Blue Prince is a uniquely odd game that swept the indie gaming community by storm last year. Releasing to massive acclaim, this strange indie game is the debut title from indie developer Dogubomb Inc. and published by Raw Fury. Originally released for PC, it quickly made its way to PS5 and Xbox and recently released on the Switch 2 as well. While you might think you know what you’re getting into here, you’d be wrong. This is a game that takes all your expectations, stands them on their head, shakes them around, and then pours them out in a shattered mess for you to piece back together! It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before and while some of the mechanics may be familiar, their integration certainly isn’t.
In Blue Prince you play Simon Jones, a young man whose rich uncle has recently passed. Your uncle has left you his entire estate, but only if you can find the secret 46th room in his huge mansion, Mount Holly Estate. Unfortunately for you, that’s not going to be easy as you are not allowed to spend the night in the mansion and must restart from the foyer every day. Every morning, all the rooms in the house have disappeared though. There are 45 rooms in Mount Holly and managing to get through them into the sealed antechamber is going to take some time. Walking through the mansion is nowhere near as simple as you might expect and there is more than just exploration here. There’s a mystery too and the pieces are tantalizingly vague, forcing you to study each clue as the plot slowly unfolds one image or line at a time.
This is a first person experience and while there’s not combat, there’s certainly challenge. This is a roguelike, where every new run into the mansion starts off a new and unexpected chain of experiences. Just like other roguelikes, there’s a drafting element involved but in Blue Prince that’s a double entendre. Each door you open allows you to draft 3 room options from a set of blueprints (which are made by…well…drafting). Whichever one you select is then placed into the mansion for the day. To make matters more complex, there are no guarantees that the rooms you draft will match up, meaning that while you have a 45 room grid with a fixed foyer and antechamber, often you will be unable to reach the other end of the mansion and end up in a complete dead end, forcing you to end your run and start over.
As you wind your way through an assortment of rooms, you’ll slowly learn the rules. Each room only appears until you’ve placed it. Once you’ve chosen it, it won’t come back. Most rooms have various puzzles, clues, or items to find. You might find tools that will help you solve a puzzle, gems, keys, or even money lying about in various random places in each room. There are also a ton of hidden notes, photos, books, and drawings secreted throughout the rooms of the mansion. These are all static in each room though, so once you’ve read them and taken your notes, there’s no need to revisit them.
That’s just the start of how weird the game gets however. There are a number of constraints on you as you slowly start to understand Blue Prince. First of all, the game gives you no help. Just like the classic (and evil) Myst, you have to find each puzzle hidden in the house and solve it on your own. The game even warns you that you absolutely should take written notes while you play and…it’s not wrong. There is so much going on in Blue Prince that it’s nearly impossible to keep straight every nuance, clue, code, and methodology required to progress depending on what rooms you draft. Some puzzles even change from day to day! Most stay the same but many require specific items or knowledge of certain codes to unlock and it’s going to take you a long time to both learn the ins and outs and draft the right rooms in the right order.
Things get even more challenging from there. In the corner of your screen is a number and some footprints. This is how many steps you have per day before you become exhausted and are forced to leave the house and start over. Basically, it’s a timer inexorably counting down to your imminent failure of the run. Every time you move from room to room, even if you’ve already been there before, the counter goes down by one step. Walking into some rooms gains you additional steps, as does eating food, but other rooms suck away additional steps. There are also requirements for some rooms. They might be locked, necessitating a key or a special key. They may have drafting requirements where you have to have a certain number of gems in your inventory or you are unable to draft the room. And worst of all, all three of the drafted rooms you have the option of picking may not have exits going where you need to go, shutting down a successful run midway through because you simply can’t go any further.
There are a number of types of rooms in Blue Prince too. Each room has different border colors and these indicate different types of rooms. Sometimes effects will only apply to certain categories of rooms instead of the whole house so it’s important to pay attention to what you’re putting onto the schematic. Standard rooms are blue bordered, bedrooms are purple, garden rooms are green, utilitarian rooms (kitchen, dining room, etc) are yellow, passageways are orange, garden rooms are green, and penalty rooms are red. Within those categories, there are still requirements for many of the rooms as well, and many rooms can only be drafted after they are unlocked or when certain unexplained conditions are met. Red rooms are particularly nasty as they will drain extra steps, take away items, or hide drafted rooms so you get stuck. There are ways to mitigate their effects, but every time you draft a red room you cringe inwardly.
