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Quick Summary
- This game has a lot of hidden story explore, which makes the world feel full.
- With so many things to remember, you’ll need to write down your findings as you go.
- Reaching the end of the game requires mastering all the mechanics.
Introduction
Blue Prince, the rogue-lite puzzle game, is an incredible feat of intricate and overlapping details and mysteries. Solving it takes time and patience (and maybe the help of a friend). In this review, I am going to be discussing Blue Prince as a whole game, spoilers and all.
If you are interested in something more spoiler-free, check out my previous review instead.
Story
The story of Blue Prince is deceptively simple, with the 14-year-old main character Simon P. Jones inheriting the sprawling Mt. Holly Estate from his great-uncle on one condition: finding the 46th room of the 45-room manor. However, reaching Room 46 is only the beginning. Playing beyond that reveals Blue Prince as the story of a family, with three key people highlighting deeper facets about the world.
Herbert S. Sinclair
Simon’s great-uncle, Herbert S. Sinclair, is the first key person in the story, the man who penned the will which starts the game. Herbert is a man who loves puzzles and he has left many for Simon to find as he explores the estate. It is Herbert’s hand which guides Simon to Room 46, but he is also very involved in aspects of the story afterward.
He traveled to all 8 realms of the fictional world, leaving behind a puzzle which requires information about each realm from classrooms and books. In addition, all of the mysterious “red letters” found in safes around the estate were hidden by Herbert and relate to him in some way, with most of them being addressed to him directly. They also are tied to the next key person in the story, Mary Jones nee Epsen.
Mary Epsen
Mary is Simon’s mother and Herbert’s niece. She disappeared when Simon was young. Through the red letters and puzzles tied to Mary’s books (she was a children’s book author), you discover that this disappearance was actually planned by Mary herself. Mary was involved in rebel activity aiming to undermine the current militaristic and likely authoritarian government. Following her line of puzzles leads you to learn that Simon was subject to oppressive propaganda growing up and turn an old throne room to blue using the crown that Mary helped steal.
This storyline ties in a lot to the title of the game, Blue Prince, which is also a pun on “blueprints.” Simon, once obsessed with the red propaganda of the Fenn Aires government, starts the path of becoming a “blue prince” instead once he learns the true history of his country and how it connects to old royalty and his family line. Completing this line of puzzles is required to unlock the true last area of the game, which is connected to the last key family member, Baroness Auravei.
Baroness Auravei
Auravei is Simon’s great grandmother and she is the original creator of the Mount Holly estate with all its mysteries. Solving her line of puzzles is the most difficult, obscure stretch of the game and her story and lore are set far before the other main story beats. Despite this, however, Auravei’s story feels like the proper end to the game, tying it all together.
To get to this ending, you must venture into Auravei’s rough draft, an area of the map where you see the rooms you are familiar with in an utterly blue and unfinished state. Solving the puzzle of this zone grants you access to the last bit of the story: Auravei’s will and the true inheritance of the estate.
Supporting Characters
These key people are not the only characters in the story, of course. There are many side plots and people who circle around these main lines of mystery, giving the world a more lived in and interesting feeling as you explore. For example, there are estate staff who you learn about through letters and messages on the Staff Announcements board. There is also Denny, the man who was perhaps not the best estate gardener, but quite a smuggler and thief who created his own hidden areas on the map. And there is the detective who chased Mary after she disappeared and got caught up in her riddles.
But really, it comes back to the three key people, Simon’s family, and the way that they are connected to the history of the world as a whole.
I appreciate that this game has so much story and lore to explore, a way to make the world feel full. And the world of Blue Prince does feel full. While there are questions left at the end, I loved this story and the way it was told and how it was so intertwined with the puzzles. I don’t know if I’ve played another game quite like it, but I hope to see more creative story-telling like this in the future.
Gameplay
I talked a great deal in my first review about the rogue-lite aspects of Blue Prince and its basic mechanics. For a brief summary here, Blue Prince is played over the course of many in-game days. For each of these days, you will select the rooms and how they are laid out in the mansion, also called “drafting.” You start each day with a certain number of “steps” that are used each time you walk into one of your selected rooms; one room usually equates to one step. The day plays out by collecting items and information from these rooms, but once out of steps, the day is over and all the rooms and items are reset, randomly generating differently the next day. Outside of the occasional permanent upgrade, all that is retained from day to day is the knowledge you derive from the drafted rooms.
Game Progression and Upgrades
A lot of the first part of the game requires figuring out how to manage those rogue-lite elements: counting steps and gathering resources that disappear when the day is over. However, that becomes a lot less pressing the more you play. While there is always some element of randomness to what rooms you are able to draft, you are better able to control the probability of which will appear and how far you can get with permanent upgrades and resources.
At a certain point, I was able to reach Room 46 consistently every run!
This progression feels good, but it’s also important for the later overarching puzzles to even be possible. Quite a few of them require pulling particular rooms, sometimes in particular places, and it would be terrible to have to deal with the mental strain of solving them while also constantly stressed about rogue-lite elements. Though that stress never fully disappears, it is much more manageable in the late game.
Puzzles
Besides resource management, Blue Prince is a game of puzzles: individual puzzles in individual rooms that change each run, multiple room puzzles that unlock new areas of the estate, and full game puzzles that require story and mechanic knowledge to complete. The reward for solving one puzzle is usually a clue or important piece of another. In this way, the gameplay naturally progresses, with one thread leading to another until there is nothing left to discover.
