Blue Prince Review

Blue Prince might seem as crafted as a personal gift for you. This brilliantly devious puzzler, developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, melds a concise list of your favorite game genres and mechanics into one seamless package: first-person exploration puzzles with an approachable facade that belies its hidden depths.

It can be recognized as a roguelike that strikes an elegant balance between permanent upgrades and the pure satisfaction of honing your skills. It can have drafting mechanics that capture the best elements of deck builders without the weighty overhead of actual card games.

Even if certain facets of that eclectic mix don't resonate with you, how these disparate elements of Blue Prince interlock is nothing short of masterful. This review will avoid spoilers, so you'll see insights drawn from early forays. Yet after dozens of hours, multiple credits, and countless tantalizing mysteries still waiting to be uncovered, Blue Prince stakes its claim as a genuine puzzle masterpiece that beckons you repeatedly.

When you enter Blue Prince, you inhabit the shoes of Simon, a teenage heir who inherited his great-uncle's sprawling, eccentric mansion. The catch? You can only claim your inheritance if you discover the fabled 46th room within the mansion's ever-shifting corridors.

It's a simple premise—beyond the whole "living house" bit—but it's the proper foundation. Scattered throughout the manor are helpful hints that nudge you in the right direction, but for the most part, you're left to your own devices to unravel the house's secrets.

With this open-ended method, you won't always know exactly what to do next, but your main goals in Blue Prince will be clear enough that you won't feel genuinely lost often. Yes, sometimes you feel like you're going around in circles, retracing your steps and wondering if you're missing something obvious. But that feeling of going around in circles is part of the fun. Every loop, every backtrack, and every fresh doorway you encounter adds another piece to the sprawling puzzle that is your inheritance.

The beating heart of Blue Prince lies in its drafting mechanism. Each day, each run, you start with a finite allotment of steps. Every time you open a door, you expend one step, and with that action, you're presented with three possible rooms to place beyond the doorway.

You're filling out a 9×5 grid anew each run, forging pathways connecting doorways, avoiding dead ends, and hunting for critical items and cryptic clues. At first glance, it might not seem revolutionary, but you'll quickly realize how deeply satisfying it is to gain mastery over this system.

Some rooms are mere hallways, straightforward in function. Others are color-coded by type: purple bedrooms that reward you with extra steps, yellow shops where you can trade coins for vital items, red rooms that impose adverse effects, like obscuring your drafting options, and more.

Certain rooms in Blue Prince only appear under specific conditions, such as when you draft on the mansion's periphery, and discovering those triggers becomes its mini-puzzle. Early on, you'll learn to prioritize rooms that yield keys, gems, or special drafting privileges, setting yourself up for targeted dives toward rooms or objectives you're eager to conquer.

The drafting mechanic is deceptively simple, but refining your strategy transforms it into a profoundly strategic puzzle about risk assessment, resource management, and planning.

When you explore rooms, you'll find puzzles of many shapes and sizes, not just the drawing variety. Some of them offer simple logic or math problems. Some require more complex timing of interactions, lever pulls, or button presses.

Yet these self-contained puzzles are just the appetizer for what Blue Prince truly offers. The most captivating puzzles evoke the essence of classic first-person games such as Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. They want you to examine every aspect of your surroundings, make thorough notes, and connect throughout the mansion's extensive narrative fabric.

You'll review old documents to decode safe combinations, analyze why certain artifacts are positioned where they are or exploit a room's unique function to circumvent obstacles in an entirely different wing.

That "aha" moment—when a puzzle that once felt utterly inscrutable snaps into focus—is a thrill that never gets old. It's the kind of subtle, brilliant design that turns frustration into triumph and keeps you glued to your notes, eager to see what secret you'll uncover next.

Of course, no roguelike-inspired system is immune to the sting of randomness. Now and then in Blue Prince, you'll find yourself desperate for a particular room—maybe one that lets you turn left when you need it most or grants the extra step to seal your success—and you won't see it in your drafting options.

It's a gut punch when a perfectly orchestrated run collapses because the cards (or rooms) didn't fall in your favor. Fortunately, Blue Prince offers multiple ways to mitigate this randomness.

You'll unlock permanent upgrades that smooth out the rough edges of chance, and you can gather special dice that let you reroll your room choices when the odds aren't in your favor. You'll learn when to play it safe when to gamble, and when to accept that sometimes the house has other plans for you.

Though those unlucky draws still hurt, they become less frequent as your understanding of the system deepens—and even when you strike out, each failed run typically uncovers at least one new secret or clue that enriches your overall progress.

And make no mistake: every run, successful or not, is rarely a waste of time. Blue Prince is stuffed with hidden chambers, locked safes, secret letters, and lore-rich documents waiting to be discovered. You may not reach that critical room on every attempt, but you'll often stumble into new areas or uncover tantalizing breadcrumbs that send you down unexpected rabbit holes.

In my experience, it took roughly 15 hours to crack the central puzzle and unveil that elusive 46th room in Blue Prince—and it was a deeply satisfying achievement. Yet even after rolling the credits, your journey is far from over.

There are still countless optional challenges: encrypted books, forgotten diaries, family secrets, and more historical mysteries woven into the fabric of the estate. Some lie in plain sight from your first foray; others demand a keen eye, a dash of lateral thinking, and the patience to follow a seemingly innocuous trail of clues.

Because the layout is random, the way you go through the house might not be the same every time. Still, the game does a great job of ensuring that essential hints appear in more than one place or way, so you're never entirely in the dark.

How its narrative and mechanics intertwine elevate Blue Prince from a mere puzzle romp to something truly memorable. At first, the story seems like cute background noise. There are strange letters and journal entries at certain locations, including intriguing bits about Simon's mysterious great-uncle.

But as you learn more, that simple story of Blue Prince becomes a rich, interesting fabric. You'll find different versions of what happened in the past, pieces of family history that make you question what you thought you knew, and new information about the world that puts each puzzle you solve in its proper place.

None of this narrative heft is forced; it's doled out with patient precision, rewarding your curiosity with a deeper understanding of the mansion's significance. The story doesn't just sit alongside the puzzles—it breathes life into them.

Each clue you unearth, each decision you make in laying out the mansion's rooms, echoes the messy, nonlinear process of piecing together a family's history from half-forgotten documents. At the beginning of the game, you have to solve tasks to get an inheritance. By the end, you care about Simon's emotional journey and want him to find that last room as much as you want him to make peace with his family's past.

By the time you've spent nights dreaming about floor plans and waking with fragments of room layouts dancing in your head, it becomes clear that Blue Prince has dug deep into your brain and refused to let go.

Its sprawling estate, with its countless secrets and branching pathways, offers a puzzle experience that feels simultaneously intimate and vast. Yes, a lousy draw every once in a while can hurt. Still, you'll forget about the mistakes when you finally put together a perfect run, build the exact rooms you need, figure out a tricky puzzle that's been bothering you for hours, and learn something about the game's history that changes how you see everything.

If you count The Witness, Portal, and Myst among your favorite first-person puzzle games, then Blue Prince deserves its carved spot beside them. It's a masterclass in emergent storytelling, strategic depth, and pure, unadulterated, puzzling joy—one that will keep you coming back long after you've laid that final tile and unlocked the mansion's ultimate secret.