No, You Don’t Have to Play Blue Prince—Or Any Other Game

People who write about Blue Prince genuinely love Blue Prince. I’m cooler on it than a lot of critics, but I’ve still gotten a lot out of it, and wrote a pretty glowing review right here at Paste. As I said in that piece, it’s the kind of game critics love writing about, and also the kind of game that’s easy to obsess over. And that combination leads us to where we are today: with a lot of critics openly calling for more people to play Blue Prince, their obsession du jour. That drives me to ask a simple question: what if we didn’t do that—and by “we” I mean game critics, and by “that” I mean loudly urging people to play a game that is guaranteed to alienate a significant amount of the people who play it?
Critics love to advocate for the stuff they think isn’t getting its due, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s one of the underlying points of criticism: If you don’t passionately care about whatever medium you write about, and don’t want to elevate what you think are its best works, why even write in the first place? (It’s definitely not for the money.) There’s a difference between writing a positive review and issuing calls to action outside that review, though. That kind of advocacy has quickly come to the fore with Blue Prince, tilting quickly into overkill. Major sites have published articles calling for more people to play it, and writers have hyped it up non-stop on social media. Their general attitude is that this is one of the best games of the year, and so anybody interested in games needs to play it. And that’s absolutely not true with Blue Prince, and with games (or any other art) in general.
Blue Prince is not a game everybody needs to play. I’d wager that most people who play videogames would get very little out of it. It’s an intentionally obtuse, incredibly complex puzzle game that demands a lot of patience and a decent amount of work outside the game from the player, and that’s not always what people look for from their leisure time. Blue Prince is a niche game, and should be celebrated as such; although niche games as uncommonly good as this one sometimes break out to a wider audience, they still won’t appeal to everybody who normally has no time or interest in that niche. Blue Prince is not a game for everybody, and acting like it is isn’t good for anybody.