In the making for over eight years, Blue Prince is an atmospheric, architectural rogue-lite adventure played from a first person perspective that took me completely by surprise. It merges mystery, incredible design, unbelievable depth and satisfying strategy to make something frighteningly addictive. I couldn’t stop playing, and hold on to your butts, because it might just be one of the best games I’ve ever played. Read on for the full verdict in XboxEra’s Blue Prince Review.
Disclaimer: I’ve actually found this review incredibly difficult to write, because telling you or showing you too much would spoil what makes the game so utterly captivating, at least to me.
You have two options – one, you can take me at my word, close your browser, and go download the game. The second of course, is to keep reading. I will do everything I can to avoid spoiling anything – that goes for puzzle solutions, any advanced details, hints towards specific mysteries – but if you at least want to understand a little more before you dive in, stick around.
Making a House a Home
In Blue Prince, you play as young 14 year old Simon P. Jones, heir apparent to the mysterious Mount Holly, a sprawling 45-roomed mansion estate that was owned by recently deceased and renowned puzzler, Herbert S. Sinclair. Now that he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, he’s left it all to you. But there’s a catch.
In order to become the new owner of Mt.Holly, you must reach the long rumoured but never actually confirmed “Room 46”. It sounds simple enough, but this mansion is anything but simple. The house itself is split into 45 identically sized rooms, and at the top, the mysterious ‘antechamber’ which will be your primary goal to reach when you start your journey in Blue Prince.
Is it the way to room 46? Well, you’ll have to figure that one out for yourself I’m afraid.
Starting each day in the Entrance Hall, you will decide the layout of the estate, room by room, discovering new rooms to explore and plenty of mysteries to solve along the way. Anytime you reach a closed door in Mt. Holly, the game will offer up a choice to draft one of three unique rooms – ranging from bedrooms, hallways, garden rooms and more for you to select. Some have multiple exits, some are just dead ends that force you to double back and try an alternate route and most have some sort of clue to all sorts of wider mysteries.
You’re equipped with just 50 steps you can take, the count whittling down every time you pass through a doorway. Run out, and your day exploring the estate is over, forcing you to start again tomorrow. And surprise, the rooms have all reset, and you must begin again. There are ways to increase that step count, allowing for more exploration of course. Find food, say fruit while exploring for example, and it’ll give you a few precious extra steps to take.
The rooms themselves are varied and hugely detailed, each supplying the player with various perks or de-buffs on each run, depending upon the type of room you draft. The type of room is colour coded, with ‘Purple’ Bedrooms tending to replenish steps in some fashion and ‘Red’ rooms typically having some sort of negative consequence. ‘Green’ rooms are nature-focused, and usually can only be placed on the edges of the 45-room grid. The ‘Orange’ hallways tend to allow for more connections to other rooms than usual, and ‘Gold’ rooms act as shops where the player can pick up new supplies, be it food or equipment. There are also other types of rooms….but to share more would spoil things, and you don’t want that.
Beyond the apparent ‘perks’ of each room, be they good or bad for the player, each also contains, in some form at least, a puzzle, a document with a clue to something else, or important context around the broader narrative that acts as the backdrop for the game.
I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve discovered something in one room, that’s linked to another room, that’s linked to another puzzle and so on. These ‘eureka’ moments of discovery are wonderful, and I would wholeheartedly recommend keeping a pen/paper or at a minimum, your phone handy when playing – just so you can note stuff down. The constant drip-feed of information, that leads to discover, that leads to new information…it consistently builds, is always satisfying, and frankly, some of the most intricate and incredible game design I’ve ever seen. This is all layered against a backdrop of political and familial intrigue, and the story – yes, there is one – is doled out through a variety of methods, be it found letters or interesting clue-laden cut-scenes.
First Draft
As you play, you’ll start to obtain three primary consumables. First, there’s cold, hard cash. This can be used to buy food or equipment, and it can be found randomly throughout the manor. Next up, there are keys. In certain runs, as you progress deeper into the manor, you’ll encounter locked doors which require keys to open.
