Can you use the blueprints to become the blue prince? A mysterious letter, a strange death and an inquisitive mystery await you in Blue Prince, a unique spin on a puzzle genre unlike any you’ve probably ever experienced. This could be up there with the likes of Myst and Riven as one of the best puzzle games ever made. It’s available for the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X and for the PC through Steam.
You play as a 14-year-old boy named Simon who is exploring the mansion he inherited from his recently deceased great uncle. The catch? Every day the mansion’s layout changes, encouraging creativity, planning and a bit of luck to explore every nook and cranny. The goal appears simple enough: make it to the white room at the end of the house. However, appearances can be deceiving, as the exact nature of the title is revealed through an ever-changing interior and an ever-growing list of questions in this mysterious puzzle adventure.
One of the best features of Blue Prince is the fact that the blueprint of the house is ever changing, and yet, you also get to influence what the blueprint looks like. You make choices about which rooms to put down, and there is randomness and consequences to the outcome of those choices. To advance forward with the plot, you must build rooms with various doors to aid in your progression through the house. Some are dead ends, but that is okay because they can provide anything from keys to help open locked doors, gems to build rare rooms or coins to buy items that will assist your exploration. Every single room has something of value, and you will feel like a detective trying to figure out the meaning of so many clues scattered throughout the massive mansion.
Beyond the rooms shifting their location daily, another challenge is the fact that every day you only have a limited number of steps to expend in exploring deeper into the mountain. And you lose some steps every time you move from one room to another. You can replenish a small amount of these steps if you stumble across food as you explore. However, after you either run out of steps or cannot progress farther into the house given the current blueprint, your day ends, and you start a new one. Each morning you will find that the house resets and you start over from scratch having to map out everything all over again. This mechanism makes each playthrough of Blue Prince different and unique. But as you learn more about how each room works, you can strategize with how to best advance to your goal and maximize your daily efforts.
Because of the shifting rooms mechanism, I never found myself getting bored when starting a new day from scratch over and over again. There is really no pressure to move quickly, so you can just play casually, trying to discover new rooms and puzzles without feeling a need to rush through the title. There are plenty of secrets, puzzles and rooms to find and explore too, ensuring that each day is both different and fun. The house only has around 40 slots for you to build out rooms, but with over 80 total rooms in the deck, you have a seemingly endless combination of outcomes. If you like exploring, then you’ll never get bored playing Blue Prince.
There are also some helpful items randomly scattered throughout the mansion to make your exploration easier. These can range from lockpicks to open doors and shovels that can be used to dig for buried treasure. These items can make adventuring in Blue Prince feel like a treasure hunt, especially when you finally stumble across whatever item you were looking for or hoping to find.
It took me a while actually before I started to appreciate the depth and complexity found in Blue Prince. And to be fair, it can sometimes feel like a slow burn, similar to a tv show that takes a while to get going. Those who need constant action may feel that Blue Prince is too slowly paced but for me it was perfect. Even when I went a few days in game without making any real progress, when I finally discovered whatever item or clue that I needed to advance further, it made the wait worthwhile. Your victories in Blue Prince seem really rewarding when they happen.
The overall goal of Blue Prince is to make it to the white room at the end of the mansion so that you can unlock the mysterious Room 46. While this goal may take some planning, it can be accomplished easily enough with careful exploration. And surprisingly, once I got to Room 46, I found that there was still a lot more to do in the mansion. The real game kind of starts after you meet that goal and can then look around at the plethora of additional puzzles the mansion offers. With over 80 rooms in the mansion, there is so much to do even after you have technically “won” the game. In fact, I’ve spent over 40 hours playing after locating Room 46 and still have so much to discover and complete. Many of the rooms contain puzzles of various difficulty. My suggestion is to look at each room closely, as most of the time they contain much more than meets the eye.
While most of the rooms you find are easy to understand, a few of them may require some trial and error to grasp what they do or how you can best use them. A few of the puzzles require a more meticulous effort in order to understand how to solve them, which should keep puzzle gamers happy. However, most of those more difficult puzzles are not required to unlock the ending, so you can kind of consider them optional content. Instead, they provided more lore pertaining to the house and former residents who lived there. I did find that this made for a fun side challenge as I played and solving them a worthy goal after finishing the main story.
One word of warning to potential players: because each day starts over from scratch, it can be frustrating getting a decent day or set of rooms to work with. You might have to resign yourself to making smaller gains on some days. When I was just starting out with my explorations, I found out quite quickly that randomness and luck plays a big part in your overall success. However, with so many slots for rooms, I also discovered that if I used all of my resources and found equipment, this was not a huge problem.
Overall, as you can probably tell, I really enjoyed the creativity that went into Blue Prince’s design and the fact that there are so many layers of complexity hidden within it. And even now, after completing the fascinating main story, I still have so much more to explore and many more puzzles still to solve, making it a great value for those who enjoy puzzle-based adventures. In fact, Blue Prince is one of the most intriguing and unique puzzle titles that I have ever played. Trust me, it will keep you happily exploring and searching for your next goal for hours on end inside that mysterious, constantly shifting mansion.