Blue Prince Review: Will Room 46 Steal Your 30 Hours? 😱
After a few hours with Blue Prince, I realized this game gives me the same feelings as Balatro. It's not because of the cards or passive-aggressive clowns like Jimbo, but because the games pass as smoothly and almost imperceptibly as when I immerse myself in the poker roguelike. Blue Prince is a true time-waster: addictive gameplay, constant risk, and rewards that push you to try again—and you'll be happy to be stripped back. 🎮🃏⌛️
Blue Prince It is a mystery and architectural puzzle game developed by DogubombIn this game, you play a young man who inherits his uncle's magical mansion. On your first day in the house, you receive a note outlining the rules for earning your inheritance. This house has 45 rooms. Find the secret 46th, which doesn't appear on any of the mansion's floor plans (get it?) Blue Prince / blueprints) and the house will be yours. 🏰
To find the 46th room, you must create or "design" rooms one after another by connecting them through their doors. You start each day with 50 steps, and entering a room takes one step (or more depending on the room type). When you run out of steps, you are exhausted and must retire for the day. At the end of each day, the design you created resets, and you must start over with a blank mansion. 🗝️
Each time you approach a door, you'll design a room from a set of random options.
Image: Dogubomb
In essence, Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game that unfolds around a narrative involving family secrets. Its core mechanics are room design and arrangement within the mansion's 5x9 grid. Each room comes with any number of doors that open in one of the four cardinal directions. You build your map each day, trying to connect as many rooms as possible while avoiding dead ends. 🧩
There are many different types of rooms to design, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Bedrooms, for example, reward you with extra steps that extend your day. Dressing rooms give you surprises like keys to unlock doors, but they're dead ends. Designing a puzzle room early, like the Billiards Room or the Parlor, rewards you with gems to design higher-quality rooms like the Library or the Laboratory. The more rooms you design, the more likely you are to find rooms you haven't seen before, revealing secrets and clues that will help you on your journey. 🔍
In addition to trying to design rooms that grant you the greatest benefits, you're also trying to do so in the correct sequence. Manipulating the fuse box in the breaker room will allow you to open the door in the garage, bringing you one step closer to finding the 46th room. It's an extremely dense, interconnected puzzle game that uses every ounce of your brain power to solve. You'll definitely need to take notes! —the game tells you that clearly. And every time I have to write things down to play effectively, I can confirm that it's cooking with high-quality gas. 💡
Solving puzzles in Blue Prince uses all my powers of spatial reasoning, math, narrative, and memory. And what I love most about it—something I don't think I've ever said about a video game—is its pacing: Blue Prince unfolds almost infinitely; solving one puzzle leads to the next, and so on, like a fractal of overlapping mysteries. Some of those mysteries are easy and satisfying to unravel. When I first encountered the dark room, the lights went out 🔦.
Not only could I not see what was there, the darkness forced me to design the next room without seeing what it was or if it was a dreaded dead end. But I remembered that in the circuit room I had seen a dark room setting on the fuse box 🧩🕹️✨.
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On my next attempt, I made sure to design the circuit room and turn on the light before designing the dark room. When I walked in, voila, the light stayed on and I collected a treasure trove of new clues. 🌟
Turning on the lights in the dark room will reveal more clues.
Image: Dogubomb
But the game's other mysteries are less intuitive and can lead to frustration that no amount of notes can mitigate. The dartboard in the pool room is a math puzzle with different colors on the board corresponding to different functions. At first, it was easy enough to solve: blue next to a number means addition, yellow is subtraction, pink is multiplication, and purple is division. Instead of recalling the elementary PEMDAS lesson, the order of operations is determined by working from the inside of the dartboard outwards.
After about 20 days, when I had everything under control, the board started throwing up new symbols and colors that were much less intuitive. I just couldn't figure out what to do, and it became so frustrating that I avoided designing the pool room altogether, which left me unable to obtain valuable keys.
There is a story in Blue Prince But from what I've seen so far, it has little relevance to the puzzles and isn't especially interesting. There's a mystery involving the political leanings of your family members, a missing author, and a disgruntled employee, but I'm so eager to figure out how to open the basement door that I don't pay much attention to it. I'm about 27 hours into the game, which feels pretty extensive for a puzzle game. And I feel like with everything I've discovered and everything I think I have left to discover, I could go for another 30 hours, and it would go by in a heartbeat. ⏳
Conclusion: Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game that hooks you from the first run 🧩🎮 thanks to its room design, fast pace, and the constant feeling of discovering layers of mystery that invite you to explore and optimize strategies 🔁🕵️♂️.
The narrative takes a backseat and some puzzles can be cryptic and frustrating 🤯, but the satisfaction of sorting out interconnections and honing your focus day after day makes it a happily addictive time-waster ⏳✨.
If you like games that require note-taking, experimentation, and thinking about sequences and consequences, you'll find dozens of hours of well-spent replayability here; if you prefer a more focused story or clearer clues, this may not be enough for you ⚖️.
Recommended for fans of challenging puzzles and replayability; available on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC 👍.
