The Indie Informer

Blue Prince is astonishing, refreshing, and its rabbit hole goes so deep I haven’t been able to find the bottom yet — despite rolling credits weeks ago. Ostensibly, the goal of the puzzling game is to find the forty-sixth room of a forty-five-room mansion. Why? Because your great-uncle left you his estate on the condition you discover the hidden chamber.

From the get-go, the narrative is thrilling and ready to pull players in. However, as I played, I realized solving this seemingly great mystery was really only the beginning. Friends, we have another Game of the Year contender.

Funnily, the gameplay recalls a board game rather than any other video game I’ve played. Being a big fan of Betrayal at House on the Hill, the similarities are easy to spot and the formula translates perfectly to the virtual space. Blue Prince sets you just inside the front door of the contended mansion — a room with three closed doors leading in different directions.

Choosing to open a door prompts a selection of three rooms and the start of the game’s strategy-testing elements. The rooms are, more or less, random, though some are more common than others and you can slightly affect these outcomes as you wade further into the mystery. Some may be a dead end but offer tempting items, like a shovel to dig up buried treasure, a metal detector to locate hard-to-find objects, or a sledgehammer to break open locked chests.

It might, however, be more vital to continue moving to a spot in the north-most section of the house’s designated space, enigmatically labeled the antechamber. This requires picking rooms with multiple entries and exits or passageways that allow me to continue upward. While traveling through rooms I find puzzles — and hints of puzzles — nestled within the larger objective of getting to the antechamber.

Some rooms, for example, have brain teasers I can choose to solve for rewards. Others require me to figure out environmental puzzles to use the room’s equipment. And all the while, eye-catching details keep me wondering whether it’s important I keep seeing that same motive over and over. This is where note-taking becomes my good friend.

To top the strategic orchestra off, every time I walk through a threshold, I lose one “step,” which works like my stamina. Starting with fifty, once I run out of steps, I have to immediately end the day. When the sun rises, all my work from the day before is wiped clean. The rooms are back in the draw pile, and I have to make my way, once more, towards the goal.

The loop is wildly enticing. Rather than feeling like I’m back at square one, I often found unexpectedly important pieces to the puzzle combing through chambers the day before, giving me an exciting objective to chase besides simply finding a room. This can also sometimes be a downside because, as the rooms are mostly random, I can’t ensure I’ll find the space with the key to my new questions even if I know what I am looking for.

However, there is so much to explore in Blue Prince and it’s impressive how much richer the enigmatic tapestry grows as you play. Following a single thread consistently set me unraveling parts of the game’s world, politics, or intrigues I hadn’t previously even known existed. How deep you want to wrap into all of this is up to the player, and the game’s main objective is pleasantly accessible. I couldn’t resist grabbing at the veil of its more tantalizing riddles.