Blue Prince Review – A Must-Play Puzzler
While the game may have only been publicly announced last year, Blue Prince has been in development for at least nine years. Could this be as unique of a game as it seemed when we initially previewed it? We have spent our fair share of time within this architectural roguelike first-person puzzler, and have our review ready right now.
Can a puzzle game be a must-play? Well, you’d be surprised at the answer.
Find the Hidden Room
The premise of Blue Prince is refreshingly unique. You have been named as the presumptive heir to your late Grand-Uncle’s estate, known as the Sinclair Estate at Mt. Holly. It’s a charming mansion nestled within a majestic mountain range, but it has a unique, mysterious ability: its room layout resets each day, and you determine what rooms go where, whenever you go to open a door. You cannot take possession of this manor unless you can manage to find the 46th room in this 45-room estate, which of course sounds preposterous on the surface, but a lot of this becomes clearer the more you play the game.
Each day, you have fifty “steps” you can take. Whenever you move into another room in the house, one step is spent. However, certain rooms such as bedrooms may add to those steps, while other (usually red) rooms such as the gymnasium will cost you even more steps. The effects of these rooms can be altered or negated entirely, depending on items in your possession, or other rooms: a circuit breaker room allows you to, for instance, shut the gymnasium off, which means it no longer drains your steps beyond the one you pay to simply walk into a new room.
Drafting a room is easy. All you have to do is walk up to a door and click. This will bring up a random list of three rooms to choose from. Once you’ve brought up this menu, you are forced to pick a room to create. Pressing Tab shows an overview of the current layout of the mansion. This becomes critical to look at as the day goes on, because you have to pay attention to how many open doorways are available to you. If you run out of spots to draft new rooms in, then you can no longer expand the mansion, and must either use up all of your remaining steps or simply “Call it a Day” via the option on the map/inventory screen. With limited exceptions, your inventory, currencies, and the manor all reset completely once each day ends.
Pleasing Roguelike Puzzling
Blue Prince has a pleasing cel-shaded aesthetic to it, plus a mostly-tranquil-but-occasionally-concerning soundtrack to go along with it. The Unity Engine runs the show, and it renders this game with ease. Expect hundreds of FPS on most any mid-spec computer, and smooth performance on either home console. The overall presentation of Blue Prince is impressive, especially as a debut game from developer Dogubomb.
Blue Prince doesn’t hold your hand. It simply lays out its rules at the start and expects you to figure things out on your own. For many players, there will be a lot of trial and error, especially in the early goings of the game. Ending a day early because you boxed yourself in with dead-ended rooms is frustrating, but most people should be able to get through these early setbacks and learn from them. There are a lot of things to consider whenever you draft a room, such as: how many doorways a room has, which direction those doorways are facing, what color the room is, if you have enough gems or some other currency required to draft that room, if some rooms offer a boon or debuff to you based on any blessings you might have on your current run, or some other item you might be carrying.
There are dozens of different rooms to discover, some of which can level up via repeated draftings, or with a floppy disk inserted into computer terminals found in certain rooms such as the Security Room. A laboratory allows you to select some effects, which will modify the way some rooms penalize you, or simply give you some currency at the start of each day. This laboratory also has a complicated looking machine in the corner, with a note mentioning that additional power needs to be piped in from the boiler room, which is of course another room you can draft and interact with. There are hundreds of ways in which rooms are connected to one another, and it shows the dedication Dogubomb went through for Blue Prince.
Lore Drops, Upgrades Available
Like any good puzzle game, Blue Prince has some lore to offer players who wish to feel a bit more immersed in the world being presented. There are various notes scattered throughout various rooms, which can help to convey a sense of what life was like at such a peculiar residence. Some of these notes also have hints scrawled on them, regarding other rooms which you may encounter, such as the billiards room which has a math-related dartboard puzzle, which seems to grow more complicated the more often you draft it. There are also a few ways to permanently upgrade the mansion, but rather than spoil them here I’ll leave discovering how this is done as an exercise for the reader. It’s satisfying to figure them out, after all!
Blue Prince was worth the wait. It’s easily the best first-person puzzler since Portal (or its incredible sequel). With countless mansion layouts, dozens of rooms to discover and best utilize, plus a nearly constant drip-feed of lore content to absorb, this is an ideal first game for any studio. If you enjoy puzzles even a little bit, you owe it to yourself to check out Blue Prince as soon as you can. Bring a notebook or at least be ready to take a ton of screenshots as you work to unravel the game’s many layers of secrets when it launches on April 10, 2025 on Steam, PlayStation (free w/PS+ Extra or higher subscription), and Xbox Series X|S (also free if you have Xbox Game Pass).
Score: 9/10
Pros:
- A refreshingly new concept
- Many interconnected rooms
- A fun challenge mixed with interesting lore
Cons:
- Short runs in the beginning may frustrate some
Blue Prince review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
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