Blue Prince Review – IGN
Blog Andrew Joseph 08 Apr , 2025 0
I'm not entirely convinced Dogubomb didn't use Blue Prince as a personal gift to me. This extremely clever confusing confuser mixes my shortlist of top game types and concepts: the first person confusing is the direct facade that hides a seemingly bottomless secret pit, Roguelite runs, perfectly balances permanent improvements with the growth of your own skills, with the growth of your own skills, drafting mechanics, these mechanics are able to build my best suits, even the best range of suits, and also build a suit, i.e. carcassone. Even if there is a bunch of Tom stuff that doesn't inspire you like I do, the combination is integrated fine. I was still crazy about peeling off the layers of this onion for dozens of hours, but I've been sure that the Blue Prince has secured its position as a historical puzzle.
You play Simon, a teenage boy who inherits the stately mansion of his highly respected and somewhat quirky great uncle, but only he can figure out how to figure out how to browse the ever-changing halls of the estate in order to find a hidden 46th room. It starts out as a fairly simple setup (a far from the entire MC Escher changing house), and while there are a lot of useful tips scattered around you for you to find, you're largely just relaxing and looking at what you can piece together on your own. This is a good foundation because while you don't always know what the next step might be, your goal is yes Always clear enough that I never felt like I was just wandering in the darkness.
You may Will be However, I feel like I wandering around from time to time. Blue Prince’s meat is the drafting mechanism you use to explore the house: Every day you have a limited number of “stairs” starting every day, these measures are spent every time you walk through the door, and each time you open a new step, you’ll give you three options to offer three of the many unique rooms of the three mansions. This means you try not to hit a dead end every time you fill out a nine-second room floor plan in a different way, connect the doorway, and find useful items and valuable clues along the way. It doesn't sound like nothing outside the box, but it's a real joy to slowly master the system.
Some rooms are just simple hallways, while others play more roles, which are divided into color categories according to their type. For example, a purple bedroom will usually give you additional steps when you enter, and if you pick up enough coins to buy them, the yellow shop can sell useful items, while the red room can have a negative impact (such as masking your draft choices) that can drop a wrench in the plan. Some rooms also appear only when certain conditions are met, such as when you draft on the edge of the house or once you go deep enough.
The actual “puzzles” take a variety of different forms in these rooms, but they are all as fun as the devil. Some have very simple math or logic problems, some literal puzzle boxes to find, while others require more complex button buttons or lever pulls to solve everything that the room does. But the challenge of being completely independent like this is the side dish that the Blue Prince really offers, the most interesting stuff feels closer to the incredible first-person puzzle game Return of OBRA DINN or Outdoor field. It requires you to really look at the world around you, write down what you find, and then use that knowledge to make connections wherever you can – it does this in such an expert way, feeling completely implicit from the start and then it can be achieved when it is finally cracked. This could mean browsing the document to find safe combinations, decoding why some objects are where, or using the functionality of a specific room to overcome obstacles elsewhere.
The last part might lead to the only real frustration I found with the Blue Prince, but the best floor plan for House Rats and Men could be broken by some bad draw. Don't get me wrong, there are some very real and effective ways to help mitigate the randomness that rooms offer you – neither in learning priorities and when or shouldn't take risks, nor in terms of permanent upgrades, I won't ruin my future running more consistently. But, simple and simple, sometimes you need a place where you turn left, do whatever it can (including all the power to collect dice that gets you to repaint the room), and still get stuck like Zoolander when it finally offers options. Those bad rest hours are few, but when a good run is over, it still stings because you just never saw the room you want.
(Tenable, so do I real Hopefully, you can stop the ticking of the clock in the game by completely ending the end of the current day, or at least opening the menu, without having to shorten your progress without having to shorten your progress. Running can usually take more than an hour, which makes the Blue Prince a tough claim – although that's a problem, as I played the console on my desktop, and even the steam deck, which would also let you pause it if you need to go and do something else. )
Thankfully, any pain of this randomness can be alleviated by the fact that so much It is found here that a given run is seldom wasted time. You may not be able to draft a specific combination of the specific rooms you are after, or you may not reach some of the squares you want, but you still enter some new rooms and doing so almost always adds to the growing list of mystery I take down in a bunch of handwritten notes. “Beating” the Blue Prince took me about 15 hours, and reaching Room 46 was definitely a satisfying puzzle to solve by myself, but I also have a lot more goals now than when I first set off. There are safes to open, doors to unlock, books and letters to read, clues to decrypt and load The legend revealed.
It's impressive how to weave all these optional puzzles on and around the path of the “main” – some hide in sight from the first minute, just waiting for you to realize they are important, while others drop a string of debris in your way, leading to deep and unexpected rabbit holes as you follow.
Blue Prince is a very difficult game to talk with friends and they are playing as well because of the randomness of drafting mechanics and your own curiosity that can take two players on different paths. Once, when I was about five hours, I excitedly mentioned that I unlocked something to a friend who had played for 40 and learned that they haven't even found that thing. However, this fractal residence is not frustrated by random detention, as clues can often be found in many forms or locations. Once again, you've been improving something.
As you mean, Blue Prince’s original touch story also began to move more directly into the spotlight. Discover more about the great uncles and family history of the characters at the beginning, it was a fun outfit, but ended up becoming as rich and compelling as any puzzle. The world building here is explored with patience I'm not used to seeing, there are tons of people to get to know your relatives, estates and the country you are in, but none of them are forced to drag your throat. This allows me to understand that important historical events or complex geopolitics feels like a victory that almost always helps me solve the mystery of the future, not just some “knowledge” that can be read in books or letters and move on.
Still avoiding spoilers like laser stumbling in impossible traps, this story and its theme cleverly connect your movements with your movements to make few games so successful. Patching together the chaotic history of a long, sometimes alienated family is rarely a linear process-Simon wanders through the house, and he suddenly inherits the message conveyed from a conflicting perspective, often completely wrong order. The person who tries to simply solve a fun puzzle in a boy trying to make all the right connections so he can win a prize to understand the real rewards this mansion has reflected my journey with the Blue Prince, the kind of subtle brilliance you won't see in many games.
