This is the first part of the Black Prince series.
I had never heard of Blue Prince (Dogubomb, 2025) until I read out the Most Anticipated Game at the 2025 Thinky Games Awards. I learnt it was something to do with building a house and solving a mystery and left it at that. I’d play the game fresh. I wouldn’t even try the demo.
Naturally, this is a classic Electron Dance recipe for playing the game 20 years too late, but I saw a litany of complaints about the game emerge shortly after it was released. And if there’s one thing that gets me to play, it’s a hyped game deluged with complaints.
So I blame you. All of you who complained about Blue Prince. It is you who made me begin this journey. These hundred hours lost in the estate of Mt. Holly are all on you.
Spoiler Level: MINIMAL
Right, Baron Herbert S. Sinclair has kicked it and you, Simon Jones (age 14 and a half) are his grand-nephew in line to inherit the Sinclair estate and his industrial empire, Synka. But his will sets young Simon a challenge. The manor of Mt. Holly is divided up into 45 rooms laid out on a grid of 5 columns and 9 ranks. Master Jones will only inherit the Sinclair legacy if he can find Room 46.
However, exploring a mysterious house and looking for secret hotspots is just not how this particular puzzle box operates. Mt. Holly is in a permanent state of flux. The floorplan for the day is constructed anew as individuals move through the house. Every time you go through a door, you are presented with three options for the room ahead which are selected at sort-of-random from the “draft pool”.
It is this which sometimes gets Blue Prince labelled a deckbuilder, however it is anything but. The draft pool is 90% complete when it gets into your hands and it is not merely a shuffled deck of cards but a complex card delivery system. Some cards are more common than others. The Den will never fail to pop out in drafting everyday, but 25 days into the game you may suddenly have a stroke and shout at your children JESUS HOW COME I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS ROOM BEFORE. There is, of course, a lot to learn about how drafting actually works…
But there is a resource management game at its heart which will upset your soul for the first few days. Moving from room to room will cost a step and at the start of the day you’ve only got 50 steps to begin with. Locked rooms need keys. Desirable rooms cost gems.
I’d say the average player drifts through the first few days with the thought “well duh this isn’t that fascinating” which then slides into “this game is a joke, I keep running out of resources”. But Blue Prince’s mysteries will kick in at some point and then you’re doomed, motherfuckers.
Someone who has never played Blue Prince will have no goddamn idea how many sweet rabbit holes there are to fall into. It’s got puzzles, mysteries and mysteries within mysteries. Clues might be multi-dimensional, offering hints for several different puzzles at the same time.
But there’s the potential for this finely tuned machine to come apart at the seams because Blue Prince relies on… a certain kind of player.
To make progress, you will often need certain rooms to be in the house and maybe even in certain configurations. While you do have a few levers at your disposal with which to control how the draft pool works, you do not have enough power at your disposal to make things happen at will. You may go through several days without being able to solve a puzzle you’re interested in.
The correct response to this kick-in-the-balls is to keep handy an enormous list of “things I want to do” and switch to whatever the house is good for on a particular day. To focus exclusively on a single puzzle is to lay claim to madness – because your days will always feel like a waste of time. I suspect, but cannot prove, this is why some people bounce off the game, because it seems like it’s actively fighting you trying to solve its mysteries.
I heard so many complaints about RNG and, sure, some days will collapse at the last hurdle – a whole game where you were hoping for a certain outcome and no, it’s fucked again. I’ve had days which were blown up after ten rooms. It’s fine. Just start again. Death is not the end.
In fact, I think I was more laid back than the average Blue Prince enthusiast. YouTuber Aliensrock reached 46 on day 24. Joe “Thinky Games” Mansfield breached 46 on day 23. GamesWithMorgan? Day 19. Northernlion, Day 16. Electron Dance, puzzle grandmaster solver: Day 50.