If you run out of keys, then you’ll be unable to progress, forcing you to call it a day and start a fresh run the next day. Lastly, there are gems that like coins, can be found strewn throughout the manor. These are used as a resource to draft rarer and more unique rooms, and like keys, can force a run to end if you don’t have what you need and are forced to draft a dead-end room, instead of the one you wanted.
A note on Localisation: While I understand the developers would love to localise the game into more languages, it’s an incredible challenge due to the amount of content that revolves around the English language. Without delving into spoiler territory, if English isn’t your native language, be wary of potential challenges when solving some of the games deeper mysteries.
However, despite the medley of genres on display here, be it puzzle games or point-and-click adventures, there is always the rogue-lite element to contend with. Some runs just aren’t going to go the way you want, and some players may get frustrated when the game turns around and simply denies them progress. Here in lies the beauty of the Blue Prince, in that sometimes the definition of what a ‘successful run’ actually is will change. Perhaps now getting to the antechamber isn’t the primary goal, but solving the puzzle you found a clue for is the current goal, and so on.
Beyond consumable items, there are also other things you can find while exploring Mt. Holly. There’s a variety of equipment you can utilise, be it a metal detector, a sledgehammer, a magnifying glass and more. There’s even a wrench, that if equipped, can let you adjust the rarity of each room you draft.
Each new item kicks off another layer of investigation, and when you discover a room that can let you modify these items to combine them together to create entirely new things, or perhaps a room that lets you “check” an item to be retrieved on another run…so opens up more possibilities. You can also, through a mechanic I won’t detail here, upgrade rooms to permanently improve or change them, adding another layer of progression as you work towards your various goals, or unlock fully permanent editions for all future runs.
A Maze within a Maze…
Graphically, the game is lovely to look at, with this sort of sketched/cel-shaded and minimalist style that works well on the smallest of props to the expansive mansion estate. The music ranges from ethereal to playful, with all sorts of motifs kicking in at just the right time, and some of them being room dependent. Draft the Music Room, for example, and you’ll get a lovely piano piece. It’s all really, really good.
I’ve been playing the Xbox Series X version of the game, which is a Play Anywhere title, with occasional stints on my PC and lots of time on my ROG Ally X. The game runs great on all of these, though a patch introduced towards the end of the review period on Xbox Series X seemed to introduce some really bad screen tearing during movement, which I hope is resolved by the time the game is publicly available. Having said that, I feel that Xbox is actually one of the best places to play – and that’s mostly because of Quick Resume.
The one big flaw with Blue Prince is that it doesn’t have the ability to save mid-run, so should you draft a a rare room and get stuck on a puzzle, if you’re on any other platform other than Xbox and need to quit out or turn off the game, you’re out of luck I’m afraid. Quick Resume came in handy, enabling me to step away, turn the console off and come back to it with a refreshed brain in the morning.
I also had great fun playing this co-operatively with my partner – it’s not a co-op game, by any means, but chatting through puzzles and bouncing theories and ideas off another interested (and fully invested!) party was a lot of fun, and absolutely factored into why I’ve enjoyed the hours I’ve sunk in so far.
BluePrints
Now, this is where my job gets difficult, because beyond describing these core mechanics and themes, I’m genuinely loathe to tell you anything else. The beauty of the game, and indeed, its core design is in the mystery itself, and to even hint at what awaits you to uncover inside the halls of Mt. Holly is a crime I simply won’t commit.
To say that I’m utterly infatuated with Blue Prince would be an understatement. There are so many layers to the game, I’ve barely even scratched the surface here in terms of how deep this rabbit hole goes, and I’m 70+ plus hours in at the time of writing this review.
It is an impeccably made work of absolute genius, and the team at Dogubomb and Game Director Tonda Ros have worked magic here. As I said at the start of this review, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever played. Without a doubt a shoe-in for indie darling of the year, I’d give it an 11 out of 10 if I could.
Go download it, and dig in – it’s fantastic.
Blue Prince
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Gorgeous art and sound
- Incredible depth
- Quick maths!
- Logic Puzzles
- Extremely Addictive
CONS
- No Saving Mid-Run - Thank god for Quick Resume!
