Image credit: Dogubomb
In Blue Prince, what lies on the other side of the door is up to you. You might reach for the handle and decide there’ll be a kitchen on the other end, or a bedroom or a closet. Whatever you decide, it’ll be there – there to step into as if someone just imagined it on a drafting table for you. Thick pen lines frame block-coloured panels, all arranged with a slight jazz-like lilt. There’s a slight unevenness to it all, a slight unnerving-ness coming from it. Or perhaps you have grander aspirations. Maybe it’s not a kitchen or ordinary kind of room you want, but something outlandish and more befitting the mansion you’re in. Maybe it’s an observatory with a huge, swivelling telescope in the middle of it, peering out at constellations. Or maybe it’s a chapel with rows of wooden pews and sunlight coloured through stained glass windows. Perhaps it’s a dark room such as a photographer would have. Whatever you choose, one thing will be true of it: no one else will be there but you. You are alone in this strange mansion that rearranges itself. Everywhere you go, there’s stillness and silence, as if the place is caught in time, waiting for someone like you.
In Blue Prince, you’re a boy who’s been bequeathed a mansion by a rather eccentric uncle – an uncle who’s probably a genius. Rather than simply leave his fortune to you, then, he’s designed a test. If you can find the 46th room of his mansion, you can have it, the whole thing. But there’s one slight complication: usually there are only 45 rooms in the mansion. The 46th is elusive to the point of being mythical. Can you find it?
It’s a deceptively simple question, because here, it’s not a case of simply trying every door and seeing what lies behind it. The rooms don’t stay put. Every day you attempt the puzzle, the blueprint of the house is wiped clean. Every day, you piece it together again, room by room, door by door. What you find is very much up to you.
It works like this. At the beginning of the day, you walk into the foyer of the mansion and find a letter from your uncle outlining your task – to find the 46th room – and along with it a roll of blueprint paper upon which to decide the layout of the house. You play this all from a first-person perspective. The moment you touch a door handle, though, the game grabs you and asks you to make a decision: which room would you like to walk through into? By default, there’s a choice of three, but you don’t know what those three will be before you touch the door. It’s a bit like pulling cards in a Roguelike game. You might get a choice between a kitchen and a bedroom and a hallway, for instance, so you’ll pick one and decide how to place it, aligning doorways if you can. Once placed, a room becomes a fixed part of the layout of the house during this attempt. Walk through into the next room, do the same thing again.
As you progress, you’ll notice that different rooms do different things. Kitchens, for example, have a bit of money in them and present you with a shopping list with the names of fruit on. What that means, though, you won’t really know. Bedrooms, meanwhile, give you additional footsteps that you’ll learn are a kind of energy gauge, and that if you run out of them, your day will be over. You’ll discover game parlours with puzzles in, which change each time you place them, and you’ll rifle around in closets and find things like keys and gems. You won’t know what a lot of this does. You’ll naturally assume keys open locked doors, but the gems? It’s not so clear. Then inevitably, you’ll realise you’ve built your way to a dead-end and all available routes have been closed off, and you’ll have no choice but to end the day and try again.
The next day, you’ll return to the mansion with the layout wiped clean and a new consideration in mind – probably to keep your routes open this time. To pay attention to how many doors a room has and place them in a way such that they open out on empty space and not adjoining walls, which block them off. With this in mind, you’ll probably get further and discover new kinds of rooms. You might find a garage with a car in, and an electrical box on the wall that opens the garage door but won’t work yet. You might find rooms with objects in, like a magnifying glass that can highlight written clues, though you won’t have seen many of those yet. You might find a workshop where you can combine items, though which ones, you’ll not know. You might find that telescope and peer out onto the stars, and receive a bonus based on the constellation you see. You might find an electrical box with unlabelled buttons that does inexplicable things. Everything you find hints at a bigger puzzle that you’re only beginning to understand.
That’s how Blue Prince goes. Every day you begin again, you will try something new with a bit more knowledge to guide you. The more you play, the more of the game and the puzzle you’re facing comes into view. The looping, Roguelike approach also means there’s a holistic sense of progress in the game that connects your different attempts. I don’t want to give too much away, because discovery and understanding are clearly the driving forces of the game, but suffice to say there are things you can do which have a permanent impact in the game, and therefore carry over between runs. It means there’s never a sense of binary success or failure, but more a feeling of incrementally edging towards something bigger – that every run is important in its own way.
It’s also here, in this looping approach, I think Blue Prince is really clever, because it allows you to keep stepping back from the puzzle and to think of a new way in. You’ll always have something new to try, prompted by a discovery the previous time around, so there’s always an excited sense of momentum to continue and to wipe that blueprint clean and try again. The looping approach also means developer Dogubomb can wrap this puzzle up like a pass-the-parcel present, in layers of paper, and be cryptic about how it reveals things. This in turn makes for a fiendishly compelling mental chase on your part, where any and every discovery alights a bright magnesium glow of excitement in your brain as you think about how you might use it next. Blue Prince is atmospheric, it’s clever, and it’s a very hard game to walk away from. I can’t wait to play more.
This piece was based on a press trip to Raw Fury in Sweden, with flights and accommodation paid by the publisher.
