Blue Prince

Review

Game Description

“Welcome to Mt. Holly, the mysterious manor with shifting rooms. In Blue Prince, you embark on a genre-defying experience, filled with a unique mix of mystery, strategy, and puzzles that weave together to create an unpredictable journey. Will your explorative steps lead you to the rumored Room 46?”

Personal Experience

Blue Prince came out of nowhere to completely eat up all of my free time. I’d read a review of it that compared it favorably to Outer Wilds¹My favorite video game of all time. I need to do a writeup on it at some point!, that—and the description of the game on Steam—was enough for me to slap down $30 and give it a shot.

I bought it the day it came out, April 10th, and as of this writing on April 29th, have put over 80 hours into it. The good news for my free time is that I’m done. At least for now, there’s likely more to discover out there, but it’s beyond my capabilities as a puzzle solver. (And if there is, it’s currently stumping the internet writ-large.)

Game Play

There’s a lot going on in Blue Prince and so much of it is a delightful surprise that I’m going to avoid talking about a lot of it. But I will say that it’s a much bigger game than described on the tin. The game rewards curiosity and perseverance, it demands attention and thought. It’s bigger than you suspect and even bigger than what you set your new expectations to. When playing puzzle games, I scribble my notes in a journal as I play through. When playing through Myst late last year, I took pretty detailed notes and maps and used about four journal pages. Lorelei and Laser Eyes took about three pages. For Blue Prince, I have fourteen written pages of notes and over 400 screenshots. My journal looks like that perennially popular Pepe Silvia meme from Always Sunny:

Someone online said that reaching Room 46 (the ostensible objective of the game) is the equivalent of finishing the tutorial for the game. While they were being glib, they also weren’t far off. I got there about 20 hours into the game. I played for another 60. There was an exhilarating pattern of me thinking I’d reached the end of the rabbit hole I was exploring and then finding another rabbit hole at the bottom. Eventually the rabbit holes did run out, and the last one I explored felt a little anti-climactic as a result.

Narratively, the story is fantastic at environmental storytelling, with new discoveries recontextualizing old ones and adding nuance to the story. Small details that you may overlook earlier in the game become relevant late in the game after you learn about the wider world and its history.

That said the game wasn’t without moments of frustration. The game is a rogue-lite where what you see and encounter in any given run is randomly selected. Typically it wouldn’t bother me much, I’d have a large variety of threads that I’d be exploring at any given point, so I’d learn what I could learn from a given run and move on. But near the end of the game there were times when I had to play through loops over and over until the right combination of items and rooms appeared in order for me to proceed at all, with me having to make my way through most or all of a loop to know if I could proceed or not.

Some of those late game puzzles are also incredibly tough, requiring careful scrutiny of vague clues in order to get an idea of how to proceed. I am not ashamed to admit that I turned to the community for help with some of the endgame puzzles, because even with knowing how to solve some of them, the act of implementing the solutions was still challenging on its own.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t talk about colors in this game. Colors are very important in this game and there is a lot of color based puzzling. Unfortunately, there are a fair number of issues with distinguishing red from green, blue from purple, and orange from gold. All of which gave me trouble. The game has promised a color accessibility update in the future, I’ll be keen to see how they implement it.

Recommendation

It took the developers of Blue Prince eight years to complete the game, and it’s easy to see where that time went. This is an incredibly deep and layered experience that will likely have people scouring it for clues for years to come. Even in spite of the few issues above, Blue Prince is a triumph and a near masterpiece.

I recommend it to anyone who is looking for an obsession and isn’t too bothered by the cruel whims of random number generation.