Blue Prince

Herbert S. Sinclair, the enigmatic billionaire who has spent most of his time secluded in a gigantic mansion in the mountains, is dead. In the hours that follow, those representing his vast fortune and possessions find an eleventh-hour deposition that undermines all other court documents and transfers ownership to all his properties, including a giant house, to you, his nephew. But there's a catch.

All this is yours if you can find the 46th room in a house that contains 45 rooms. Why is it so difficult? Because every day the floor plan of the house is reset, and how the rooms are now distributed and look is entirely up to you. That's the premise of Blue Prince, a roguelike escape room simulator where you must desperately try to reach the 46th room of the house. However, putting together the right constellation of rooms, gathering the necessary resources, and navigating around locked doors and other challenges seems almost impossible at first.

Each day, you wake up in your tent just outside the mansion grounds and make your way into the lavish entrance hall. From there, there are three doors. Grabbing the handle, you are presented with a selection of rooms, usually three, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Each room you enter costs a step, of which you have 50, and if you either run out of steps or hit a dead end, you retire for the day and return to the same starting point as the day before.

The rooms can give you resources, such as Gems, Coins, or Keys, which can later be used to buy food that gives you more steps or just unlocks doors, and they can take resources from you as well, and that's while you have to keep a close eye on how the doors exiting these rooms position you going forward. You need to create a path from the entrance hall to the legendary 46th room, and that can only be achieved with ingenuity - and a lot of luck.

This is essentially a roguelike, and by that I mean that there are very few assets you take with you out of the mansion when you're done, and it's mainly about you figuring out how to put the rooms together to make it all the way to the other end, and what resources you will absolutely need to succeed. The rooms are versatile, but there are maybe 10-15 types in total, so even if it seems like an unsolvable puzzle at first, you'll quickly realise what does what; that a Breaker Box room may end up as a dead end, but allows you to power another room that you'll need to use later. You'll learn how many steps you actually need and how many doors are actually locked as you progress.

We spend a little more time here than usual explaining this intricate network of interconnected mechanics and structures, precisely because the premise is Blue Prince's big draw. Discovering how to use these rooms, which ones to avoid, and which ones give you the resources you know you need to move forward is surprisingly satisfying, even if the pacing seems inspired by first-person walking sims like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and can get a little drowsy at times. There are even specific items that give you permanent upgrades along the way, such as a wallet that gives you an extra coin for every five you find, or a silver key that guarantees that the next room options you are presented with have many unique doors ahead.

It's exciting, it's satisfying, and it's extremely intelligently put together, and in this way Blue Prince is in some ways an extension of recent puzzle successes like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, as you are almost overwhelmed by how intricate and coherent all these mechanics and structures really are.

The problem is that it doesn't quite last in this case. Precisely because Blue Prince is a roguelike, and not a roguelite, nothing you bring with you is retained, there is no real progression other than the one you mentally create yourself, and since the game is so RNG-dependent (the rooms you "draft" at each door are random after all), the frustration starts to set in after about seven or nine days, when you realise it's as much the luck of the draw that determines your progress as it is how skilled you have become with the game's unique layout. Some roguelikes become memorable precisely because you don't get the chance to improve all the time no matter what, but most games benefit from offering some form of progression and Blue Prince just doesn't really have that, possibly because it would be a little too short if there were ways to level up, create shortcuts, or otherwise "cheat" the game.

Also, roguelikes often work because each "run", if you will, is so short, but Blue Prince is a slow, systematic, and intricate experience where a good run might take you... well, let's set up a point for comparison. 80% of the way to the 46th room can easily take 35 minutes to then return to the starting point, with the feeling that it was largely just bad luck that put you in a dead end, which is not very satisfying.

That said, Blue Prince oozes character. There's a unique atmosphere here that's neither creepy nor downright relaxing. There are little quirks such as notes written on coloured slips of paper left in the rooms, but it changes whether what is written on them are lies or the truth. There are a few rooms that let you store powerful items for a future endeavour, and of course standalone puzzles in some of the rooms that are also advanced and exciting to solve. It's a game like no other, and a shining example of innovation and creativity in almost fluid form. At the same time, it's also a game that I feel lacks a progression system or two that could make each run a little shorter, or even help the player finish after running head-first into a wall for what seems like unfair reasons for 15-ish hours.

Klara and I, my puzzle-partner-in-crime, made it, and it was satisfying, and I wouldn't spoil what's to come, but Blue Prince is easy to recommend if you've read the description of the premise and found the idea itself compelling. It's the idea that wins here, and maybe in the future developer Dogubomb can work with this diamond of a premise and polish some of the edges to make the player feel like they have a little more control over each outcome. That said, Blue Prince has a pretty cool board game feel, and at the end of the day, we ended up proving to the late Sinclair that we were worthy of inheriting his mansion because we defeated it. And that was awesome.