I knew exactly how to reach 46 but there were so many interesting things to explore and fiddle with that I decided I would just keep solving the smaller mysteries. Effort was required to reach 46 and it was just easier and more fun to keep running around Mt. Holly, day after day. Hey, I had an amazing time, but eventually I suspected not entering 46 was holding me back. And so I went off and unlocked Room 46.
Room 46 is where Blue Prince thinks it’s telling players they can stop now.
Hey, good job. Well done, you. I’m so proud of what you’ve done.
You get some credits. There’s a cutscene. I mean, it’s really lovely. There’s a moment in it where the penny drops and you realise what you’re listening to and it’s like, oh-my-gosh, how does this make me feel something?
But the credits are a lie. Reaching Room 46 doesn’t resolve any of the other dangling threads you’ve got scribbled in your notes. You’ve got more miles to put on the clock, Sherlock.
This genius game hasn’t yet taken you to the point where you’ll beg for more credits, when you’ll plead for it to be over. Tell me I’m fucking done, tell me! And you wonder if those who broke the emergency glass and shouted RNG! RNG! down the corridor had lost the plot during the early game… or lost their way in the late game. Are you destined to be permanently lost in these rooms?
Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve spoiled the ending haven’t I? Why keep going now? Because I’ve dangled some threads; we must see them through. And I’m gonna keep fanboying Blue Prince until I’m ready to beat it black and blue.
Oh, and I will.
Next: Mora Amore
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** SPOILER WARNING **
** SPOILERS WILL BE ALLOWED IN THE COMMENTS **
And I answered.
Inexhaustible mysteries? Luck-gated progression? The lingering sense that you’ll never be finished and/or smart enough to comprehend this clue you just got, never mind the Grand Message? Hundreds of hours??
Yeah, this is the anti-CA game. I felt myself breaking out in a rash just reading this post. But I’m more than happy to have a vicarious let’s play of it. Thank god for Electron Dance.
Whereas this seems is my sort of thing in various ways (or perhaps something calculated to drive me up the wall) but not available on Mac, so I will mention that I understand Tantusar’s post and drop out until perhaps such time as I get a chance to try it. Come say hi to me in the Leap Year comments!
And we answered.
i am mostly the sort of player that blue prince was made for. i loved the room placement game: figuring out how to budget room to put dead ends to get them out of the way; using up corner rooms when possible even if a nicer (but not actually needed) room came up in a draw; arranging rooms to give myself the best possible chances of doing… whatever it was i was trying to do.
i played _the demo_ for dozens of hours, deleting the save data every time i ran out of profile slots so i could start again. i milked every secret i could find out it—noting down pictures on the wall, cracking every safe i could find, discovering several hidden floorplans… i was actually afraid when the full game came out that i had delved so deeply through the demo that the full game would have disappointingly few secrets left to uncover.
well, i was wrong. steam says i have spent 238 hours in the full game…
and yet—i am still not entirely the sort of player that blue prince was made for. but to get into why that is would be to discuss post-credits stuff; so underneath this post is not the place.
Welcome everyone, welcome. I see people are reading between the lines. There are five parts to this series. Second part probably in a few days’ time.
Matt, I’ve been meaning to Leap over to those comments but I put Blue Prince first. I’m sorry you will not enjoy the rest of this Blue Prince journey even if you understand our first stop. At least for now.
CA – I am definitely trying to share with you the wonders and terrors of Blue Prince which are both in abundance.
Ah, vfig, you dropped a comment while I was typing my own (which was written at a rate of one word every ten minutes I think). Blue Prince is an absolutely fascinating game but I also wonder, sometimes, whether it abused my time. Not in the beginning, of course, but later. Even though Joe Mansfield still has videos to drop, he is taking a break from Blue Prince because he’s getting a little exhausted with it (and he hasn’t yet discovered all that we know there is discover).
You, a real gamer – I will put a secret code in my article that will entice
Me, a degenerate – Ehdottomasti ei, I do not have time for this bullshit. Similar to how when I saw room 46, I was absolutely done with it. In a good way.
