Imagine a piece of complex origami. You want to understand how it works, so you start looking for a place to begin unfolding it. With each corner of the paper you peel back, you notice an even more intricate structure underneath. So you unfold that too, and find even more fine detail underneath yet again. You start to wonder how many layers it can have, and marvel at the intricacy. You remember at the start, when you already thought it was complex, but you had no idea how elaborate it really was. That is the experience of playing Blue Prince.
It can be difficult to describe a game like this, in which so much of the design is about curiosity and discovery. But at its most basic level, Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game built around exploring a shapeshifting manor house. The executor of the Mount Holly estate has left it to you, but it will only become yours if you reach the mysterious Room 46. You cannot spend the night inside the house, so you set up camp just outside the grounds. After each day, the rooms reset and all of the doors close again. The exact layout of the manor is never the same twice. It takes place in first-person, making it an unfolding puzzle box that you live inside.
You start each day at the entrance, the bottom-center square of a 5x9 grid, faced with three doors. Each time you interact with a door, you're faced with three choices of which room to "draft" on the other side. Some rooms are dead ends, others are straight pathways, others only bend, and so on. You have a limited number of steps, and crossing the threshold into a new room ticks down one of them. From the start, you understand the objective to be that carving a pathway using these interlocking pieces, without expending too many steps, will successfully lead to the top of the 5x9 grid, to the Antechamber where there sits the entrance to Room 46. At this point, Blue Prince feels very much like a prestige board game, complete with a grid and tiles to place.
Then, another layer of complexity appears. Some rooms carry special properties. The Parlor and the Billiard Room carry individualized puzzles that reward you with items. Others can give you key information, like the Security Room, which can give a complete inventory of items in the house as it's currently configured. You start to notice that the rooms are color coded--Green are garden rooms, while Orange are hallways, and so on. You begin to notice how some rooms can have direct impacts on the properties of other rooms. The elaborate puzzle unfurls even further.
You start to find Keys, necessary for unlocking some rooms, along with Gems, which are used to generate the appearance of specific, specialized rooms. Coins scattered around the mansion can be used to purchase things in Shop rooms. Re-roll tokens can be used to present you with another set of options. You start to find pieces of special equipment, like a Metal Detector to alert you to Coins, or a Shovel to dig up holes in the ground.
As you explore the house, you discover glimmers of persistence that help you along the way. An Observatory gives you greater rewards the more times you find it, the individual prizes determined by the configuration of stars in the sky. You start to earn a daily allowance of coins that give you a head-start for spending in the shops. A Coat Check room lets you check in an item and retrieve it on a later day. One particular room even lets you permanently create entirely new rooms.
One of the most significant sources of persistence are Upgrade Disks, which when inserted into one of the old DOS computers scattered in certain rooms, let you upgrade a random room with one of three bonus effects that will last from then on. These upgrades feel small, but they begin to snowball as their effects stack and you learn consistent methods to exploit their benefits. Like a lot of roguelikes, this is a game about incremental progress, but Blue Prince is a puzzle game at heart. Rather than upgrades to your attack damage or poison resistance, you're slowly mitigating the randomness of the ever-changing house and bending the odds in your favor.
Being a roguelike puzzle game, of course, Blue Prince can sometimes feel frustratingly random. Even when you know the exact solution to a problem, it may take multiple attempts waiting for the various factors to line up correctly. This is aided, somewhat, by the fact that there is almost always some way to make a degree of progress, even on a failed run. But when you're locked in on making a specific, certain thing happen, it can feel annoying when the game's systems refuse to cooperate.
But the greatest source of persistence is the knowledge you carry with you. Blue Prince tells you very directly at one point to keep a notebook of your findings, and it means an actual, physical one. Some rooms give oblique clues about how to solve problems facing you in completely different rooms. There are puzzles and combination locks and enigmas that simply cannot be solved without a full notebook or a photographic memory. These solutions are cleverly interwoven to let you feel the spark of recognition. They're engineered to keep your brain working on solutions even when you aren't playing. More than many games in recent memory, Blue Prince is a game that demands your full attention. I thought about it often when I wasn't playing, even when I didn't mean to.
In addition to persistent knowledge of its systems, you start to piece together the story of the house and the people who once lived there. I'll admit that I've only barely begun to piece together this aspect of it, as keeping track of the various figures, their relationships, and their struggles mostly eluded me while I was locked in on resolving the gameplay puzzles. It often felt more like a tone poem than anything else, but it was coherent enough that I could at least tell that the story is its own mystery to solve.
Now, here is where the design of Blue Prince shows off its real magic, and if you want to go into the experience as fresh as possible, I would encourage you to stop reading now and simply know that it has my recommendation.
The old manor house itself is endlessly changing, with a seemingly infinite combination of permutations and criss-crossing solutions. Many of these solutions are extremely flexible and can be solved in multiple ways, which works well in the context of a roguelike, because it allows you to make constant progress, even when a run ends in dead ends or other frustrations. But at a certain point, you begin to transition to another puzzle, and one that is much more rigid, with fewer and more-specific solutions. At first I thought this was counter to the game's goals and philosophy, but then over time I realized it's integral to the real beauty of the Blue Prince's design.
All the unfurling of layers and seeing how the machine ticks were not an end to themselves. The house is a puzzle box, of course, and it's full of individual and interlocking puzzles. But it is also an incredibly flexible tool. The campaign is not just about making your way through the house. It is about training you how to wield the house. The challenges are a series of locks, and Blue Prince is about learning how to use the physical space itself as a skeleton key that can open them.
Blue Prince is one of the most memorable video game experiences I have ever had. It is at once accessible and impenetrable, frustrating and euphoric. Like each of my dozens of permutations of the Mount Holly manor house itself, it is truly one of a kind.
