Cliff Notes – Blue Prince review the best puzzle game of the year
- Unique Gameplay Structure: Blue Prince features a roguelite design where players rebuild a mysterious manor each day, with a focus on strategic room placement and limited movement.
- Engaging Puzzles: The game offers a variety of brain-teasing puzzles that are quick to solve, while the overarching challenge of locating the elusive 46th room adds depth to the experience.
- Note-Taking Essential: Players are encouraged to keep notes to track the intricate relationships between rooms and their interactions, enhancing the game’s complexity and replayability.
Blue Prince review – the best puzzle game of the year
Blue Prince creates a different manner every day. The latest indie hit is also a surprise game of the year contender, as you try to discover the secrets of your great uncle’s mysterious manor.
Since the early 1990s, when Myst and Riven wowed gamers with their pre-rendered CD-ROM graphics, puzzle games have been perfectly content not to explain themselves, letting players infer far more about their plot and setting than they’re explicitly told. And that’s certainly not something that’s gone away in the last few decades, with titles like Gorogoa, Return Of The Obra Dinn, The Talos Principle, and Lorelei And The Laser Eyes proving utterly inscrutable for most, if not all, of their play times.
Blue Prince is a little different
It adds to the air of mystery and helps keep an open mind when you go about solving what can be pretty oblique puzzles. Blue Prince is a little different. It begins by setting out exactly what you’re doing and why, even if its explanation poses more questions than it answers. Baron Herbert Sinclair has died, leaving his estate to you, his grandnephew, with the single stipulation in his will that you will only inherit it if you can locate the 46th room in his 45 room mansion.
There are other rules. You’re not allowed to stay overnight, all the items and tools you need for your exploration must remain inside the house, and you’re not allowed to bring anyone in from the outside world. You swiftly discover that’s because Blue Prince has a roguelite structure, and that the house is completely dismantled at the end of each day, ready for you to help build it again from scratch the next morning using a special blueprint.
That means you begin each session with just an entrance hall, its doors facing North, East and West. Played from a first person perspective, when you approach one of the doors you’re presented with three random rooms. Some have useful items, others have plenty of doors so you can expand your map more easily, while others have debuffs that in most circumstances you’d want to avoid.
Placing a room on the house’s blueprint instantly builds it, so when you walk through the door, it opens into the room you’ve just designated, letting you collect anything inside and use its doors – if it has any – to build new rooms, corridors, and store cupboards.
The only issue is that you’re limited in your house building endeavours by the number of footsteps you take. Starting each day with 50, you use one each time you enter a room, with some knocking more from your total depending on their type.
While you can top them up by eating food you find around the house, or receiving buffs from certain rooms, the number of footsteps you’ve taken is a constant consideration in your travels and discourages unnecessary backtracking. Run out of steps and it’s time to end the day and start again from that lonely entrance hall, but that’s just one of the things that ends runs that typically last 30 to60 minutes.
You’ll also find yourself boxed in, your layout reaching the edges on both sides, or having all available doors plugged by dead ends. Generally, cul-de-sac rooms also have upsides, like giving you free footsteps or keys used to enter locked doors. But there are other times you place them by accident. If your selection of three rooms contains two that require a special crystal, and you’re fresh out of crystals, you can be forced to build rooms you would usually prefer not to.
While not beautiful, Blue Prince’s cel-shaded art style is more than enough to provide an atmospheric and consistent backdrop to your exploration. It’s also highly polished and completely bug free, its interface proving clean and responsive. Laying down rooms and entering them is quick and seamless, giving runs a wonderful sense of flow that really lets you get lost in your task.
Its puzzles are similarly pithy. Most runs will feature both the Billiard Room, where you’ll find an increasingly complex mathematical puzzle built into a dartboard, and the Parlour, which has a logic game constructed around three treasure boxes, each of which has a statement on it that may or may not be true. They’re brain teasing but pleasantly so, taking seconds rather than minutes to solve.
The real puzzle is the house, which has a tantalising antechamber permanently fixed in the centre of the farthest northern reach of your blueprint. You’re led to understand that it’s the gateway to what may be the 46th room, but just reaching the antechamber, let alone opening one of its four doors, is a puzzle of its own.
The blueprint is everything (Raw Fury)
You’ll also find certain rooms interact with one another. Sometimes that confers extra bonuses, but other times rooms’ relationships are more essential. The Pump Room supplies or removes water from other rooms, while another gives them power.
The Security Room lets you change how keycard doors work, but only in concert with the breaker box – which you’ll find in a Utility Closet. Or there’s the Laboratory that lets you conduct ‘experiments’ that offer rewards when you build specific rooms or trigger certain events.
Unlocking new rooms as you progress, which are retained for subsequent runs, you’re rated on how many you’ve managed to add to your blueprint at the end of each day; the game acknowledging their layout and composition in its final appraisal of that day’s results.
You can also find tools. The metal detector for example, highlights extra coins and keys; the lockpick opens some doors without using up a key, while the Coat Check lets you save a single item and reclaim it another day.
The game advises you to have a pen and paper handy to make notes, and it’s not kidding. While some gamers won’t be fans of that idea, we found writing things down was all but essential unless you have a photographic memory. There are more than enough mysteries to unpick without the added challenge of forgetting some you already know the answers to.
There are moments of frustration – being forced to box yourself in when you were previously having a really good run or exhausting your supply of keys or footsteps just before getting to the anteroom do not inspire joy. There are also sometimes fairly lengthy periods where you don’t feel as though you’re making any progress at all, with runs finishing without any major breakthroughs, but then you’ll get a big step up making everything feel exciting again.
The obscurity of its overarching challenge, roguelite structure, and having to write things down won’t appeal to everyone. Neither will its mid-budget art style and sense of gradually evolving repetition. But if those things sound intriguing, Blue Prince (which pun fans may already have spotted references blueprints) is a fascinating slow building game that rewards persistence and curiosity like few others.
Blue Prince review summary
A beautifully made first person puzzle roguelite that demands tenacity and patience (and writing things down) to unravel its fascinating mysteries.
Pros: Brilliantly realised mechanics, sparse interface without a bug in sight, and a slow drip feed of new rooms and interactions that keep it feeling fresh.
Cons: Some runs can feel as though you’re making no progress and requiring pen and paper will be off-putting to some.
Score: 8/10
Formats: PlayStation 5* (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: Raw Fury
Developer: Dogubomb
Release Date: 10th April 2025
Age Rating: 3
*available on PlayStation Plus Game Catalog, Game Pass Ultimate, and PC Game Pass from day one
Some rooms are more mysterious than others (Raw Fury)