Finally, there are the puzzles. Mount Holly is chock full of complex puzzles requiring Simon to experiment with various solutions, item combinations and uses, and specific combinations of drafted rooms in order to progress. Some of these puzzles are simple logic puzzles. Others require multiple runs to solve and specific clues and information that you’ll need certain items to acquire. A few are incredibly frustrating and can take hours if you don’t clue in to the tricks around them and many puzzles are hidden in the first place. Occasionally, once you solve a particularly hard puzzle or access a specific room, you’ll unlock permanent changes in the mansion that can provide you with starting gems, extra starting footsteps, or new rooms that allow you further progress.
At first that progress seems glacial but after you start taking the game seriously, each run nets you a new insight or two that allows you to dig further into the mysteries surrounding your uncle and your family. When you finally reach the antechamber for the first time, it feels like a revelation, but even then, the story is far from over! This is a complex game and while an expert player might potentially be able to find the 46th room on the first run, it is impossible to do without knowledge of all the game’s inner workings. While Simon is supposed to make his way through the mansion in a timely manner, there’s no actual cap on the number of days that timely manner takes. It might be dozens or even hundreds of days before you can finally access the elusive room required by the will and along the way, you’ll learn a whole lot more than you expected about your family, your uncle, and the strange mystery of Mount Holly Manor.
In addition to being a uniquely complex game, Blue Prince is particularly pretty. The art style is cel-shaded but trends towards realism in a way that ends up particularly immersive. While you might be focused on the puzzles and running out of steps, it’s clear that each room is lovingly detailed with hundreds of tiny touches that add atmosphere to every single room, even the ones you don’t want to draft. The complex details also conceal hidden clues and information, making every inch of Blue Prince feel more alive and every room feel like a discovery, no matter how small or simple it is. The game runs smoothly on the PS5 and visuals are crisp and clear no matter where you go. Once you start unlocking some new areas, there is some utterly spectacular imagery and it’s hard not to just gaze around and appreciate the detail work that went into this complex game.
The audio in Blue Prince is also unique and well done, but much more subtle. As you might expect, there’s not a lot of drama here. You’re alone, exploring an empty house and things are pretty quiet most of the time. Sound effects are subtle, related to things you interact with and while the sounds are clearly matched up to your actions, there’s not a lot going on in the house itself. There are no enemies, no bosses, no weapons, and no people to talk to. However, the quiet music permeating the background sets a mood of thoughtful exploration, shifting with access to certain areas or key points of exploration. It’s a neat effect and an excellent score to accompany this unusual game.
If there’s a complaint to be had about Blue Prince, it’s the perennial complaint for all puzzle games of this type. They aren’t for everyone. If you don’t want to take notes, don’t have the patience to retry the same puzzles tens or even hundreds of times, or don’t like roguelike mechanics, this probably isn’t the game for you. Not being able to save, choose the rooms you really want, or get back to a particular puzzle on the next run when you almost had all the elements can be incredibly frustrating. Above all, Blue Prince rewards patience and if you’re more of an action game person or used to linear experiences, that can drive you insane. It’s hard to want to keep going if you feel a run isn’t going well because nothing carries over to the next run and while you’re building knowledge, there are only a handful of persistent features to show you’re making progress, aside from how far you get and how many additional areas you unlock. This is a game that can be as long as you make it and frequently makes you feel dumb, especially after you’ve finally solved a few puzzles.
Blue Prince is a unique and fascinating game. Part board game, part puzzle game, part roguelike, and filled with mystery and puzzles, it will tantalize you for hours, days, and even weeks as you slowly unravel the hundreds of secrets contained within. There are few games out there as complex and detailed as Blue Prince and success is incredibly rewarding, more than justifying the $30 price tag. Failure can be crushing though and the drafting mechanic can lead to serious frustration when your progress all has to be repeated, so be aware that you’ll need a vast reserve of patience and dedication to succeed here. But if that appeals to you, there’s a lot to love here as the game is gorgeous, well-designed, and challenging for even the most perceptive of players and those that are dedicated are going to be utterly captivated by blueprints…oops…Blue Prince!
This review is based on a digital copy of Blue Prince provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 55” 1080p TV and on the Playstation Portal where it played equally well. Blue Prince is also available on Xbox, Switch 2, and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.