GAME REVIEW: Blue Prince has its critics, but still deserves acclaim

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The first room you’ll see in Blue Prince. And you’ll see it a lot.

I pull the lever and the piano music starts to swell. The stone shutter covering the door to the coveted Room 46 starts to open. Finally, I’ve cracked the game. I’ve spent about 50 hours plotting rooms and solving light maths and word association puzzles. I had solved this devilishly tricky puzzle game.

But, I stumbled upon this lever by accident. I had no firm route to the chamber of the door I just opened. With the emotive music in full swing, the game acting as if I had beaten it, I haplessly try to draft my way to the antechamber containing the doorway to Room 46. I hit a dead end. Then another one. And finally, a locked door with no way to open it. The continuing emotive piano chords mocking me as I was forced to reset.

Best described as an escape room on steroids, Blue Prince is a puzzle-based rogue-lite game, focused around a manor, a mystery and, of course, blueprints. This is not a gamer’s game. Anyone with a passing interest in board games and puzzles could easily give this a go. It’s arguably best consumed like a Netflix series – either in big bingeing sessions or in chunks over time – and would be easy to play with a significant other.

But despite all of these perks, the game has polarised the internet. It’s yet another game that has received glowing critical reviews – and many early review critics raving at that – but middling appraisals from broader players. More on this a bit later, but first let me explain how this game works.

The foundations

Playing in first-person as Simon, the young heir to the estate Mt Holly, you investigate the strange backstory behind the family, unlocking the secrets of the house as you go. He needs to reach Room 46 to inherit the house and the family’s wealth. The catch: The layout of house resets every day.

Whenever you reach a door, you draft up three blueprints for rooms. Some hold puzzles or bonuses, others offer utility to your house, few have multiple doorways, there’s also several that are dead ends. Mt Holly is always set on a nine by five grid, giving you some limitations for drafting. Each choice is crucial, as the way you plot your house affects both your progress in the game and what you’ll be able to get out of each run.

For instance, plotting a Pool into your manor allows you to access the Pump Room which in turn gives you the ability to interact with the water-related puzzles across the property, such as draining the fountain out the front to reveal a hidden passage. But that’s just one of dozens of rooms on offer. More often than not, you won’t find it in your allotment of rooms.

Aside from the randomness of the rooms, you are also held in check by a step mechanic that limits the amount of rooms you can visit in a day. You can increase your steps by eating food or drafting bedrooms. I rarely found it to be an issue, but it’s another point of tension that adds to the overall strategy of the game.

Room requirements for both keys and gems — two currencies you acquire in the Manor — also gate your progress the closer you get to the antechamber connecting to Room 46. Along with items that interact with various rooms, these mechanics combine to create a really unique and dynamic experience that is both simple, yet incredibly rich in its execution.

While each run will differ, the game generally gets easier as you progress. Solving various room-based puzzles offer you bonuses, and new blueprints for new rooms that gradually help you break the randomness of the game, altering the frequency in which rooms appear in your drafting pool. Some even reward you with powerful permanent upgrades for Simon that allow him to start each day with more steps or gems. It’s these upgrades that ultimately motivate you to keep going, nudging you closer and closer towards Room 46.

Though, one of the fundamental challenges of Blue Prince is that its puzzles are more often than not spread across multiple rooms of the house. Many require code breaking skills, a knack for word association or, dare I say it, maths.

The more frustrating ones require particular rooms to be placed next to or near each other; a tough task until much later in the game. If you are anything like me, you’ll be taking plenty of screenshots. And despite my best efforts to avoid it, you’ll also want to play with a notepad handy — the game even strongly suggests this in an in-game note. Unless you have a photographic memory, you’ll want to jot things down.

While all puzzles lead to some form of reward, it can be difficult to suss out which will contribute towards your initial goal of reaching Room 46 and which will aid you in the post-game mystery, aimed at solving the deeper plot points. For example, there’s a number of safes strewn around the house. Cracking them rewards you with a gem, but they also contain a letter that’s relevant to the post-game and won’t help you hit Room 46. But the game doesn’t tell you this, meaning you can spend hours solving a mystery that is helpful but not significant. That’s fine, as it contributes to the overall experience.

