Blue Prince for a fascinating game.

Quite a few hours into Blue Prince, I stumbled upon a room intended for creating architectural documents, and scale models to accompany them. It also contained a document about the documents themselves, and their history. Or, at least said history within the world of Blue Prince, specific to the fictional country of its setting. Detailing the color coding for these prints, whether they be Green Prints, Red Prints, or even Blue-

And that's when it hit me.

Blue Prince.

Perhaps, one might think, missing such an obvious bit of wordplay is not a great sign for my ability to progress through this game. However! While there are layers, and layers of secrets and mysteries I did not unfold, I did, after about twenty hours, see credits in Blue Prince. Few games have ever left me with such an immense, and total feeling of relief upon finishing a game.

I was free.

Free from the torturous halls of this manor. Free from the dead ends. Free from those locked doors, free from losing steps every time I pass a threshold, free from that dart board math puzzle I got weirdly good at, and free from that chapel stealing my money every time I walked through!

But most of all, more than anything else, I was free from the cruel mistress of random chance.

I've gotten ahead of myself, so let me backtrack for anyone who might not know what this game is. Blue Prince is a puzzle game...and an adventure game...but also a rogue-like. The set up is that a young lad has inherited a stately manor from an older relative, but only if he can successfully navigate said manor and find his way into the secret Room 46. Every time a door is opened, the player chooses what room lies beyond, from a trio the game selects at random from whatever is in the current, and unseen “draft pool” of potential rooms. The two major limiting factors here are stamina (number of steps), and the player's own ability to not box themself in.

And the rub is, at the end of each day, the manor resets, as are any items/money found. It's a fascinating setup that's not quite like anything else I've ever played. Rogue-likes are usually combat focused, but there's nothing resembling that anywhere in Blue Prince. On the surface, this is just a game about placing rooms in such a way that allows passage through to the end, and stamina management.

Of course, if it was that “simple,” it wouldn't have drawn the attention it has, would it? Some doors are locked, by either old fashioned key, or modern keycard. A lot of rooms require gems to be drafted, and these are often the best, or most interesting rooms. Some rooms have negatives tied to them, but aren't necessarily all bad. Just a matter of weighing the risks and rewards. What's the point of avoiding certain rooms with step penalties if the alternative is getting boxed in, and not being able to progress any further? Those steps won't do anyone any good if there's nowhere to go.

Even that is barely scratching the surface. There's obvious puzzles within rooms, like the dart board, or the boxes in the parlor. There's interactions between different rooms, like using the boiler room to route power to other rooms. Some rooms contain hints for entirely different rooms, often ones I hadn't found yet, and quite possibly never found. Believe me when I say I wrote down a lot of notes, taking plenty of screenshots to help manage all this information. Some of these things I figured out, some I think I figured out, but never managed to line things up for, and some I just ignored.

Here's the thing, what makes Blue Prince so frustrating. As much as I love games layered so deep with puzzles and mystery that I could get absolutely lost trying to unravel it all...this one deeply, deeply frustrated me. It also bored me at times, especially early on. Too many runs where I found nothing new, nothing interesting, and was on the verge of giving up.

“One more run,” I told myself, and then it'd happen. Some new discovery, something would click, and I'd be drawn further in. It'd be just enough to keep me opening doors, moving deeper into this manor of random rooms, and further around its estate. Sometimes it was a permanent upgrade, like starting with more steps, or upgrading a certain room to help along the way, but often it was just something simple. Some little “eureka” moment moment where something finally made sense, and I just had to see more. These moments are Blue Prince at its best, when I feel smart and the game feels ingenious.

At its worst is when I have a goal in mind, but the game just doesn't want to cooperate. When I find the last piece of a puzzle, but the game refuses to give me the room I need to place it in. I said nothing else is quite like Blue Prince, but there's certainly been other games that compelled me in the way it does. I think about games like The Witness, or Fez, and what do those games have in common than Blue Prince doesn't? Aside from one challenge in The Witness, there's no randomness. When I have that eureka moment, and need to go back to another area to try something out, I can just go do it. I'm not prevented because I got unlucky when the room I needed just wouldn't come up.

To be fair, not everything is random in Blue Prince. The rooms themselves are largely static, so I always know what to expect when I get a parlor room, for example. There might be bonus items tucked away in corners, whether a door is locked might change, or maybe the décor might be slightly different, but otherwise the rooms are the rooms. Outside the walls of the manor, on the estate, things seem to remain from day to day (outside of one exception), and there are even some things inside the manor that, once unlocked, remain locked in place. I won't spoil what though.

There's other ways to mitigate some randomness. A die can be use to reroll choices for the next room, and there's at least one way to affect the likelihood of specific rooms appearing in the first place. But even that stuff is dependent on random chance. I found a wrench that, when drafting let me set the rarity of mechanical rooms. Permanently, or at least until I drafted those rooms again with the wrench in hand, I assume I'd be able to readjust them. Except, and it's not hard to guess where I'm going with this, I only ever found the wrench once. Luckily I was able to use it on the rooms I wanted to, and as advertised, they did show up more often.

Not that it ever actually helped me line up the boiler room and laboratory to find out what the machine in the lab does. But at least I got the workshop room enough to actually use it frequently. The workshop can be used to combine items into new items, with either enhanced effects, or entirely new ones. As if the random chance of finding one item wasn't enough, try finding two or three, and then the room to duct tape them all together!

