Blue Prince Review: A Mind-Bending Puzzle-Solving Adventure Game!

Blue Prince is a game that brazenly defies easy classification.  It’s kind of a first-person puzzle game, kind of a roguelike, kind of a strategy game, and even kind of an immersive sim.  It borrows elements from The Outer Wilds, Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, and the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill, but uses those elements to create something wholly unique.  And while the more demanding elements of its structure occasionally tested my patience, anybody interested in a massive, robust mystery full of rewarding exploration and the sort of “a-ha!” moments that are only possible via a deviously clever developer should give Blue Prince a try immediately.

Herbert S. Sinclair of the Mount Holly Estate at Reddington has passed away.  As his grandnephew, Simon P. Jones, you were named as heir in his last will and testament – and the Mount Holly Estate and the land around it are yours – with a catch.  In order to claim your inheritance, you have to play a little game.  And by a little game, I mean a sprawling, head-scratching leviathan of logical contortions.

See, Mount Holly Estate is hardly your typical mansion.  Its layout of 45 distinct rooms shifts into a completely different configuration every single day.  And to claim your inheritance, you must find its elusive 46th room.

But there are rules – you cannot stay in Mount Holly Manor overnight, but must camp out in a tent nearby.  And you cannot take any items from the mansion with you once a day is over.  Interestingly enough, even the amount you can move between rooms each day is limited in the form of footsteps.  You start each day with 50, and each time you move to a new room, one will be lost.  Get down to zero, and you will have utterly exhausted yourself and need to call it a day and start fresh tomorrow.  There are ways to get more footsteps as you explore the estate, but I will leave it to you to figure out how to do that.

Conveniently, these rules allow Blue Prince to operate as a roguelike, with each day you enter the manor being an opportunity to draw up your own floor plan from a pool of random options and see what happens.  In practice, that’s about as straightforward as commuting to work by helicopter is affordable.

You’ll begin every day in the Entrance Hall, where a letter rests from your dearly departed great uncle explaining the task at hand and outlining the rules.  Each room will have a certain number of doors.  Each door will lead to one of three rooms of your choosing.  Each new room may contain something special about it – at the simplest level, it may give you keys, gems, coins, or items, all valuable resources that unlock doors or chests, allow you to place some uncommonly useful rooms down, purchase items from the commissary, or give you tools to assist in exploration.  Each room has a color that places it in a particular category too, like red rooms that punish you in some way for entering them or green rooms all themed around plants.  There are even rooms with certain elements that won’t work without other rooms, or rooms that don’t do much of anything at all – or do they?

I feel that there’s only so much more I can say about how the game is played.  As layer after layer is unveiled and connection after connection is made, Blue Prince burrows itself into your brain.  It has a magnetic pull that, even when I got frustrated with it, would constantly reel me back in by answering certain questions before immediately raising new ones.

See, a game like this relies on such rock-solid design.  It is so challenging to engage any player in a mystery of this magnitude without filling the environments with proper clues that act as an invisible guiding hand.  And Blue Prince’s guiding hand is smooth as the conductor of a symphony orchestra.  Because despite its insistence that you solve the mystery of room 46 without any clear-cut path forward, there’s a tangible sense of progression between runs.  And it's not just a “your knowledge is the real leveling system” sort of thing – I mean, it is that, a little bit, in a very cool way, but there are also real ways that the game progresses between runs that are impressively varied and constantly surprising.  I refuse to spoil anything whatsoever about it, though, so I’m not going to tell you about what those surprising forms of progression are. 

However, I’d like to impart just two pieces of advice – and seriously, these spoil nothing, I promise.  One is that you should really play this with a notebook by your side – like, a physical notebook where you can write notes and draw diagrams and scribble symbols.  You’ll need it.  The second piece of advice is that whenever you have the opportunity to draft a new room you have never placed before, DO IT.  Blue Prince contains light immersive sim elements, and accordingly, many rooms will have interesting notes that teach you something about the manor or just impart more details of its overarching story.  The more rooms you uncover, the more information you’ll have and the more you’ll progress in the form of… yeah, yep, not telling you that, just trust me on this one.

It’s also a beautiful game.  Blue Prince’s cel-shaded look is colorful and warm, yet has a certain sense of gentle melancholy.  The music is slow and somber, somehow both giving each room of the manor its own unique life while making the game feel surprisingly lonely.  It ran very well at 4k resolution on my PC equipped with an RTX 4080, and I managed to get it running at a pretty smooth 45-50 fps on the Steam Deck.  If there’s anything to complain about visually, it's that there are basically no settings to speak of beyond resolution and v-sync.  So if you can’t run it well for whatever reason, there’s not much to be done about that.  But thankfully, I don’t see that as an issue for most.

As you can probably tell by now, there’s an enormous amount to like about Blue Prince.  Its hold on me is undeniable, and it’s an experience that makes you feel smart even as it constantly reminds you that it is smarter.  But I can’t deny that some aspects of the game’s procedural generation can feel a bit defeating.  This is a mystery game that relies on you to figure out its various pieces and put them together, but then hides those pieces like cheese at the end of a rat maze and puts you at the mercy of random draws to hopefully put them together.  Learning some strategies to get better draws as you decide the location of each room is absolutely part of the experience here, but the sheer volume of dead ends it’s possible to hit can make it feel like you’re being laughed at.  It’s extremely well-crafted, but also kind of sadistic at times in a way that feels unnecessary.

Compounding this is the fact that while each room is a joy to explore the first time, most don’t actually change between runs other than what items you may find in them.  Sure, some rooms have puzzles that are randomly generated and get harder and harder each run – which are great, by the way.  But most won’t even be worth exploring after you’ve seen it a couple of times, and especially after you’ve seen it a couple of dozen times.  It’s the same notes, the same diagrams and the same scenery, with a vast majority of objects in each room being completely non-interactive.  Having more objects to pick up, examine and read to add to the world’s lore would have been a welcome addition here.  It’s also an incredible shame that the game doesn’t allow you to save and quit mid-run, but rather forces you to end the day entirely, losing your items and current manor layout in the process.  For many this won’t be a problem because runs can be as short as 10 minutes and only as long as 45 or so.  But some players with kids and other time-sensitive obligations may find the need to quit out before the run is over, and I would’ve hoped that being able to return to where you left off would be a pretty standard roguelike feature at this point, and its omission here is unfortunate.

I want to tell you so much more about Blue Prince, but doing so would simply be a disservice to you.  This is a game whose main feature is the joy of discovery, and as long as you have the patience and desire to put together its pieces, it’s likely to be one of 2025’s standout titles for many.  But patience will be the key here – trial and error, missed opportunities and frustrating dead ends are all part of the experience and very much a feature rather than a bug.  It’s hard to recommend Blue Prince to everybody because it’s definitely not for everybody.  But if you’ve played and loved any games of its ilk, mainly Outer Wilds and Lorelai, I’m sure you’re already paying attention.

GREAT