Blue Prince is one of the greatest video games I have ever played, but please: don’t read this review.
I admit, in a landscape of constantly evolving Google algorithms, explicitly asking you to go away in the first line of an article might be seen as a trifle eccentric. But Blue Prince is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. Believe me when I tell you, this is a game you need to experience the way its creator intended.
If you insist on sticking around, know that I’ll aim to keep this review as light on spoilers and specifics as possible. But be warned that Blue Prince is a game in which discovery is woven into every fibre of its being. It’s a game about connecting unlikely dots, unearthing unexpected secrets, and slowly making sense of an initially incomprehensible interconnected world.
When I was first sent the code for Dogubomb and Raw Fury’s mysterious indie puzzle game, I expected to be done over the course of a weekend.
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Three weeks on, and Blue Prince had consumed my life. The desk in my office at home was littered with pieces of paper with random dates and numbers scratched onto them. My phone’s notes app contained phrases which, out of context, would surely make me appear quite mad. How did it come to this? Blue Prince is a simple enough game on paper. It’s an exploration-based mystery game in which you, the player, have been tasked with discovering the mysterious 46th room in a sprawling 45-house estate.
To do this, you have to draft the house room by room. Each time you go through a door, you can choose between three possible rooms, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.
For instance, a closet may contain a key that will help you unlock a door elsewhere, but it’s also a dead end that narrows your options for progressing through the house. A corridor could have lots of doors giving you greater choice, but some of those doors may be locked.
Then there are rooms that have their own specific functions. The pump room controls the flow of water through the house; the security room allows you to access a terminal, if you have the password; the chapel is a place of refuge.
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Discovering the various ways in which these rooms can impact one another - and the house at large - is all part of the larger search for the 46th room. The manner in which Blue Prince slowly allows you to peel back its layers is masterfully done. Perfectly paced, and devilishly moreish.
One run through the house will end when you either run out of energy (walking into new rooms takes up “steps”), or when you run out of new doors to go through. Starting again the next day, the house will once again have completely changed, allowing you to draft new rooms and make new plans.
If this sounds like it could get repetitive, it doesn’t. There are always new leads to follow, fresh mysteries to pursue, and new hunches to play. A run is rarely wasted; with each go through the house you learn something valuable, whether that’s the best place to put a certain room, or a piece of information that can be used to find a shortcut, or carve a path forward next time.
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Alas, we’ve reached the point where it becomes particularly tricky to say much more about Blue Prince. Like The Outer Wilds before it, this is a game whose greatest qualities are what they are because they’re supposed to be discovered by you as you play. What I will say is that what begins as a simple (relatively speaking) search opens up into one of the most remarkably sprawling mystery games I have ever played. Every time you find an answer to one question, three more will rise up in its place.
If Blue Prince has one minor issue, it’s that the randomly generated nature of the game can sometimes prove frustrating. Let’s assume you’re following a particular lead that involves you accessing the security room. You know exactly what you need to do, but the RNG means you might not get the room, or combination of rooms and items, to do it.
I reckon this will bother some players more than others. Personally, I think there are so many different mysteries to chase down that, as long as you’re keeping track properly, you should be able to adapt with each run and still get something from it. I will say I also wouldn’t have minded some kind of in-game system for tracking my discoveries, but there was something nice about going back to pen-and-paper notes for this one. Blue Prince deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as games like Return Of The Obra Dinn, Fez, and Tunic. And while there are comparisons to be drawn from all three, I’ve never experienced anything quite like this game. It’s an endlessly captivating labyrinth of twists and turns, with a world that will crawl inside your head and refuse to leave until you’ve finally wrestled its final secrets into submission. And believe me: it’ll take you a while to do that.
Pros: Deceptively massive, genius original conceit, unlike anything I’ve ever played before
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Cons: Randomly generated rooms may rankle
For fans of: The Outer Wilds, Tunic, Fez
10/10: Perfect
Blue prince launches on 10 April for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC via Steam (version tested). A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.
Topics: Reviews, Indie Games, Playstation Plus