Blue Prince (2025)

Incredible, incredible game. Feels unique and fresh. Love these types of new puzzle games, where the design is the tutorial, it's all about the learning process, letting the game make you think, like really think. Draw connections and create theories...

I haven't finished the game yet, I'm 33 days in so far, but I wanna explore everything. I will get back to it then, and then I think, to get more of the lore. Highly recommended to play with a friend, keeping track with the necessary pen and paper.

It already hit a full star review for me, i have nothing to compare to. The game is exactly the game it should be, and I hope developers can take inspiration from the uniquenes

I finished Blue Prince last night (at least got to room 46). What impressed me the most about this game was also the thing that frustrated me. Somehow a puzzle game with a heavy dose of randomness always allowed you to feel like you were making a little progress each day. The puzzles to get to the end are all solvable (and while solving, I realized there were several ways to get it done).

What's going to keep me from diving deeper into a lot of the unsolved mystery is the randomness. There are some rooms I have theories about but they require me having several of the right items at the right time or having them populate close to other rooms (power...). I'll probably play a few more rounds and try and draw rooms I haven't seen before or crack a few puzzles I haven't solved, but I am almost certainly not going to 100% this one.

I still gave it 5 stars though because the positives outweighed the negatives. I never felt so frustrated I gave up the game and, for me, the puzzles were just the right level of obtuse to keep me guessing, but keep me away from spoilers. Spoiling a safe code just isn't fun, so I have 2 or 3 safes that I'm still trying to search the room to figure out.

Game was developed over eight years by solo developer Tonda Ros from the studio Dogubomb. It’s a puzzle adventure game with strategy, puzzle and roguelike elements.

The story is about a young boy named Simon Jones. He inherits the Mount Holly Estate from his great-uncle Herbert S. Sinclair. The thing is that he needs to find and enter the 46th room to enherit this mansion.

When you step in to the Entrence Hall, your goal is to make it all the way through the 45 room mansion to the secret 46th room.

When you open a new door you get 3 options for a room to spawn. Think I read there’s over 100 different rooms. In these rooms you need to solve puzzles, collect items, keys, gems and more. Instead of a time limit you have a limited amount of steps. Every time you enter a room it counts as one step. When you run out of steps your day is over and you need to start over with a clean room layout. There is some permanent upgrades that carry over if you solve certain puzzles.

The Blue Prince game design is awesome, so detailed and well designed. Each playthrough feels fresh but comes more and more familiar every time. You’re encouraged to experiment, backtrack and connect dots. You learn new things every run.

Make notes is necessary. An early note in the game even suggest you to use a journal to write down observations and notes.

Much more can be said about this masterpiece, but can’t fit it all here. Blue Prince may not be for everyone, but if you like puzzle-games this could be a GOTY-contender! I reached room 46 but I have soooo much more to discover. Need to get back into this later!

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲🌲➕

I played this on a friend’s recommendation, and I’m glad I did — it’s one of the most engaging games I’ve played in a long time.

If you’re into roguelites, logic puzzles, detective work, or that feeling of slowly unraveling a mystery, this game is absolutely for you. The whole experience feels like one massive escape room. The game doesn’t dump exposition on you — you uncover everything yourself by digging, observing, and connecting clues. I actually ended up taking notes, writing down names, dates, and other observations like some Charlie Day conspiracy meme with red string across the room.

Like most roguelites, the first few runs can be rough while you’re learning the mechanics and figuring out how to manage your resources. But once everything starts to click, the game becomes addictive in the best way.

Blue Prince is a game that, when I bought, captivated me deeply, and I played it constantly whenever I had any free time. It has me taking screenshots of clues with my phone and taking notes on a pen pad to figure out the various clues. In that way it’s very engaging.

I love when games try something new and this one is entirely unique. A puzzle roguelike where you draw different “rooms” from a deck to navigate to the other side of a large grid. That is an extremely satisfying idea and hits my brain just right. Like most roguelikes it depends on RNG and skill combined where you use your resources the right way. What initially seems simple, like oh I just need the right door configuration to reach the other side, gets even more complex, with keys, keycards, items, more permanent buffs, stores, special rooms, etc.

The art style is worth noting as it’s very charming and well done. The story isn’t much of a traditional story and more so a mystery to unveil. To be honest, the story/characters are not the most interesting in this, moreso the gameplay and mystery keeps the game going.

The constant try to get just more run, progress just a little more is very satisfying. And there are more puzzles and deep clues than just appears on the surface. However, the one negative to that is, some of those puzzles are a bit too obtuse that I don’t think they could be realistically solved by your average person without looking up a guide to them. I think if you do want to finish this game you probably have to look up a guide. Even though I had to look up a guide I still did enjoy the clever puzzles.

