Blue Prince review: A mysterious journey of discovery and puzzle solving

There’s something endlessly enticing about exploring a giant empty mansion that supposedly has secrets hidden within, and Blue Prince isn’t the first game to use that to its advantage. Gone Home leveraged the innate uneasy curiosity that such a location sparks to tell you a great story, and Blue Prince takes that a step further, adding roguelike elements to make sure that thrill of exploration and discovery never goes away.

You play as Simon, the nephew of a dead baron. Very sad, but in his will, he’s left you his entire estate – score. The catch is that the rooms of this mansion never stay in one place, and every day you must enter the mansion anew, never knowing what will be behind each door, and your uncle’s will states that you can’t claim ownership of the mansion until you find the secret 46th room, which will require you to solve a series of puzzles to uncover.

That idea makes wandering around the mansion a delight. As you come to each doorway, you’ll be given the choice of three random rooms that might be behind it. All of the rooms have different features. Some may offer items or boons, others may debuff you, and some contain puzzles and clues that will lead you closer to your goal. 

On top of that, they all have different numbers of exits facing in different directions, which means, on top of considering what you need from a room at each moment, you need to make sure you build the mansion properly, as if you make a doorway face an existing wall then you’ll have blocked your progress and need to start over. You can also only go through a limited number of rooms per day, so you have to think about efficiency, otherwise you’ll be running back and forth so much you’ll end up exhausted and unable to continue.

The many puzzles you’ll encounter along the way are excellently designed – even the one that makes you do math. You’ll find great ideas like a room with three boxes, each of which has a statement on top as to which box contains gems, but not all of these statements are true. There are also power rooms and pump rooms that determine the flow of electricity and water into other rooms of the mansion. Plus, of course, there are a bunch of safes around the place for which you’ll find the codes in other random rooms as you explore.

It makes the whole mansion feel like a cohesive place, despite being broken up into chunks and randomly assembled each time. You start to become familiar with each room and the puzzles they contain, while the high-level puzzle of assembling the mansion and reaching your goal keeps giving you a sense of momentum, especially as you start to uncover some of the mansion’s secrets.

There are also remnants of the baron’s life about the place that help it feel its history, and it’s not afraid to make light of the fact that it must’ve been hellish for the maids and cooks to work in a place where the layout changes each day. One note in particular made me chuckle, as a scientist laments that he hasn’t been able to work for three days as the laboratory didn’t spawn.

The random elements can come back to bite it, though. The thing is, once I’d figured out what I needed to do and was familiar with every room in the mansion, it became frustrating to go through run after run where the RNG didn’t line up and I couldn’t complete my objective. I’d already solved the puzzle; all that remained was to do the required actions to complete it, and random chance giving me rooms that stopped me progressing, not giving me the keys I needed to open doors, or otherwise screwing me over for a couple of hours was not a fun experience.

Still, as annoying as that was, I enjoyed the many hours of puzzle solving leading up to it, as it’s a great mix of overarching escape room-style puzzles that push you towards your main goal and little puzzles that you encounter in each run. Even after you’ve found the fabled 46th room, there are still plenty of mysteries to be solved that add more context to the story of your uncle and how your family fractured around him.

While the roguelike elements can cause frustration, Blue Prince still manages to be a fantastic experience. It nails the sense of discovery and leverages the randomness to keep it going much longer than a traditional puzzle game does, all while constantly motivating you towards a grand objective that’s satisfying to solve.