Blue Prince is delightful. It’s sort of a mashup of Slay the Spire and Myst. And it has a moving story. (It’s the second puzzle game that actually made me teary eyed at the end–the first being Outer Wilds.)
Reaching the credits made me feel like I achieved something. (And for those that played, I reached there on Day 12 with exactly one step remaining! Wow!) And then I watched the story I’d been reading come to life in a wonderful cutscene with a moving score and voice over, and just felt that they’d made a perfect little game.
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The premise of Blue Prince is simple enough: You begin in a room with three doors. Opening one reveals a slate of three rooms to choose from. Explore/build the house room-by-room, find the final door, and win.
It starts there, but hidden behind that straightforward premise is an expansive Myst-like world explorer game, and a rich, mysterious, emotional story. The story in particular surprised me.
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Again, the basic goal of the game is to make your way to the far end of the manor. And it’s totally possible (and in fact almost certain) that you will make a home with no path to that room. Your job is to strategize and gamble a bit to make a path anyway.
What sorts of rooms can you draft? All sorts. Bedrooms, hallways, dining rooms, kitchens, and all sorts of esoteric rooms you’d expect to see in a lavish mansion. Grand halls, aquariums, pump rooms, and more.
Rooms with better connections cost more. Rooms with fewer connections tend to have more resources, and dead ends have the best resources. And there are special reasons you’ll want to draft rooms beyond just resources, so when drafting there’s this fun “push your luck” quality to it.
How much do you spend, and when and on what, to get to that final room? Perhaps I just cut my losses, focus on rooms that advance the meta-progression or puzzles I’m working on and ignore the final room? There’s a push and pull decisionmaking to it that’s classic Rougelike stuff and works very well.
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Rooms contain puzzles, many more puzzles than first meets the eye. To beat the game, you’ll need to play through a Myst-like world exploration game, and complete large-scale environment puzzles to open secret passageways and elevators and other things you’d expect from such a game.
You’ll also need to solve lots of smaller puzzles. To take one simple example, one of the rooms you can draft is the Parlor, which asks you to solve a logic puzzle. The puzzle is different every time you draft the room, and increases with difficulty every time you draft it. Successfully solving it rewards a decent amount of resources.
Beyond that there are combination-safes to find, and larger meta puzzles to figure out, and puzzles that don’t even look like puzzles to solve.
The difficulty to make it to the credits was, for me, a fair bit easier than Outer Wilds, but I am not complaining–and probably just got lucky. I did not need to look up a guide for this game, but I did for Outer Wilds a couple times.
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The story is excellent. Unlike many other games which drown the player in text, Blue Prince doesn’t. Text, where it exists, is pithy. There are a couple longer letters, but for the most part, the story is told in post-its and clippings and short messages and images, and the very occasional cutscene.
You’ll discover that some… bad things happened in the past, in this mansion and the land it's set in. You’ll uncover a disappearance mystery, and a political thriller. And weirdly, a children’s book sits in the middle of it all… A delightfully written children’s book, I might add.
The writing in the game as a whole has the pithiness of a child’s book. Every line seems to rhyme, or have a double meaning; every word seems to be particularly placed, just like the name of the game itself (Blue Prince, blueprints, get it?) and its chief mechanic (drafting, see?).
Words are not wasted here, and you are rewarded for paying attention. (Other games, particularly RPGs, should take note. More words is not better.)
Also, Blue Prince's story also takes swings on a couple deep, challenging topics. There's an undercurrent of discussion of fascism and censorship and leadership that, while it isn't resolved (at least so far; not before the credits rolled), I appreciate that the author seems to have something to say.
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I loved this game and was surprised at how it sucked me in and compelled me to keep playing. I was surprised by the rich story and the mystery under it, and the overall sheer quality of everything I’m seeing and hearing. (I should have said how good the music is!)
Few games are made with this attention to the player’s experience, with this level of polish and quality in every frame.
Also, like any good Roguelike there’s an entire endgame on top of it, including a challenge mode. There’s a deeper story too, or so I hope! I’m very interested in playing on and discovering more! I think I’ll do that… right now.
Blue Prince is recommended.
