Blue Prince - 2025

Contains extremely light spoilers for Blue Prince. I strongly advise you to just play the game and then come back later to talk to me about it.

If someone compares a game to Outer Wilds or Myst, that is a precious gift to me, because it means I can buy it sight unseen and go into it completely cold. I had the privilege of doing that with Blue Prince, and it spit me out two weeks later, haunted in the night by dreams of corridors and hallways, with 10+ notebook pages full of scribbles, questions, clues. I had achieved the ostensible goal of the game (locating the 46th room in a 45-room mansion) and rolled credits, but there are still dozens of locked safes, distant doors, and whispers of the history of an entire fictional continent to draw me back in.

The roguelike structure of the game initially threw me. It can be frustrating to learn of a path forward that relies on the RNG spitting you the exact set of circumstances you need to explore it. But over time I warmed to this structure. The game throws so many clues and paths and patterns at you that I almost never felt like I wasted a run. Other puzzle games may take you to a single locked door, and no further progress is possible until you wrack your brain and solve the puzzle that opens it. Blue Prince doesn’t have this structural problem; it branches out fractally in every direction, layering mechanics one on top of the other, so you’re usually pushing your awareness outward, or reinforcing glimpses of a larger picture. This game rewards careful observation.

Early on, the main character’s great uncle, who sets the stipulations of the challenge before you, warns that the task will be difficult, but that he has full confidence that you are worthy of it. This game is tough, but it is not cruel. I fiddled with some tricky puzzles early on, and far later I discovered rooms that laid out some of the rules to those puzzles that would have made them easier. The in-game library includes what is fundamentally a Prima Strategy Guide for the game itself, laying out dozens of pages worth of tricks to assist in the fundamentals of room drafting.

I’ve put Blue Prince back on the shelf for now, but it has easily landed a spot on my Top Five Puzzle Games list, and it will draw me back someday, desperate to turn over every stone and unlock every door.