Blue Prince review — Puzzle perfection

I’ve always loved puzzles. My insatiable hunger for brain-teasers has been with me since I was a child; my parents ordered puzzle books all the way from the UK to keep me occupied for hours on end. As I became more acquainted with video games, my desire to have my brain boggled only grew. Enter Jonathan Blow’s The Witness. Jonathan Blow, political idiot, game design genius, whatever you’d like to call him - since the release of The Witness in 2016, I was sure that he had made the best puzzle game that could ever exist. Until now. Dogubomb’s Blue Prince is the new greatest puzzle game that could ever exist…with all the baggage that comes with that moniker. 

Blue Prince places you in the shoes of Simon, a 14 year old boy who’s recently inherited a gargantuan house known as Mt. Holly from his eccentric great uncle. Well, he will inherit the house, on the condition that he locates the mysterious 46th room of the 45 room estate. The difficult task is made even more confounding when you realize that the walls of the mansion are transient, never sticking around in the same spot for more than a single day. Through his exploration of the house’s numerous rooms, he’ll uncover a mystery far greater in scope than he - or I - could have anticipated, filled with familial tension, deep historical lore, and political intrigue. 

Blue Prince’s narrative is a hard one to talk about since so much of it only reveals itself late into the endgame. The story is told entirely through the brief bits of information you’ll find as you solve puzzles - letters, books, emails, even discarded notes found in the trash. Despite the fact that you’ll never see another character model in person (as far as I know), some subtle environmental storytelling and well-written nuggets of characterization make the mansion feel lived-in and vibrant.

In all honesty, I’ve gleaned most of the lore content from people far smarter than myself who have compiled and condensed the lore into a more palatable form. While difficult to truly grasp, the mere hints of a grander world than what’s on the surface is enough to keep Simon’s largely domestic journey intriguing and thought-provoking. It becomes increasingly clear that while it may seem as though the shifting walls of Mt. Holly are a magical occurrence in an otherwise mundane part of our world, the truth is far more foreign and confounding. 

Blue Prince is, perplexingly, a first person puzzle roguelite. It’s hard to imagine how such a thing could exist until you play it yourself; the two genres seem to be inherently at odds with each other. And yet, somehow, Blue Prince establishes its gameplay thesis early and proves immediately that not only is it a possible mashup of genres, it’s a brilliant one. 

Each run, or “day”, involves Simon drafting rooms one by one, most of which offer various resources that will aid Simon on his search for the fabled 46th room. Keys are necessary to progress through locked doors, gems are required for passage through more lucrative rooms, and coins are used for purchases at a variety of unmanned shops. The catch, though, is that Simon can’t just mosy about the manor to his heart’s content - he has a strict step limit that will send him home once he’s passed through rooms 50 times. The game offers numerous creative ways to circumvent the mansion’s various restrictions, each adding a satisfying layer of puzzle-solving to maneuvering your way through the winding halls. 

Navigation-based puzzles and light resource management mechanics are simply the bread of an enormous puzzle sandwich. Nearly every single room is home to a self-contained puzzle, a hint to another room’s puzzle, a hint to the house’s innumerable deep secrets, or a piece of lore that fills the house with a rich sense of historical import. Not a single pixel is wasted - everything you see either matters or feels like it matters. I highly recommend that you keep a notebook handy to keep track of each clue you find. By the time I decided that my perusal of Mt. Holly was complete, my notebook looked like the scribblings of a madman. 

Sometimes I was onto something, sometimes I was being completely led astray, but I always felt like I had a litany of goals in mind. Each run felt like it could break a different puzzle wide open regardless of which rooms I was offered. At the moment I rolled credits, despite the game ostensibly being over, I felt like the game had only just begun. So many loose threads were left hanging that the only thing I wanted to do was dig deeper. And dig I did until I could dig no longer (without a guide). 

Plenty of games these days feel as though they were built with community engagement in mind. Some of the Dark Souls games’ more elaborate questlines and secret areas feel as though they were never intended to be found by any one player, but rather designed to be discussed and dissected piece by piece by benevolent contributors excited to share their discoveries. Blue Prince feels similar, in that I feel as though there’s no chance whatsoever for any individual to attain a full understanding of the game; an active and committed community is necessary to uncover everything there is to see. 

While many may see this as exciting and rewarding, I found this late-game focus on sometimes comically obtuse puzzles to be alienating. While this approach would be admirable for puzzles that serve as content only meant for the most die-hard of players, filling the mid-game and supposed “main” story with them only serves to cut playthroughs short. 

Regarding playtime, your mileage may vary greatly. I’ve alluded to this previously - Blue Prince starts off deep and only gets deeper, deeper, deeper. I rolled credits after about 20 hours of playtime, a reasonable if lengthy amount of time to spend with a puzzle game. I would then spend another 20 hours post-credits and when I decided I had seen enough to write this review, I wasn’t even close to having seen the vast majority of the endgame content. If you have the desire and the time (and the genius), Blue Prince is a near-endless trove of puzzle-solving enjoyment and welcome frustration. I guarantee that in a few months, I’ll decide to boot Blue Prince back up and be hooked all over again, poring through my notes and peeling back the layers that had stumped me previously. 

Let’s get into why I had to put Blue Prince down, since it’s not just because I felt I had seen enough. With a game this big and this intricate, some technical foibles are to be expected. That being said, Blue Prince currently sits in a somewhat questionable state when it comes to bugs and crashes. I experienced two crashes during my playtime - my first happened at the very beginning of a day, resulting in no loss of progress whatsoever. 

My second, however, was a heartbreaker. I had finally assembled what’s considered to be the mid-game puzzle Exodia if you will - the Pump Room/Boiler Room adjacent combo. It’s so elusive that whenever I got the opportunity to draft the Boiler Room, I would drop every other goal in order to maximize my chances of connecting it to its long lost brother. I drafted them together, their reunion was glorious, I made my way to the path it had opened for me, I got up to make a bowl of cereal (in real life) - I came back to an error screen, shaking me to my core. I’d just lost everything. That was the first and only moment I doubted my infatuation with this game, and I hope to never feel that way about it again. There are also a smattering of more minor bugs - visual glitches, clipping through the world (resulting in a hilariously self-aware end of day message), and an unfortunate soft lock that I believe has since been patched. 

What makes Blue Prince a masterpiece is the summation of its parts, each working together in unexpectedly brilliant ways. The roguelite core of the game provides a delicious gameplay loop that had me exhausted at work for weeks due to the “one more run” mindset bleeding into the wee hours of the night. The meta-progression of the puzzles kept me noodling long after I’d put down the controller. The dense narrative had me dissecting every scrap of lore for any clues as to what the world outside the many walls of Mt. Holly had to offer. The art style…well, let’s say it’s more than serviceable, save for the unsettling and thankfully scarce character models. Each element feeds into the others in such a way that it almost feels impossible, like this game was made by a AAA team over the course of decades rather than having mainly been developed by a single visionary. This kind of game only comes about once in a blue moon - move over The Witness, there’s a new sheriff in town.