Not all of it is fully intuitive, however. I played with my roommate, and even working together, there were times we had to ask a friend who had finished the game before us for a hint. For example, at one point we had all the pieces to start the Auravei line of puzzles. There are two main hints for this: a blue note clue about the family crest number and a paper that tells you how to calculate the core of numbers. Even with both, we still needed some assistance figuring out what to do with that information.
However, I never really felt frustrated when we needed assistance. I don’t think asking for help in a puzzle game is a problem. Blue Prince tries to lead you to the solutions to puzzles by hiding clues in different rooms of the estate, but it doesn’t have an option to ask for hints at will if you get stuck. Having that would take away from the overall experience of the game.
So much of what makes Blue Prince fun is being forced to figure things out with minimal explicit guidance. Not having at-will hints encourages external collaboration, either with friends or with the fan community on the internet, and I love that. It’s a mark of a good game when you feel compelled to discuss it with others.
Randomness and Luck
This system of collaboration for figuring out the puzzles work because they have set solutions, something you might not expect in a game that relies quite a lot on chance. However, while you might think that the RNG inherent to rogue-lites would be unfair and unfun in a puzzle game like this, I felt like the randomness was implemented quite well.
Like I mentioned previously, as you play, you gain more tools to influence the random aspects of the game, tying the puzzle and rogue-like progression together. There was only one point when I was genuinely frustrated while playing, and it was when we were trying to get the Vault and the Gallery, two specific rooms, in the same run. We had a series of very bad luck.
Even with the Banner of the King and the Royal Scepter making blue rooms more common, even with the Draxus constellation making dead ends more common, even with the Inkwell constellation allowing many rerolls when drafting rooms, we just couldn’t get the Vault to appear. It took so many runs. But even having experienced that annoying RNG, that didn’t ruin the overall game for me. After all, I played over 100 hours and had one frustrating series of runs which is very little in the grand scheme of things.
I had an incredible time with Blue Prince, randomness and all. You are given so much information and so many clues are hidden across different rooms that I had to keep track of them in a notebook and take a ton of pictures. It was incredibly satisfying to have that moment where something I noted down many runs ago suddenly became relevant and key to moving forward. Unlocking everything really requires understanding the estate on a deep level.
The End Game
Blue Prince, at its heart, is a game about a house and the relationships that house has to various people: to Simon, to his family, and to you as the player. The arc of playing Blue Prince will be different for everyone as there are different ways to get to the same solutions and there are different relationships players will develop with the estate.
From my perspective, the goal of Blue Prince is not really to solve all the puzzles. Instead, it’s to gain true mastery over the estate. There are many ways to do that. You can learn to control the estate by exploiting room mechanics and the rogue-lite elements, you can learn to collaborate with the estate by influencing the probabilities but understanding how to utilize even the unexpected, you can develop a method to just go with the flow, but the one thing you can’t do is let the house control you.
There are parts of Blue Prince that, in another game, I might call unsatisfying: hanging puzzles that don’t seem to have a solution or have a solution that feels like it should connect to something larger, what has been called an unclear ending, and weird world lore that doesn’t really make sense or get fully developed. But in this game, none of that took away from my overall experience.
Everything in Blue Prince comes back to the house and the relationship that you and the characters have to it. Everything is in service of mastering the estate.
The larger story elements regarding the world outside aren’t fully developed because that’s not what the game is about. For example, there are a lot of questions I have about the governments and politics of the Blue Prince world. Those questions don’t get answered, because the pieces of the story that we get are there to help solve puzzles and deepen your relationship to the estate. Other mysteries remain mysteries, and I’m content with that.
The end of the game was perfectly clear to me. After demonstrating mastery of and harmony with the manor by unlocking the Rough Draft in the Atelier and solving the puzzle within, you get one final reward: the Blue Testament of Auravei. The Blue Testament exemplifies your achievement, with Simon finally, truly inheriting the Mt. Holly Estate. He is, in that moment, more than any other time in the game, the Blue Prince.
Final Thoughts
I don’t think everyone will get the same thing out of Blue Prince that I did. To me, it is a game of inheritance and mastery and the successive challenges that lead you to that point. Others might have stopped sooner or kept searching after I felt content to stop. I think that’s part of the magic of it. No one will have the same experience as another player.
The journey that my roommate and I went on playing this game will stick with me, the highs and the lows. We will continue to laugh about the time I decided to try and smash a vase in the Entrance Hall after seeing one video and it actually working; or when we drained the Reservoir and just tried keys randomly on the chests instead of doing the logic puzzle; or when we broke into the Basement with the power hammer before ever pulling the Foundation. There are so many little stories like that I could tell about our play through and I’m sure everyone else who has played has their own.
In the end, Blue Prince is a unique and special kind of game. If you connect with it, it will give you something incredible in return. I’ve never played a video game before where I just sat for hours in a Discord call with someone else, the game open, while I learned to translate a fictional language and she worked on figuring out fictional math symbols. But honestly, I hope it isn’t the last time. I hope Blue Prince is just the start of puzzle games like this.
Blue Prince can be found on Steam, Playstation, and Xbox.