Anyway, all that said, there is a rather extensive “endgame” to this. And I think for now I’m not interested in pursuing the endgame, after my 22 ish hours spent with it. I might come back to it. But for me, the endgame was overstaying its welcome and over complicated.

It may seem like I don’t like the game after those negatives, but Despite that I still super enjoyed my 22 hours with the game. Mainly because it was a unique experience and I found something new and exciting everytime I logged in to play. The element of “discovery” grabbed me. I can see why some might not like this game due to the RNG but for me that was one of the more captivating elements of it.

Blue Prince is a special game full of mysteries, secrets and mind-blowing moments with an addictive gameplay loop. It's so good that labelling this as one of the best puzzle games of all time feels like a disservice. Instead, it's possibly the most memorable experience I've ever had playing a game and I can't stop thinking about it.

Each playthrough feels unique thanks to the draft system, while permanent upgrades preserve your progress. It’s an endlessly captivating labyrinth of twists and turns, with a world that will crawl inside your head and refuse to leave until you’ve finally wrestled its final secrets into submission. And believe me: it’ll take you a while to do that.

We're starting up top with my main piece of advice for this game: Play until you feel satisfied, then stop. This is one of those "layers" games, wherein most people should likely quit sometime shortly after the credits roll. Is there more? Yes. Should you keep playing? Maybe. Anyways:

This is such a lovely game that, for the most part, rewards observation and curiosity. Do you like exploring and finding things? Play this. Do you like neat puzzles? For sure play this. Time and again you'll be rewarded with joyful moments and neat interactions simply by playing around.

I don't have much more to say. I'd recommend booting it up and giving it a go with as little information as possible. It's worth it. While I ultimately didn't "finish" the game, I ended up quite far and had a wonderful time throughout. Give it a go!

I was really into the story and world and even the drafting gameplay... at first! I made it about 10 hours in and realized I understood all the narrative beats and was now waiting for the gameplay to catch up.

I got really bored and just looked up what else I might need to do. It became clear that the bunch of fiddly fussing and also the hopes that I draft the right rooms in the right place, I was like, fuck it!

I started so invested but just quit it. I do not even feel bad. I might watch a YouTube lore video about the full story since I never got to the end but I had all interest just slowly grinded away until I was just... who cares?

I think it is probably a good game but not designed for my lifestyle. I only have so much time to devote to the game and so the randomness really makes it feel like a waste of my time a lot. I kinda wish I could get the 10 hours I put in back.

Full disclosure: there's a much more complex story and undoubtedly more complex puzzles that I've yet to solve. I've only rolled credits, but have yet to solve the actual mystery hidden within the notes and books left around the house. I'll revise this review if I find that I underestimated the game. But after 25 hours I think I have a good idea what my rating is regardless.

The primary goal of Blue Prince is to get to the 46th room. Doing so is as simple as building up a few permanent changes (like starting the day with extra gems, coins, and steps, and adding some key floorplans), figuring out the pretty straightforward way to open the necessary doors in the antechamber, and then fighting with RNG until you get the perfect run. And just when you think you've got it, the devs added some more busy work, requiring you to have that perfect run twice. It shouldn't have taken me 25 hours, but that's how the cards played out for me, completely beyond my control.

The real game, I think, is in the mystery I have yet to fully uncover. But it's so held back by the experience that I just described above that I'm not exactly looking forward to it. IMO, there should be a lot more opportunities to control your fate. And maybe there are, but if there are, they should come MUCH earlier in the game.

I recorded my whole playthrough (so far) for anyone interested in seeing how it all played out for me:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_eK8WTu0-WEEiB_bOQgOkrAzFqpxzSfL

Blue Prince for me is reminiscent of older puzzle games like Myst and Riddle of the Sphinx that also featured a first person perspective, puzzles that functioned on a "macro" scale in the game world, and a foreboding lonely atmosphere. However here the devs threw in a bit of a curveball by pulling in looping roguelike elements. These do help make the game stand out from others in the genre, but their implementation caused me more frustration than I personally found them worth. Still, the game is clever in how it weaves these elements into its various mysteries.

Each day has you building up the layout of the mansion you inherited from the inside by pulling randomly selected groups of three rooms at a time and selecting which one you want to place down. Progression in Blue Prince typically comes from selecting a new room and exploring it to find items, puzzles to solve, and notes which often act as clues to the mansion's larger scale secrets.