As mentioned before – I do not care for late game wankery.
I immediately thought that was Erajan which is as good an example as any of how much Blue Prince cooked my brain.
I think most of this series is about Late Game Wankery. It’s Late Game Wankery: The Series. We should sell the T shirt with the phrase “I made a game and didn’t add any late game wankery”. But the only way to purchase is to break a Fibonacci code cipher.
I’m happy to see you’ll be focusing on Blue Prince for the next bunch of essays, this game has gripped me and my partner and I’ll be happy to talk about it in the comments.
Joel, I also agree that the game sometimes abuses my time: I’m now at the END-end-game I think, and I do feel like I’m circling the drain a bit. But those moments of sudden revelation are worth it for me. My desktop background is a screenshot I took of one of those moments, and I NEVER change my desktop background.
I imagine that the problem the designer faced was that puzzle games are quite hard to test, and they become harder the further into the game testers get. You can test the first hour quite reliably, but how to do you test the 50th hour? So he built a bunch of failsafes in that almost sort of give you the answer (the mail room letters, the Treasure Trove memos, the Blue Tents hints). But these all feel like failsafes rather than hints, like an emergency solution to make sure you don’t get completely stuck. It’s also noteworthy that 9 times out of 10 these are hints for puzzles I’ve already solved, so they feel quite useless.
I think that Blue Prince is amazing on its own, but I feel like this game will give future roguelike-puzzle-designers a lot of important information about how to design this kind of game, and what parts of the endgame work and what don’t.
AH JAMES BUT IS IT THE END END GAME NOBODY KNOWS
I think the failsafes are great but they increasingly dry up as you get further in. I suspect, like you’re saying, that the failsafes were added as a result of testing but it’s harder to know what failsafes are needed deep into the game. Some of the failsafes are confusing – I thought they were different puzzles! For example, va gur Ebbg Pryyne, gurer’f n abgr gung unf snvag yrggref ba vg, ohg guvf vf whfg n onpxhc sbe gur fvtaf chmmyr va N Arj Pyhr.
Oh, I actually missed that thing! But it sounds like it doesn’t matter anyway.
Yes, I think what Blue Prince has shown is that there is a limit to how smoothly a puzzle game can run when you add this level of interchangeableness. A traditional puzzle game (eg. Braid) can curate the experience somewhat, so that hints or nudges can be designed to directly address particular stumbling blocks. Blue Prince is operating at the very edge of this territory: the contents of its hints are directly curated by the designer, but their deployment is unspecific and crude. They’re sort of flung out into the game in the hope they will meet the player who needs that hint at that time, like messages in a bottle.
What would make the game run more smoothly is some kind of system that is encoded with knowledge of the puzzles in the game, and can determine which hints should be deployed to move you forward. For example, it might keep track of every puzzle, whether or not you’ve solved it, as well as which puzzles you might reasonably be expected to be working on, and it would have a list of hints that can be deployed to nudge you forward on those puzzles. BP doesn’t have this, because the game itself doesn’t understand the logical connection between puzzles: as far as the game is aware, there are just objects in space which happen to have certain textures on them, but it doesn’t understand the puzzles. BP shows us that future games in this style would seriously benefit from building in that kind of logic, so a puzzle-master AI could know when to drop each memo.
This would be complicated, because many hints are not as easy to isolate as “text on a memo”: they exist in a spatial context (eg. signs, symbols, graffiti). But I think an attempt at this kind of system would be beneficial, even if it could never be perfect. (After all, it’s a puzzle game. A bit of friction is fine, as long as it doesn’t grind things to a halt.)
James, you know I never thought I’d see a big puzzle game like The Witness ever again, but along came Blue Prince. (Outer Wilds, maybe? Less a fit for me as it has few ‘optional’ activities and it’s nowhere near as long.) Regardless of any reservations I might have about its implementation, I love that we have it at all.