The devil is in the artistic details

While it’s no graphical powerhouse, Blue Prince looks and sounds incredible. You draft an incredibly diverse range of rooms, all of which have a unique charm to them.

Some are also marked by a change in the subtle jazz soundtrack accompanying the game, which creates a calming, but intriguing mood as you play. Memorable moments in the game are often marked with a piano chord or underpinned by woodwind instruments.

Crucially, its thrust towards artistic, rather than realistic graphics, means that it performed very smoothly on my PS5 Pro, but I see no reason why it wouldn’t on my Steam Deck.

Word nerds though will appreciate the writing and scripting in this game. In a world where AI may soon pick up the mantle for the bulk of in-game memos and notes, everything in Blue Prince feels hand-crafted and eloquent. The words feel genuine here, and perhaps call on creator Tonda Ros’ marketing background. He understands the power of language to evoke emotion and drive curiosity, and that’s on full display here.

How do you review randomness?

Back to what I mentioned earlier about the critical reception of the game. It’s incredibly hard to critique randomness. This game wouldn’t work without it.

But it can be incredibly frustrating to set up for a future run, only to have it foiled by a bad pull of rooms. Or to be locked in a loop of poor runs.

It’s possibly why the critical reception and player reception for the game differ. Critics will generally try to see a game to completion — or as close as possible — before offering a view.

There’s no such self-imposed restriction on player reviews. A few poor runs could easily see someone bounce right off Blue Prince in frustration.

Separately, there’s something to be said here about the reviewer experience, where many received copies ahead of the game going live.

The proliferation of post-release guides on the web can also turn Blue Prince into a paint-by-numbers affair, where you know the solution (or at least how to solve) each puzzle when you encounter it. That dilutes the pain of the randomly generated rooms, as when you do encounter them you know what to do. But does it defeat the purpose of the game? That’s likely up to the player and how they want to engage with this title.

After you unlock certain blueprints for rooms and items, the game’s logic starts to really reveal itself to the player. You, both literally and metaphorically, become a master of your own manor, knowing exactly how to draft to get what you want. That sense of accomplishment is incredibly rewarding in itself.

The solution to the game lies between beelining for Room 46 and engaging with other side mysteries where it’s easy to do so. The game attempts to nudge you in this direction with in-game notes and clues. But perhaps gating more mysteries or potential rooms behind your initial visit to Room 46 may have been the answer here? Albeit at the cost of narrowing the game.

But if Blue Prince does have one genuine flaw, it’s the lack of a toggle function for running. I played this game for hours at a time. Perhaps it’s a sign of my ageing gamer hands, but holding a trigger to get Simon to move just that little bit faster will eventually give you cramps. As you solve more puzzles, you’ll have less reason to dawdle, and more reasons to move at max speed — which still isn’t that fast.

Despite all of this, my time with Blue Prince was both engrossing and rewarding, and very easy to recommend to others.

The run that did get me into Room 46 left little to chance. I knew exactly what I was doing. That piano music resurfaced, and this time it felt like a victory lap. I cleanly marched into Room 46 with plenty of steps to spare and an abundance of keys and gems.

My reward? A very poignant cutscene, with yet another mystery lying in plain sight – an emotive reading of a note that I’ve spotted in the house at least a dozen times and glossed over. But with voice acting, and a montage of images it hints at a deeper mystery and an invitation for further play.

More narrow requirements for drafting certain rooms, and even the slightest bit of randomness with the drafting lists ultimately bounced me off engaging further with the game’s interesting end-game mysteries. But when the game release cycle slows down, I could see myself returning to Mt Holly. I have unfinished business and a deeper engaging narrative to unravel.

Reviewed on: Playstation 5 Pro

Worth playing if you like: Tricky board games, escape rooms or old Resident Evil games — without the zombies. Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn.

Available on: Both Xbox Game Pass and Playstation Plus Game. If you subscribe to either, it’s a free game. Otherwise on Steam, Windows, and Nvidia GeForce Now.

• Harrison Polites writes the Infinite Lives newsletter. Follow him here.

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