You can lose yourself very easily inside of Blue Prince. If you aren’t immediately turned off by it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to obsess over it. It’ll be your next Myst, your next Lost, your next Twin Peaks—the next piece of media you devote endless hours to in hopes of cracking its well-guarded secrets. Blue Prince’s ultimate puzzle isn’t figuring out how to get to the antechamber, or learning what all of its various rooms do; it’s trying to fit this game into your already busy life.
Blue Prince was developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available on Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