And it’s a strange madness that it’s so big that it just hopes players will manage to assemble pieces from entirely unrelated corners of the game. It tries to nudge and guide but, in the end, a lot of the side stuff is down to the player. And probably, also, how to manage drafting – which may be where some stumble. If you’re not as interested in the drafting aspect, then you are going to have a horrible time.
I guess it would have been better to have a stronger relationship between the failsafes and the puzzles somehow because one of the frustrating parts of the game is working your butt off to solve a puzzle and inside you find: a hint to a puzzle you have already solved. It’s highly unusual for a puzzle game to feel backwards like this.
You’re right Joel, it’s a marvel that this thing exists at all. The more I play it the more I think of the developer (whose name escapes me) chipping away at it for 8 years with his financial security intact due to some side-hustle that he apparently had. It feels like a game that could only have been created very much outside the bounds of the standard publishing model, because it is so finely crafted, so niche and would have been such a risky business proposition.
Yes, I guess most puzzle games (and I include point and click adventures here because they have the same basic form?) are explicitly designed to avoid this sort of backward-hint accident. But that’s what makes BP exciting to me: it’s not a linear puzzle game, it’s a dizzying puzzle box filled with other puzzle boxes extending in every direction. Not expansive in space, like an open world game, but expansive in informational depth, which I guess is only possible in a space like Holly Manor which is only pseudo-physical.
Also I have to tell someone: (no spoilers in this comment though!) my partner and I thought we were just going to do one or two runs of BP yesterday, for maybe an hour, you know, tidy up some loose ends.
We kept to our plan and did 2 runs. But it took us FOUR HOURS. We got an item that was extremely unlikely from a RNG perspective but which I knew we needed to solve a puzzle, so we could FINALLY unlock something, which got us access to a letter, which made me gasp when I read a perfectly normal phrase that included A VERY SPECIFIC WORD THAT I HAD BEEN LOOKING OUT FOR, and the letter had a numeric cipher attached, which we cracked for an hour in a shared google doc (I wrote a program for 25 minutes to crunch some numbers to assist, then my wife had a BRILLIANT last-minute idea that blew the whole thing wide open), then we were left with this PHRASE which was VERY ENIGMATIC but then we tidied up a loose end we’d had flapping about for WEEKS and it led to ANOTHER BOOK from a character that we were already sus about and THAT led to us finding a SECRET ROOM which explained where those characters were getting THAT stuff from, and it also SOLVED THE FIRST PART OF THE ENIGMATIC PHRASE because of COURSE that’s what that is and NOW I HAVE AN ITEM WAITING FOR ME THAT MIGHT REVEAL SOMETHING IMPORTANT BUT I DON’T QUITE KNOW WHAT TO USE IT ON. (But I have an idea!)
This GAAAAME
Okay, James, you have got to rot13 me this stuff. I can guess what some of your references might be but not all! Especially as you might not be able to follow this series as we get into all the spoils…
Also – day 1000? Is this true?
Oh, no, that was a joke inspired by a Groundhog Day short story I read once. “What strange creature would you turn into if you went through a time loop for a million years?” or something.
Let me rot13 those details:
Fb jr’q nyernql tbg Xrl 8 naq hfrq vg gb haybpx Ebbz 8, fb jr gubhtug jr jrer qbar jvgu gur tnyyrel naq znqr vg nf ener nf cbffvoyr. Ohg vg gheaf bhg gung gb fbyir gur Snzvyl Pber chmmyr lbh arrq gur xrl, naq lbh arrq gb oevat vg gb gur inhyg, fb V jnf cyrnfnagyl fhecevfrq gb unir gur Tnyyrel ghea hc fb V pbhyq teno vgf xrl.
