Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
There are at least hundreds, probably thousands, and possibly tens of thousands of potential houses in first-person labyrinth puzzler Blue Prince. I am genuinely tempted to review them all, but I am not a realtor and Graham’s kneecaps inflate when a review strays above 2000 words, so I’ll settle for describing just four. The first is the house you discover. It waits eternally behind doors that give you a choice of three, semi-randomised rooms when you reach for the handle, each “drafted” on a 9-by-5 grid map that is blank save for the opening foyer and the antechamber skulking at the far end. Every time you enter the house, the layout wipes itself clean and must be filled in again.
You’re here because you’ve inherited this restless, eldritch manor from your uncle, an eccentric blueblood whose many closets (as and when you draft them) are littered with skeletons of all kinds. Your uncle’s will contains a few provisos, however: to be legally recognised as heir, you need to find the house’s 46th room, an architectural impossibility according to the map, and you need to do so within a single day measured by the number of “steps” your character can take before keeling over in exhaustion. You get 50 steps to begin with, and most rooms consume a single step every time you enter.
The opening days of Blue Prince consist, naturally, of the enchantment of entering rooms for the first time, each a cosy and disquieting warren of chesspiece ornaments, cheery memos, odd machines, and free-associative paintings. In the Den, a fire crackles in the grate and huge art deco wallclocks look down upon a table displaying a single jewel. There is a tipped-over candlestick behind one of the sofas; I’m still not sure whether that’s a naturalistic flourish, or a hint. In the Bunkroom, ripe with the decades-old reek of boys festering to be men, there’s an ancient games console, possibly an Atari VCS, and a lonely hamster, trundling away at a wheel. What happens to the hamster when the Bunkroom isn’t on the floorplan?
All these spaces immediately fascinate, however humble. Even the walk-in closets are portentous. The warm, heavily shadowed graphic novel art direction is innately mysterious – it’s both calming to inhabit, and delicately haunted by the work of comic artist Mike Magnolia. There’s a horror game pallor to the whole thing, though the more appropriate moodboard connection is Gone Home. You look back through the open doors of successive rooms after a few moments, and it’s hard to suppress a shudder: all that… space behind you, all those blindspots, half-knowingly accrued. Some rooms skew monstrous: the L-shaped Pantry is a dowdier PT, and I never entered the enormous, multiple-level Boiler Room without dread.
The house you discover in Blue Prince is complicated by the house that doesn’t want to be discovered – the unspoken shapeshifter you have to outwit, to outmanoeuvre. This obstructiveness begins, of course, with the unpredictable dealing of rooms when you try to open a door. Each room has a different number of exits, and there’s no guarantee they’ll line up cleanly with the existing layout, resulting in crude tectonic interjections with boarded-up alcoves. Opening the door to a grid square along the exterior wall is always a heart-in-mouth process. But sometimes, it’s useful to draft a dead end such as Her Ladyship’s Chamber: each room can only be played once, and you’ll want to save those with two or more exits for the middle of the property, so that you can branch out comfortably and circle back to any unfilled squares.
As you go, you also discover ways of predicting and weighting the drafting pool, with certain rooms more likely to appear at certain latitudes, and mechanisms within rooms that let you stave off certain possibilities – or which add new, more exotic rooms to the pool. You’ll often, but not always, want to avoid the Red Rooms, both for the Hitchcockian associations and because they hinder and sabotage you. The Weights Room exhausts you and halves your steps when deployed. The Dark Room obscures the rooms you’re drafting when you try to push beyond it, at least till you find and reset the breaker.
Each room also forms part of a shockingly elaborate resource management element, which is densely entangled with the act of laying out routes. For the fancier room types, you’ll need to collect gems; running out of them before you’ve cracked the third or fourth row of squares is one of Blue Prince’s sophomore fumbles. Wasting your steps by, say, backtracking unnecessarily is another, but they can be replenished by various means – primarily, finding food and drafting bedrooms, with certain orderings and combinations allowing you to all but earn back every last footfall towards what might have otherwise been the end of a run.
