For many people (myself included), Blue Prince is a game that was not on their radar until all of a sudden, industry people started talking about how fantastic it is. Published by Raw Fury (who brought us great adventure games like American Arcadia and Norco), it’s the brainchild of Tonda Ros, a visual artist based in Los Angeles who initially founded the studio Dogubomb as a commercial and short film production house before bringing their talents to the world of video games, with Blue Prince as their debut title. So, does it indeed live up to all of the hype?
Why, yes. Yes, it does.
Blue Prince has drawn many a comparison to Outer Wilds due to its freeform gameplay structure. You can approach your primary objective in any order and from any direction, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to getting there. The game is also clearly inspired by Myst in its puzzle design and in how it feeds you narrative breadcrumbs gradually throughout your adventure. For instance, certain interactables and environmental details clue you into the estate’s backstory and your family tree.
Make no mistake, though; Blue Prince isn’t a mere copycat, and proudly stands on its own as a new benchmark for both adventure games and roguelikes.
You play as Simon P. Jones, a young boy chosen as the heir to Mount Holly, a vast yet mysterious estate whose owner, Herbert S. Sinclair (your great uncle), recently passed away and challenged you to reach the elusive “Room 46.” It doesn’t appear on any blueprints, and its exact location is otherwise a mystery for much of Blue Prince. Your only lead is the mysterious “Antechamber” that sits at the peak of the estate’s blueprints.
However, one key quirk of the estate makes the entire endeavour a challenge.
The entire estate, except for three rooms, is made up of empty, flexible areas. This lets you choose which rooms are in those spaces and how they are arranged. The available rooms change daily, so you never end up with the same set of rooms in any run. With each door you approach, you choose from a selection of three rooms that will occupy the next empty space.
These rooms come in different categories, such as green rooms, which are rooms covered in plants and greenery and usually flush with resources to dig up. In yellow “shop rooms,” you can spend coins you find to grab tools and upgrades to make your exploration easier. Orange rooms are reserved exclusively for hallways that are, generally speaking, featureless and used as filler. Finally, the dreaded red rooms can either be your last resort or something you want to get out of the way as early as possible. These rooms come with unique afflictions that make exploration slightly trickier.
So, as you can see, not all rooms are made equal or as simple as you’d expect, and day by day, you begin to draw strategies and prioritise certain rooms in preferred orders.
As if that weren’t enough, not all of the rooms point north, and some, even the most useful rooms you can draw, can also be dead ends. Most of the time, this means that your path to the elusive Antechamber at the far north end of the estate can look like a maze of twists and turns, and it’s easy to lose track of where you are on the blueprints and where you’re supposed to be going.
Each day, you are granted 50 steps, with each room usually taking one away. This means you technically get 50 rooms to draw and explore before you’re exhausted and need to try again the next day. That might sound like a lot, perhaps even too many, but you soon find that with the amount of backtracking that is often required, coupled with the fact that certain red rooms take away more than one step from your allowance, you have to be tactical in how you explore the estate any given day.
To be fair, this isn’t a static number, and there are several upgrades and shortcuts you’ll unlock in your travels that can increase this number or make it less taxing, but it’s an important thing to keep track of on top of everything else.
This might all sound daunting to you, but trust me, unlocking the secrets of Mount Holly is not as intimidating as it sounds. Although the game keeps track of the days you spend on the estate, there is no set limit on how many you’re allowed to have, and there are no limits on how long you can spend in any one room. Even with the aforementioned obstacles, Blue Prince is extremely generous in how it lets you forge your own strategies and approach the game at your own speed.
As I’ve said, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to Blue Prince‘s primary objective. There’s almost always an alternative path or solution if you’re stumped. Beyond that, at appropriate intervals, Blue Prince offers helpful tips and guidance on how the core mechanics work and strategies that may help you navigate the estate better each day.
That said, this is where my key criticism of Blue Prince, and really, most roguelikes, comes in. The RNG (Random Number Generation) that serves as a foundation for these kinds of games can be brutal. Even with those alternative solutions for most problems you’ll face in Blue Prince, for much of the game, you must rely on the luck of the draw to make progress.
For instance, there was a sizeable stretch of my playthrough where all I had to do was just get from point A to point B. However, I kept getting caught in a vicious circle as the configuration of rooms I drew each day just wasn’t getting me to where I needed to go. For a game so predicated on skillful puzzle design and great mechanics overall, having such a large swath of my playthrough be down to chance was a pretty big bummer.
So, why then do I have such a high opinion of Blue Prince despite such a setback? That’s thanks to the incredible atmosphere, music, and sound design. Even in my most frustrated moments, I just couldn’t bring myself to hate or even dislike the game because of how good it felt to be a part of the setting of Mount Holly.
Regardless of the configuration of rooms you set in any given run, Mount Holly Estate feels equally cozy and eerie. It’s a place with a lot of history, and not to sound pretentious, but you can feel that history as you walk through it. It has an otherworldly feel, even outside of the ever-shifting rooms.
All told, for a game that wasn’t even on my radar until recently, Blue Prince is a truly wonderful surprise, serving as a new benchmark for both adventure games and roguelikes moving forward. It can be equal parts rewarding as it can be frustrating, depending on how you approach it and how the dice may roll. Yet, despite those frustrations, there’s still just so much to love about Blue Prince that I can’t ever stay mad at it.
More narratively inclined gamers may struggle with this title as, despite intriguing lore scattered around the many rooms you explore in Mt. Holly Estate, the story is secondary or even tertiary to the experience. The game has a great ending, and the fun doesn’t stop once you hit the end credits (if anything, that’s the halfway point). However, this is otherwise a title you should approach for the gameplay first and foremost.
And on that front, it truly delivers.
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