And yet...as frustrating as it was, as tedious as it could get...something compelled me. I couldn't just give up, just quit and walk away until I achieved my goal. I needed to get into Room 46, and no matter what it took, I was going to do it. For the sake of explaining this last bit of frustration that got in my way at the end, I kind of have to explain (and thus spoil) how one gets into Room 46, so keep that in mind. Trust me when I say that knowing these little bits of information (I will not divulge it all) will not actually make doing this any easier.

So, to get to Room 46, the first step is getting into the Antechamber, on the opposite side of the manor from the entrance. The Antechamber is at the ninth level, and the entrance is on the first, so theoretically a minimum number of seven rooms are needed if they were all placed in a straight line. (To be clear, this is all on the same floor of the building, the levels refer to going further back, not higher or lower.) I'm not going to say that's impossible, but I'd be shocked to see it ever happen without some sort of cheating, or modded version of the game. Actually, I don't think this would even be possible because of the types of rooms needed to get into the Antechamber, but I'll get to that.

There's three doors into the Antechamber, but they're all blocked. Not normal locked doors, just entirely blocked. Specific levers are needed to open them, and they only appear in certain rooms. So, the first level of random chance here is if these rooms are even in the draft pool (which can't be seen). Now, maybe at least one of these rooms is always in the draft pool. There's Trophies for beating the game in under an hour, and on the first day, so clearly it's possible. What I'm saying is I have had runs where I did everything I could, got all the way up to the Antechamber, with doors leading to the entrances, but never got the rooms needed to open said entrances.

Two of these rooms are “Green Rooms,” many of which can only appear on the rightmost or leftmost sides of the manor. These are things like outdoor gardens, so that part makes sense, and it's a fun restriction to have to work with and around. That part I'm fine with. The other room though, the Great Hall, doesn't have that requirement, so it's just...really frustrating when it doesn't show up!

And yeah, I know. One of those rooms needs the Green Key to unlock, and the Silver Key has a chance to make the Great Hall appear, but I don't think it's required. Like I say, it's frustrating when I use these things, and they still don't work. The Green Key probably always works, I mean the Great Hall. Never mind that, like I also keep saying, even getting these keys in the first place is random in itself.

Anyway, each of those three rooms has a lever that opens a specific way into the Antechamber, meaning the sequence is open the way, then line up the doors so there's a path into the Antechamber. I was fully expecting something like this, so of course when I eventually got into the Antechamber, I was still far from the end. A pedestal rises, holding a key to the basement, and a note also pointing in that direction.

The lever opening that final door in the Antechamber lies elsewhere, which I shall not spoil. Just suffice it to say that those first couple times I got into the Antechamber, I was not then able to get to the lever needed to open Room 46. That took some further work, exploration, and some puzzling out of things. Eventually I did, and this, thankfully, involved a route devoid of random chance. It took steps, so it wasn't entirely free, but it was repeatable. So long as I was smart with my step management, and how I placed rooms, I could do it.

The end was in sight!

I'm not going to entirely blame every failure after this point on random chance, I definitely still got myself boxed in. I can blame the randomness a little bit, but not entirely. I will, however, blame it for the time when I got all the way up to the Antechamber, lined everything up right, and just couldn't get the rooms I needed to open the way.

Doing everything right, then getting blocked because of random chance is frustrating. And maybe I didn't do everything right, maybe there's something I don't understand that would negate that random chance, even a little. I just know what happened to me, and it left me very, very frustrated.

Still, I kept going, finally it all lined up, and the relief poured over me. A word to the wise, for those who care about Trophies/Achievements, it doesn't pop until the physical trophy is collected the following day in the entrance hall. I really thought the game bugged at first, and I was quite disgruntled!

So, where does that leave me on Blue Prince as a whole? Yes, it frustrated me to no end, but I also couldn't stop playing it. It compelled me like little else has in years. It's not quite like anything else I've played, and that makes it feel a little magical. That's the thing, above all else, that makes video games special. When they do what they do in a way that feels so unique and different from anything else I've ever experienced. The awe and wonder of discovering a new thing, it's special and Blue Prince has a lot of moments that evoke that feeling. Probably even more if I was willing to keep digging to find them.

But...did I like it? Yeah, I did. I'm glad I played it, and I think it's a game just about everyone should try at some point. There are people out there absolutely enamored with Blue Prince, and I couldn't be happier for them. On the other hand there's people that bounce off it immediately, and I can't blame them at all. So, I'm somewhere in the middle. Glad I played it, it'll be on my top ten for sure, but part of me never wants to touch this game again. Even just listening to the game's music, setting the mood as I write this, somehow both puts me at ease, and makes me anxious at once. I guess they're negating each other out, at least?

As much as I would love to keep exploring that manor and solving more mysteries, I just don't want to deal with the randomness anymore. I could sit here and detail the specific things I'd change to make it more palatable for me, but that might make it less unique, less special. And it might make it less appealing to the people who really truly love it, so why bother? The game is what it is, and frustrations or not, I'm glad it exists.

What really excites me though, is knowing this is one of those games. It's unique and different, and I just know someone out there is playing it, and their head is filling with new and exciting ideas. For them, that awe and wonder is turning on their creative juices, and just maybe they're starting work on something special. I might not love Blue Prince in the way some others do, but maybe I'll love the game inspired by it that releases in a handful of years. Maybe a decade from now some passion project comes out that is exactly the game for me, and its creators point to Blue Prince as their inspiration.

That's what excites me. Let's hope we all get to see it come to fruition, whatever it may be. Though, perhaps it's a little telling that what excites me is the future of those this game inspired...and not the future of what Blue Prince's creators do next.

Until then, thanks for reading! Hope you have a great day, and just, be careful where you step.