REVIEW: ‘Blue Prince’ Provides a Solid Foundation And Engaging Mysteries

Heading out of a bedroom, you enter the adjoining garden, opening another door to reveal a chapel. The two doors in this room reveal a bathroom and a gymnasium. Any contractor looking at your home’s blueprints would be scratching their head at the layout, but in the puzzle exploration game Blue Prince this is the norm.

From developer Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, the game will frequently see you cobbling together various mismatched rooms to create a home best described as Frankenstein’s maze. However, after several in-game days, weeks, or even months of exploration, Blue Prince peels back its layers, revealing patterns hidden in the chaos, creating one of the most unique puzzle experiences to date.

When the former lord of Mt. Holly passes away, you are named the future owner with one stipulation. Through all the changing rooms and halls, you must find your way to the elusive Room 46, one of the few constants each day. To do so, you must learn the rules and secrets of the manor, manipulating them to your advantage to build a path to lead you to the north end of the building towards your prize.

Upon entering the manor each day, players are presented with a trio of doorways in the entrance hall. Opening a door allows you to pick one of three rooms, ranging from hallways to bedrooms or even special rooms like a parlor or storeroom. From this point, players must make decisions that will provide resources, information, or a path forward. Some rooms can provide keys, gems, or coins, which can be spent to open locked doors, select more valuable rooms, or buy food or items to aid in exploration. Once the day ends, however, all of the rooms you added will be removed, and your resources stripped, resetting your progress.

Blue Prince makes you think about how you explore. 

While there’s virtually no limit to the time you can spend exploring each day, you are limited by your supply of footsteps. This is more forgiving than it sounds, since individual footsteps are not counted. Instead, moving between rooms reduces your count by one, forcing you to be mindful about exploration to preserve your many resources. You may be tempted to head deeper into the house from your first path, but utilizing all of your paths equally can ensure you find the items you’ll need later on. Otherwise, you may find yourself backtracking and wasting your precious footsteps.

What makes Blue Prince so special is how it unfolds. In your first few days, most rooms will be new to you, full of inscrutable clues, some useful items, and ideally a path forward. As the days turn to weeks, though, you may find an article, note, or some other scrap of information that changes the way you view the rooms you thought you knew. While many days will end prematurely because of a scarcity of resources or dead ends, there are countless opportunities to make lasting progress, despite the daily reset.

Information isn’t the only way to progress, with some particularly elusive threads leading to permanent unlocks. Despite the random nature of Blue Prince’s gameplay, these upgrades can move the starting line, making it a little easier to find new rooms and information, and eventually reach your goal each day. However, even with these boons, it can be difficult to intentionally steer your daily run to a specific objective, providing most of the frustration in the game.

Blue Prince shines when you don’t have a goal in mind for the day, allowing you to explore and take in new information. More often than not, you’ll accidentally stumble across some new thread that ends in a new story beat, permanent unlock, or some information that reveals a new puzzle throughout the manor. But your patience will be tested when you set your sights on a goal.

Failure doesn’t derail your drive to move forward.

Since each day resets virtually all of your progress, and you have little control over how each day will unfold, it can be difficult to reach your goal. Trying to find a specific room or form a path to a certain point in the house becomes an exercise in futility, since so many factors are at play. If you run out of keys or gems, if your available rooms turn the wrong way or result in dead ends, or if you just don’t get the room you’re looking for, it can result in a premature end to your day.

Still, though, it’s hard not to jump right back in after a failure, and even when you fail to accomplish your goal, it’s possible to progress in some other way. Blue Prince succeeds because it somehow knows to drop you a breadcrumb when you’re on the verge of collapse, turning your potential breakdown into a breakthrough. To its credit, it is possible to complete the game without pursuing every single thread to its conclusion. However, it certainly makes it easier to get there when you’ve unlocked every permanent advantage.

Additionally, while Blue Prince’s story is not at the forefront of the gameplay, it is likewise sprinkled throughout the house. Many of the puzzles, computers, books, and other lore drops contain threads that paint a picture of the people who lived in the manor at one point, and the greater world around them. While it’s not explicitly required to beat the game, the narratives you uncover are expertly unfolded across your many days in the house, adding context to details you’ll find in the many, varied rooms.

Despite frustrations with the random elements of gameplay, Blue Prince presents an experience that is unique, memorable, and as ever-shifting as the rooms of Mt. Holly. It throws you into a mystery full of mysteries and will ask you to take enough notes to create your own conspiracy board. Thankfully, these stories are worth the effort and solving any of them will leave you feeling like a genius.

Blue Prince is available now on Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 5, and PC.