Having a room you've never seen before show up in the draft pool is often a moment of excitement because the RNG has decided to bless you with an opportunity to learn something you previously couldn't. Your mileage may vary, however, as while most if not all rooms have something of note, you often only discover how to truly make use of all of a room quite a while after you first get it.

As with many roguelike games, there is certainly an element of luck involved here. You can manipulate it to some extent but especially early on it's easy to end the day having gained nothing because you have yet to unlock any of the methods to do so. This is my issue with the game. There's an irritating friction between the puzzle elements and the roguelike elements that often creates a situation where you know exactly what you need to do to "solve" a puzzle or mystery yet can't get lucky enough for the game to allow you to since the stars have to align perfectly. As you progress you'll unlock ways to make this easier but the complexity of the room combos you need increase as well, which moves the goalpost just out of reach again and again.

I worry a bit that I've painted an overly negative image of the game up till this point. I should emphasize that I had a fun time with it. I busted out the ol' notepad for one of the puzzles and also took notes on my phone for several others, which usually is a sign I'm interested and engaged. This is a very clever game and I had many of those satisfying "Ah-ha!" moments when I'd peel back a layer of the game only to find there was so much more to explore than I'd thought initially. This is worth a look for any fan of the puzzle genre; I just think it's only fair to warn of the RNG involved beforehand.

(The image below isn't a story or gameplay spoiler, but does show a screen you get after the credits so I tagged it anyways to be safe)

You really need to be on a certain wavelength to completely embrace Blue Prince, a roguelite adventure that may bring to mind other acclaimed puzzle games but that has a feel of its own. That relatively unique format comes with both pros and cons, making for a game that I had quite a bit of fun with, but which ultimately proved to be... a bit too much.

I found the roguelite structure initially off-putting, particularly since I was further slowing it down by taking excessive notes that weren't all that useful. (The game tells you to take notes, but I think it's worth having some restraint at first until you see what's actually important and how.) It did become fun for a while though once I mostly set the pen down and got some momentum going. It's all built around managing different limited resources like keys as you "draft" rooms to place on a grid which resets every day. The variety of things you can draft is reasonably well-balanced with three random-ish options being presented each time, letting you form an actual interesting strategy about how to approach each run. It's a lot of variance, but you start to see not only opportunities for permanent upgrades but also ways to refine the strategy and mitigate that variance to an extent.

I often think back to something relatively fundamental that Sid Meier said about Civilization, where the reason its formula is so addictive is that you constantly juggle short-, medium-, and long-term goals that are all fun. I think this game's approach is a reasonable way to do that on paper, but if you're like me there comes a point where its shorter-term goals just aren't enough anymore. You might repeat dozens of variants of the same puzzle or go through the same setup over and over and it starts getting old. You might know how to solve a certain puzzle or complete an objective, and you might play each day of its loop well, but still end up just not being allowed to do it this time due to everything that needs to align. Trying to focus only on one specific thing will end in frustration, but for me just "going with the flow" was only fun up to a point since it was not intrisically rewarding enough.

You can usually get something out of each run and keep answering questions you had earlier, and I did get addicted to that flow for a while, but one series of events finally kind of "broke" me on this and made me sit back and reflect on how much fun I was really still having. I'll put it vaguely: When you get to what is ostensibly your main target, it turns out there's more you need to do in another new location to open the final door. I finally made it in there with some difficulty on a later run, only to realize that it too had a previously-unknown prerequisite. (It's more complicated than this, but this is just how I'd explain the feel to someone who hasn't played the game.) I set all these conditions up multiple times while still being open to other objectives, but kept getting unlucky and barely not making it. I think the way this was all paced out was just kind of annoying and tedious in the context of a somewhat randomized game where you "get it" long before you can actually do it.

And that initial goal really is just a part of this big whole that seems to have some pretty complex stuff going on. There's much more I could go into in terms of the vaguely interesting story and some of the pretty smart design of the grid and whatnot, but I'll leave it at that. It's a game that I think people should try out if they like puzzle adventure games just to see what it's like and see if you're super into it. I find it pretty interesting thinking about how the game flow was designed, what a challenge it must be to localize, what depths I may be missing out on by leaving it here, but I think I just had enough personally.

Sure, it looks good, and the premise seems interesting at first, but something felt off while playing it. I think it comes down to the intersection of things that make this game what it is: the general slowness, the (imo) uninspired puzzles, the repetitiveness, the RNG (of course), the tedious resource management, the unnecessary steps restriction.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of Outer Wilds, The Witness, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, or Animal Well, but this game really felt disjointed. I have a hard time getting my head around the overwhelming praise it's getting, but maybe it's just not for me.