One More Go

Herbert S. Sinclair is dead, and he’s left his ancestral home to his nephew, Simon. That’s you. Only there’s a catch. You’ll need to find the 46^th room amongst the inconsistent floor plan of Mt Holly Manor, or forfeit the keys. The layout is defined as you explore it, but even so, there’s an element of chance to what lies behind each door. You see, Blue Prince has a deck of blueprints, and each door that you open lets you draft one of three plans to place on the other side. Maybe this hallway leads to a bedroom, an aquarium, or heaven forbid, the lavatory. Each crossed threshold costs one of your 50 steps, locked doors require keys, and special rooms cost gems. Balancing these resources is essential if you plan to fill the five by nine grid that makes up the building’s footprint. Inevitably these obstacles become too much, forcing you to rest for the day and try again tomorrow with a fresh set of steps, an empty floor plan, and a renewed sense of optimism.

Some of these rooms contain overt puzzles, maths and logic challenges that dole out rewards to boost your path through the mansion. Others hold deeper secrets that help you uncover the mysteries surrounding the house and beyond. If something looks a little out of place, it’s likely intentional, though you’ll often need to scour the mansion for more context to understand just what that means. It’s not long before you find yourself attributing meaning to every piece of decoration. It is the ultimate ‘what-if’ game, with growingly outlandish plans often yielding progress to some new breakthrough, or at the very least a knowing nod from Dogubomb, the developer.

That’s not to say there isn’t any turbulence. In the early hours as you get used to its rhythm, Blue Prince can feel like a bit of a slog. Beholden to its randomness it can often seem obstructive, preventing you from revisiting that one room you want to see. The trick is to not get bogged down by it, there is so much at play here, it’s better not to focus on any single objective, and to just keep exploring. The remedy for me was an elaborate to do list that grew as I played. Every time I uncovered a clue or thought up some new experiment I would add it to the list. It wasn’t long before Blue Prince started to feel like a game of endless possibility with macro, micro, and meta puzzles seemingly everywhere.

You’ll soon fall into a groove of navigating the Tetris-like maze, knowing what items to buy, what rooms to draft where. Though this element of Blue Prince can never be truly solved, your attention is soon drawn to the broader puzzles. To-ing and fro-ing across the grid in search of clues and drawing connections between seemingly disparate rooms. Eventually, you’ll reach the elusive 46^th room, but the process of doing so reveals that there is so much more to Blue Prince. Puzzles are hidden ever more deeply, their solutions ever more obtuse, often taking many steps and many runs to solve.

It’s at this point, when puzzle solutions become so specific, that the randomness of Blue Prince can start to feel insurmountable. For all the ways that Blue Prince can surprise and delight it can also be frustrating. It doesn’t go far enough to ease the difficulty of navigating the mansion, giving players little control over the rooms they draft or the number of items they discover. The run-like nature of the game, having to manage resources as you explore, eventually just gets in the way. It draws your eye away from what makes this game truly special – the intricate puzzle box that Dogubomb has created.

The design across Blue Prince feels so well considered that it’s entirely possible this is intentional. Maybe Dogubomb’s vision for Simon is one where he wanders the manor forever in search of a hidden truth that may or may not exist, but I hope not. I still have a notepad full of plans to test, and while I think I have a fair grasp of what’s happening narratively, there are still too many open threads for me to claim that I’m totally satisfied by what I’ve discovered.

It’s a shame, then, that even amidst a bumper year for excellent puzzle games (Animal Well, Lorelei and The Laser Eyes), what starts as one of the singular and most enjoyable video games I have played, falters. Even so, Blue Prince is an easy recommendation. Though it might be worth considering how much truth is enough, before you follow me too far down the rabbit hole.