Blue Prince is Riven for the Indie Roguelike Generation

Dogubomb's masterful puzzle adventure is an unputdownable lightning bolt of brilliant game design.

I wasn't expecting to play forty hours of an indie game in less than five days, but then I got a code for Blue Prince. This game, whose name is a double entendre, is about designing your way through a mysterious estate on a rigid 5 x 9 grid, one room at a time. Every day, you start in the Entrance Hall, and upon selecting the north, west, or east door, are offered a selection of three chambers to choose from, blueprints picked at random from your drafting pool, which transforms as you orienteer and make all-important selections. You have 50 steps to explore, that total decreasing every time you transit to a new room. Good luck!

Some rooms are corridors with a door at each end. Others arc left, or right, are dead ends, or have exits on all sides. Many of Mt. Holly’s doors are locked and require a key; others need a keycard, and many of the rooms you’ll roll require a quantity of gems to draft. Beyond the potential to contain these currencies, almost every room has a permutation that can stop you dead in your tracks or lead you towards a new discovery.

You play as a young boy who has been tasked with conquering the mansion in order to inherit it, and to say much more would be criminal. If you care even one iota about the thrill of mastering a puzzle game, you simply need to play Blue Prince. This dizzying but ultimately euphoric experience is up there with your Obra Dinn’s and Golden Idols, and will undoubtedly feature on year-end lists. It’s very much an adventure in the Cyan Worlds style, brought up to date with an innovative integration of roguelike systems.

So yeah. You’re going to need a notepad for this one. What I’ve failed to mention until now is that it’s not just a case of planning your way to the other side in Blue Prince. That will get you so far, but the mansion is steeped in an immense teacup of intrigue, each room pockmarked with whispers of interconnected puzzles that take a lateral mind and a holistic approach to solve. Specific rooms in the drafting pool complement each other in this regard in satisfying or frustrating ways, but it’s all dependent on how the dice fall. There will be many runs where you don’t even bother trying to get to the other side of the mansion, distracted by some ancillary pursuit like the hapless puzzle-brained chicken you are.

You’ll likely land on a certain drafting strategy in the first few hours, only for a new lead to completely upend it and send you hurtling back to the drawing board. Expect this to happen several times before you reach the elusive Room 46. In between now and then, there’s going to be math, crafting, secret rooms and their keys, hidden levers, safes to crack and all sorts of meticulously-designed puzzle capers to get up to. If you’re anything like me, you will imbibe all of it with little disregard for the real world around you. I struggled to surface for air from this intoxicating masterpiece — even when the cards weren’t falling in my favour, I couldn’t help but love the feeling of starting another day, buoyed by the possibility of an exciting new encounter.

Naturally, it’s quite difficult to talk further about the nitty-gritty of Blue Prince without spoiling how the game works — and this is something you should experience totally blind. Even the idea that rooms are grouped into certain colour-coded schools based on what they offer (Hallways, Bedrooms, et al) feels like saying a little bit too much, even when I drown the concept in vagueries. That is testament to the fog-like atmosphere Dogubomb has curated in this game.

I’d recommend starting a little Discord with your friends where you can lob each other subtle hints and discuss what you find. One of the things I loved most about Blue Prince is how it felt like a video game event — something for players to flail against, then unravel together in hushed tones, as I did in a Discord full of other reviewers. Truly, if any game was going to spark a revival of the Universal Hint System, it should be Blue Prince. The way the game restrains and paces itself, confident that you’ll figure it out eventually, is so supremely refreshing, especially in a market dominated by games that want to give you ice cream every five seconds.

Of course, such intentional design (and Blue Prince’s partly randomly-generated nature) inevitably leads to frustration when it’s not going right for you. There was a fugue state period in the centre of my playtime where several hours passed and I felt like my only blockade was controlled by random number generation. Hold firm! It took me way too long to realise that I had foolishly backed myself into a corner by using an in-game tool to make some of the game’s most important rooms less common.

In hindsight, I realise that the only thing in my way was my own imagination, but at the time, I was dismayed. Despite sinking 20 hours into that profile, I decided to start again from the beginning, but leveraged my knowledge to quickly get back to where I left off. I wasn’t sure that I’d finish the game in time for the embargo as a result, but luckily, here we are. All this to say — Blue Prince’s use of randomness inherently leaves gaps in the armour, and there are scenarios where you’ll feel like you’re being flipped the bird by an invisible hand. But I’d strongly suggest you endure through this for what lies ahead. Blue Prince would not have its soul without this necessary chaos.

Not that it has a huge impact on the experience, but Blue Prince’s cel-shaded visual style is a lovely bit of icing on this puzzle-flavoured cake. I rolled credits on Steam Deck — perfect way to play, by the way — and the colours popped nicely on the OLED screen, giving life to the game’s graphic novelesque scenes of campsites and darkrooms. A smattering of cinematics frame the game’s narrative throughout, which admirably pervades the estate. There’s a lot of great writing in this game, which feels like a wholly unnecessary bonus to something that is already terribly easy to recommend.

Stray notes, portraits, diaries and novels are hidden throughout Mt. Holly’s many rooms, and the story is woven carefully into the gameplay all the way through to its surprisingly emotional first finale. The alluring inheritor premise is chewy enough to buckle you in before you are totally lost to the game’s thrall, scribbling in your Notes app and taking pictures of your screen. Speaking to my partner about what I was up to was a persistent descent into enthusiastic Pepe Silvia gibberish, and the relief I felt upon crossing the final threshold bordered on biblical.

But to my astonishment, forty hours of earnest investigation has still not brought me ultimate clarity on all of Blue Prince’s mysteries. In fact, I’m more confused than ever in the postgame, but still eagerly pecking away at the puzzles, which are making my brain heat up like an old laptop. I’ve seen that some players wrapped the game in half the time it took me, but I can only reflect on that fact with admiration rather than envy. Blue Prince is a singular video game crucible where everyone is forced to earn their stripes. I hope you’ll dare to join the hunt for Room 46 when it lands later this week. You certainly won’t regret it!

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