Mastering the Two Images Challenge in Blue Prince

You’ll come across a pair of pictures (or paintings, or drawings, or whatever you want to call them) in every Blue Prince room. This pair of pictures (or paintings or drawings) serves as the basis for one of the most baffling puzzles in the game.

Our Blue Prince guide will tell why there are two pictures in every room and tell you everything you need to know about how to solve the picture puzzle, including examples, the solution, the reward.

Why are there two pictures in each room in Blue Prince?

Before we outright spell out the solution to Blue Prince’s wild picture puzzle, we’ll point you in the direction of where you can find some hints. There are a few rooms you can draft that will give you some clues:

In the Commissary, check the bulletin board. You’ll see one picture labeled WITH and one labeled WITHOUT. This is the biggest clue about the process of solving this puzzle. It implies you need to, for lack of a better word, “subtract” one picture from the other.

In the Study, things are clarified even further. You’ll find a note asking for artwork and another with some unused examples. On the chalkboard, you’ll find a big hint about how to put it all together: a grid system that maps directly to a blank Mt. Holly blueprint, with the letter F in the spot the Entrance Hall always goes. Some small chicken scratch reads, “Face & Ace.”

If you manage to draft Classroom 5, you’ll find examples of pictures on the boards around the room. But the only two hints you really need are those from the Commissary’s bulletin board and the Study’s chalkboard.

[Ed. note: Spoilers follow for the Blue Prince picture puzzle below.]

How to solve picture puzzles in Blue Prince

In most rooms, you’ll find two pictures. Generally speaking, these will be arranged with one on the left and one on the right. Your job is to find two words — one for the drawing on the left and one for the right — that differ by only one letter, and then remove the shared letters.

Let’s go through an example.

In the Entrance Hall, you’ll see a pair of pictures framing the door on the right. Both are of hands holding playing cards. On the left is a queen, and there’s an ace on the right. But a queen is also a FACE card. So, FACE without ACE is just F.

Some pictures are used multiple times, though, and have different meanings.

Other drawings only ever mean one thing, like the PRY bar, the TIGER or the TIERed serving dish.

Your task in each room is to look at the two pictures, and subtract the second from the first. The pictures change each day (more on this in a second), so if you get stuck, you can always try again another day.

For what it’s worth, not every room has pictures. According to our testing, green rooms like the Veranda or the Patio appear to never have pictures. Some hallways don’t have them. The Foundation doesn’t either. This is only a problem for one day at a time, though, as you’ll solve the pictures puzzle across multiple days.

Full Study chalkboard pictures puzzle solution in Blue Prince

Refer back to the grid that was on the chalkboard in the study. (You’re going to want a journal for this.) As you figure out which letters go in which boxes, you’ll slowly fill out a complete phrase.

The house in Blue Prince is arranged in a five-by-eight grid. Each day, the rooms will move around based on how you draft them, and when they do, the pictures will change. That’s because the letters are always in the same position. (This is also why the pictures in the Entrance Hall never change.) That means, no matter what room you put there, the bottom left corner will always be S.

With a bit of work and some patience, you can fill in a grid with each letter you find there. When you’re done, you’ll be able to read the message.

See below for the full solution:

The message is: IF WE COUNT SMALL GATES EIGHT DATES CRACK EIGHT SAFES.

Picture puzzle reward in Blue Prince

Basically, this phrase is a hint that anything with code or combination on it is looking for a date. This includes the Orchard gate — “if we count small gates.” The safes it mentions can be found in rooms like the Shelter (the time lock safe counts as a date), Office, Study, Boudoir, and more.

These safes reveal red letters, which in turn fill out the backstory for Blue Prince. Want to track them all down? See our guide on all safe codes.

For more Blue Prince guides, here’s our full walkthrough on how to reach Room 46, plus how to unlock another permanent room with the Orchard, open the West Gate through the Garage, or how to solve the dart puzzle in the Billiards Room.