There are also keys of many kinds, some of which open one room, and keycards you may find you don’t need, if you can subvert the electronics. There are dropped coins, and rooms in which you can spend them, and rooms that steal them from you. And there are handheld tools, like magnifying glasses and books of coupons, that either hot-wire the individual challenges and overall randomisation in your favour, or are needed to obtain certain clues.
Some of the resources are gathered by completing smaller puzzles inside rooms. The Parlor offers a choice of labelled treasure boxes, at least one of which is lying to you, and there’s a dartboard conundrum elsewhere that hinges on deciphering colours. These lobe-scratchers can seem dry, perhaps an acquired taste next to the delight of assembling your own maze, perhaps a bit too redolent of the Cluedo-ass bullshit artistry satirised in Knives Out: A Glass Onion. But they are not repetitive: complete a puzzle and you’ll find another, typically more challenging variation the next time you draft that room. They’re also consistent with the overarching logic of the manor, or rather, with the overarching obsessions that dictate the choice of motifs. Which brings us to the third kind of house in Blue Prince, the house that you solve.
Solving Blue Prince involves the recognition that a lot of the objects you might have, which initially read simply as props, actually have purpose, and that a lot of the puzzle symbolism has a shadowy narrative agency. The metaphors are also cogs in a plot, without losing their charm as metaphors. There is a wide world beyond the manor, and there were people who once lived here. The staff, for one, who are rendered in stained glass in the Chapel, and who wish you good luck over email when you eventually discover the password for the terminal in the Security Room. Your uncle is, again, a complex character, seeking absolution from beyond the grave. The pieces and, above all, the colours, gradually settle into place much as they do in Outer Wilds – a possible influence that only dawned on me once I’d unlocked the Observatory, which adds a star to the sky every time it’s drafted, producing a new constellation that bestows a different buff.
To reach the bottom of that mystery you have to put everything you’ve learned to the test. You have to draft specific combinations of rooms, do specific things, bring specific items, calibrate the architecture in specific ways. When I previewed Blue Prince at GDC in 2024, Dogubomb founder Tonda Ros told me that it’s possible to complete Blue Prince in a single run, if you figure out certain things instantly and are very lucky. You will need a hell of a lot of luck. More likely, it will take you tens of hours.
There’s scope for frustration, once your objectives solidify. The game’s randomisation can lead to a feeling of being cheated: sometimes, you’re inches from a breakthrough and the game drops a Lavatory on you like some kind of Sherlockian Warner Bros cartoon. But Dogubomb do a great job of minimising that risk – firstly, by introducing permanent progression elements, with pivotal house and more incremental room upgrades that make certain approaches easier as your ambitions increase. And secondly, by teeing up a bunch of larger conundrums to unravel at any time, so that if you get stuck in one respect you can use the run to investigate something else. In general, I came away from failure with the grudging thought that if I’d made certain choices earlier, stacked the deck a little more craftily, I could have gone all the way.
I also confess that I often lost sight of my aim because I was having fun cultivating the game’s sense of place – stringing together rooms to support different forms of exploration, and to send particular ludonarrative energies coursing through the contours of the grid. This being the fourth house in Blue Prince, the one implicit throughout. It’s a house you build houses with, a house that opens portals to a Bachelardian tradition of houses in video games and other artworks. Resident Evil’s Umbrella Mansion, where every doorway flaps open into uncreated darkness. Last year’s sweatiest post-panopticon, The Crush House, where every room is pierced by sightlines. The Binding of Isaac‘s cellar.
I would have liked Dogubomb to have made a touch more of this. When you end the day in Blue Prince, the game scores and categorises what you’ve created: a two or three rank affair with a lot of patios and greenhouses might get called a “Rustic Cottage”, while a vast pile of Red Rooms including a Gym, Pool and Weights Room is a “Scarlet Athletics Center”. It’s the one aspect of Blue Prince I find humdrum: surely, Ros could have come up with more poetic descriptors than these, descriptors worthy of player-woven layouts that, say, hinge on reading of soil types and radiation levels, or Silent Hill-grade jumbles of sealed doors that stock the foyer with treasure for every two gems you spend. Still, that’s poking at scrapes in the woodwork. If you hadn’t gotten the message by now, Blue Prince is a marvel.
ranzware
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