Va gur inhyg guvf haybpxrq n fnsrgl qrcbfvg obk juvpu pbagnvarq n yrggre sebz Ureoreg qrgnvyvat n chmmyr gung unq orra ordhrngurq gb uvf oebgure. Gur yrggre zragvbaf ubj Ureoreg npprcgf gung guvf chmmyr zvtug abg or fbyinoyr, naq ubj ur vf pbagrag “gb yrnir guvf fgbar haghearq”, juvpu cevpxrq hc zl rnef orpnhfr “Gur Fgbar” vf ersreerq gb va na vzcbegnag cbrz. (V jbaqre vs V jvyy erprvir, ng gur raq bs guvf ybat chmmyr, n uvag gb fbyivat gur Fgbar chmmyr, juvpu V unir vebavpnyyl nyernql fbyirq.)
Gur ahzrevp pvcure jnf terng sha! V jba’g fcbvy vg gbb zhpu ohg zl jvsr unq gur terng vqrn ng gur raq gb pbaireg gur ahzoref jr unq onpx vagb yrggref, naq jura V fcryyrq bhg gur erfhygvat zrffntr (rkcrpgvat tbooyrqrtbbx) naq vg sbezrq NPGHNY JBEQF V jnf guevyyrq.
Gur cuenfr vf “Fgvyy jngre gvagf oynax obbxf”. V unq ab vqrn jung gung zrnag.
Ohg gura jr chefhrq nabgure yvar bs radhvel (xabpxvat qbja gur Terraubhfr jnyy, juvpu V’q zrnag gb trg nebhaq gb sbe ntrf) naq gung erirnyrq n frperg obbx jevggra ol gur tneqrare (naq erirnyrq gung ur vf gur bar jub oynpxznvyrq Ureoreg jvgu gur erq yrggref). Abgnoyl, vg nyfb cbvagrq gbjneqf gur rkvfgrapr bs n uvqqra pnivgl va na bhgfvqr ebbz. Zl jvsr nyfb fcbvyrq urefrys nppvqragnyyl naq yrnearq gung lbh pna oybj hc gur qlanzvgr va gur genqvat cbfg, fb jr znqr n oheavat yraf naq oyrj hc gur qlanzvgr naq yb naq orubyq vg jnf gur frperg ebbz! Juvpu jnf hfrq sbe znxvat nypbuby. Va bgure jbeqf, n FGVYY, naq gurer jnf fbzr JNGRE va vg. Fb V chg fbzr va gur jngrevat pna naq fgnfurq gung va gur pbng purpx sbe yngre.
V unir fvapr qvfpbirerq gung gur fgvyy jngre qbrf abg erirny nalguvat va gur erthyne obbxf bs gur yvoenel (Gur fgbel bs oynpx oevqtr, be N Arj Pyhr, sbe rknzcyr), ohg vf zrnag gb or hfrq ba fbzrguvat uvqvat va cynva fvtug: gur oynax obbxf qvfcynlrq ba gur yrpgreaf.
Juvpu erirnyrq NABGURE CHMMYR JVGU RAVTZNGVP JBEQVAT GUNG V QBA’G HAQREFGNAQ.
Not day 1000, but I’m past day 100. I just wanted to make a joke based on a Groundhog Day story I read once: “If a man is stuck in a time loop for a million years, what will he become?”
I’ll rot13 the details, but my last comment didn’t go through, so I think I went over the character limit. Let me break it up.
James I was able to dig the rot13 versions from spam so I’ve exchanged it with the English version
Aha, yes, that’s what I thought you were getting into. I found the cipher but didn’t get any further – it was walkthrough time for me. But congratulations on cracking the code, which must feel amazeballs.
Ah thanks for that! Yes, cracking it was great fun. I ended up writing a little Unity program to calculate ahzrevp pberf while my wife tried to do it by hand; I caught a few that she hadn’t got quite right. Very much tickled a particular region of my brain.
james: aha, you are on the verge of another fun discovery!
i wrote a python program to do the thing, myself. didnt fancy doing the work by hand either 😀