Review: Blue Prince

Ever since it was announced, I was really excited for Blue Prince. In Blue Prince you play as Simon, a young adolescent boy (I’m not sure if his age is mentioned in the game) who just inherited the manor estate of his uncle. However, Simon’s uncle has laid out a challenge for Simon. In order for Simon to become the new baron, he has to find Room 46 in a mansion with 45 rooms.

This isn’t the only quirk, the mansion’s layout changes every day, and every time you enter a door you draft the next room from a choice of three. It’s a simple game mechanic that’s beautifully executed. The manor is laid out in a 5x9 grid. You start in the middle on the bottom rung and the only other revealed room on the map is in the middle of the top rung. So that’s your first and only clue, get from the Entrance Hall to the room at the top.

Not all rooms you draft are the same, some are dead ends, others have only one other door, if you’re lucky you’ll draft a room with 3-4 doors leaving you with several options of where to go, which is the first thing you’ll have to think about in Blue Prince. ‘Cause if you have no more doors to go through, then that’s it. End of the day, start over!

That’s not the only thing you have to look for in a room, there’s different types of rooms. Bedrooms which grant you extra steps. Oh, didn’t I mention? Yeah, you get 50 steps, every time you enter a room (even if you already visited it previously) you lose a step. Once all steps are gone, that’s it. End of the day, start over! Some rooms require gems to draft, so you might want to gather some of those as well. And some rooms are locked! So better make sure you gather enough keys to progress throughout the mansion!

What really gets me, though, is the drafting mechanic is part of the narrative. Which is an absolute stroke of genius. They could have just as easily left it out, not explaining anything about it. By making it a part of the game’s story, it grounds the mechanic in the game world. Having the fantasy of the mansion being this magical place where whenever you open a door you have to pick one of three rooms to enter really made it shine for me.

The mechanic gets referenced in several letters and notes strewn around the mansion, written by several different people. I remember chuckling at a certain note of someone mentioning: “How anyone gets any work done around here, is beyond me”. This also lays out a core concept of the game, notes, images and letters are all over the place. And because you’re not guaranteed to encounter the same room again any time soon, you gotta take notes! I’m a gamer that used to make handdrawn maps as a kid for platformers like Top Hat Willy and adventure games like Valhalla. Feeling the need to take notes during a game really takes me back, I love the mixing and matching of game and real world skills to progress.

When you start out, there’s so much information coming at you, you’ve got loose threads everywhere and it’s fantastic. Because even though you don’t know which rooms will pop up in the mansion, there’s always one thread you get to progress. One piece of new information that brings you closer to a solution.

It’s a great feeling to figure out a puzzle and only later get a hint for that puzzle in a room you hadn’t discovered yet. This is a great game design decision, make some puzzles solvable from the get-go, but give hints about those puzzles in different rooms in case players didn’t notice those puzzles are weren’t able to solve them yet.

The game really, REALLY got me. The first weekend it was available I must have played about 14 hours. I was just really enthralled in the game and wanted to discover all nooks and crannies of the mansion and its mysteries. I finished the game this weekend by reaching Room 46. There’s still stuff to find, mind you. But I’m not sure if I’m still interested in finding it. You see, the game has a decent amount of RNG because of the room drafting, and to finish certain puzzles you have to get somewhat lucky with a combination of rooms. And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with hoping to get those combinations in order to progress any further. I love puzzles and I would really love knowing how they unfold, but I don’t like them feeling like a chore. Which most of the post-game content of Blue Prince feels like to me.