Blue Prince

Chaos and Blueprints!

On the plus side, this is a very unique take on a puzzle game, and a particularly strong recommend if you like games along the lines of The Outer Wilds and Tunic. On the negative side, an inescapable part of the core gameplay is the frustration of needing a very specific room and just not getting it, which then leads to having to start a new run all over again. I can easily see this being a strong hit-or-miss depending on the person.

GOTY 2025

i can feel my brain cells growing

Fantastic game. Avoid spoilers at all cost before/while playing.

It's true! Blue Prince is a good game!!!! The number of times where I activated some new change or entered a new area and was like "Oh my God?????" — innumerable. In the best way possible, it just keeps going!!! I also really enjoyed how the game, despite not actually showing you a single other person outside of recordings or photos, manages to gradually grow out these other characters in Simon's family and show all the quirky interrelationships happening. There are def a few red herrings, which I suppose is to be expected, and a few minor things I personally felt weren't explained, but... that's not necessarily a bad thing? After all, what is a mystery without, well, mystery? Some unsolved details, a little mystique... It's good to have something to chew on. I also really, really enjoyed the art direction and visuals. Blue Prince as a game has a lot of really cool style and flair to it, with a fantastic soundtrack and a lot of atmosphere, and a lot of really neat worldbuilding development. I really, really liked the admittedly kind of sparse conlang elements in-game and how open-ended that was, the flexibility of not necessarily having to input a solution, even though I don't think I was able to fully translate the letter. (But I got most of it down, I'm just missing a couple of like, auxiliary suffixes afaict) As someone with an interest in linguistics and conlanging, I really had a fun time with that! It scratched an itch that even a lot of conlang-focused puzzle games don't always manage. Just a really cool game overall, and I'm glad I got to experience it! I took pretty extensive and organized notes, both typed and drawn, but there were still some times I felt lost as to what I needed to actually do next to progress the story and game. A lot of the time it was just because I had missed or forgotten some small detail that clinched a few other things together, and other times I was overthinking something or had the right idea but was going about it in the wrong way. Sometimes you really do just need a nudge in the right direction. There is a good hint guide in the steam community that's super handy for early game stuff. It's great about not being spoilery while still nudging you along. For mid to late game stuff, I *hugely* recommend the Blue Prince Hint System aka Blue Paths which is a simple little website to help you track what you have or have not done yet. It was an immense help for me in keeping my momentum going even 200 hours into the game. It is, as far as I can tell, exhaustive, and will get you through the entire thing with as few major spoilers as possible (though there are a few things that are difficult to get around mentioning, especially for a hint guide that tracks your progress actively). — Trying not to be too spoilery but maybe some vague half-spoilers re: the story/ending below I did find the ending (or lack thereof) both 1) a tiny bit disappointing, and 2) something that made sense in context for a game like this—how would you even make a concrete ending without inadvertently discouraging further exploration on the off-chance the player still has a few things left to do? I think just one extra cutscene might have helped with a greater sense of closure, but also, I can't bring myself to be too bothered about it. Blue Prince is just a really cool game that does a lot of really cool things, and after 240 hours I've got a pretty good idea of how everything went down, so even then—I can look at my hint guide and see, as far as anyone knows, I have nothing left to do, and I can think about everything I did, and go, oh yeah, okay, I get it! That's what happened, cool! But in the moment it does feel sort of disorientingly anticlimactic. And to be clear I don't think it would have been "better" to have some kind of victorious reunion or emails or whatever, that's not what I'm after, and I don't think it would have been "good writing," even if I did initially think maybe we would see some of the other locations mentioned throughout the game, like the... teahouse, or the boathouse you see in one of the cutscenes, or whatever. Spoilers: you don't ever leave the grounds (which, yeah, duh, but for a hot minute I was like, "what if????" lol) I did find it a little funny that the... blue... papers, let's say... (not the manuscript) didn't really activate any kind of cutscene or change, despite earlier similar findings usually popping some kind of cutscene. It's just kind of... there. Which is wild! Like, ma'am??? Hello?? Rlly funny move though. Lady Auravei, you are absolutely diabolical (complimentary). — On a technical level, I did get a couple of minor, transient bugs mostly related to the key/button mappings, but I was also using Moonlight to stream from my host PC to my laptop, so it's entirely possible that some of my controller support issues were caused by Moonlight itself. I also got the premature drafting trophy bug, which was very funny—apparently the devs are aware of it, and it's just not a priority compared to more impactful bugs, which is fair. Other than that, the game ran smoothly, and I didn't experience any soft locks or truly major bugs as far as I know of.

I wasn't sure I was gonna like this game because of the rogue-lite aspect, but the puzzle part drew me in anyway. It takes a few in-game days to really get into it, and past that point, I was hooked and kept playing to uncover all the secrets of the manor. It's really well made, and sure, the endgame puzzles can be stupidly hard, but I guess if you made it this far,, then it's logical that the difficulty goes way up. I had a lot of fun playing this game, it's well worth giving it a try.