This game came out of nowhere for me. I hadn't heard of it or seen previews for it until it was released. I saw a trailer that made me add it to my wishlist to maybe purchase if it went on sale. But when I overheard a co-worker talking about it, I decided to go ahead and purchase it and start playing, so that we would have an opportunity for some water cooler talk.
Blue Prince is, at the simplest level, a puzzle game. But simply calling it a "puzzle game" doesn't quite do it justice, because it is a wholly unique blend of different video game genres, all packaged together in a way that feels more like a board game. It is a puzzle game, for sure, but it is also a rogue-like, and an adventure game (in the vein of classic 90's point-and-clicks). It utilizes a unique tile-placement mechanic that feels almost like playing a digitized version of a board game akin to Betrayal At House On The Hill (minus the overt horror theming).
The player takes on the role of a young heir to a family estate. But the inheritance comes with a catch! The house has a shape-shifting layout, with each room being placed from a pool of randomly-selected rooms, each time you open a new door. In order to earn the inheritance, the player character must navigate the shifting mansion, solve its myriad puzzles, and find your way to the elusive, hidden 46th room. But there's another catch! You cannot take anything from outside into the mansion, nor can you remove anything from the mansion, and its layout resets each day. This creates the rogue-like element.
Blue Prince's room-drafting mechanic feels similar to a tile-placement tabletop game.
Each day, you have a finite amount of stamina, and when that stamina runs out, you are forced to your campsite outside the home to rest for the night. When you wake up the next morning, you will have to start the exploration of the house over again from scratch. Well, mostly from scratch. You'll be armed with the accumulated knowledge from your previous explorations, as well as some permanent upgrades.
As such, Blue Prince straddles the line between "rogue-like" and "knowledge-based" game. The vast majority of the board resets each day, but you do keep some persistent elements of progress, so you don't have to memorize everything or repeat the same steps for certain activities over and over again, every time.
A puzzling house
Blue Prince is a heavily-randomized game, for the better and the worse. Every time you open a new door, you'll be given a choice of 3 semi-randomly-selected rooms to draft on the other side of the door. Opening certain doors requires the use of keys, and certain rooms may require that you spend gems, both of which can be collected within the mansion. Rooms may contain a puzzle, items, clues to the over-arching story, or some combination of the 3. Rooms may also have special effects that are triggered by drafting the room, by entering it, or by using certain objects within it.
Different rooms have different abilities.
For example, there is a "Drawing Room" that allows you to re-draw new rooms, if the rooms you drew weren't to your liking. And then there are rooms like the Parlour and Billiards Room, which always contain a logic or math puzzle that awards resources if solved. There are also "red" rooms that penalize the player for drafting or entering them, such as the Chapel, which collects a tithe from your purse of coins each and every time you enter.
Perhaps equally importantly, each room also has a different configuration of doors. Some rooms only have the single doorway, turning them into dead ends. Most rooms, have 2 doorways (the one you came in through, and a second exit that goes in a different direction). Some rooms and hallways have 3 or 4 doorways. If you run out of new doors to go through, then your day will also end, on account of there is nowhere else for you to go.
This combination of room abilities, resources, puzzles, and door configurations creates a lot of strategy for how you choose to layout the mansion on any given day. Do you focus on exploring new rooms to find as many of the puzzles and clues as you can? Or do you try to bee-line due north to the antechamber every day? In any case, how do you place rooms in order to accomplish your goal?
There is a surprisingly huge collection of different rooms, along with some clever and creative abilities for some rooms. There's also items that the player can use to solve puzzles or manipulate the environment. This creates a lot of tough decisions regarding how best to spend your limited resources. However, knowing that you'll loose all of those resources in the next day, liberates the player to feel like you can and should spend your resources whenever possible. There is no point in hoarding resources, the way you might save up all your most powerful ammunition in a survival horror game, only for the game to end before you've ever used it.
The puzzles in this game are no joke! Things start off simple, but they gradually ramp up. The puzzles aren't insanely difficult to solve on an intellectual level, but they require a lot of meticulous exploration and careful observation. There are plenty of puzzles and clues that are hidden in plain sight, and you'll walk right by them dozens of times without realizing there's something there, until you find a document or clue somewhere else, hours later, that makes you say "wait a minute, those were puzzles?!"
Some rooms have respawning logic and math puzzles.
Double-edged sword of randomness
The random element of this game is, by far, it's most devisive feature. On the one hand, it can make each day of exploration feel like a total crap shoot regarding which rooms and items you'll have access to. On the other hand, it means that each exploration of the mansion is unique, and will reveal different combinations of rooms and items that can be utilized in creative new ways.
There are mechanisms for mitigating a lot of the randomness of the game. Upgrades may give you access to extra resources, which makes it easier to probe deeper into the estate in subsequent days. You may also have opportunities to store specific key items for retrieval later. And certain rooms or locations will be permanently available, removing the need to go through the steps to unlock them every time you want to visit.
However, I feel like these various randomness-mitigation features aren't quite enough for a game that is as big as, and as random as, and which goes on for as long as Blue Prince. Specifically, 2 of the most important abilities in the game are the ability to re-draw the pool of 3 available rooms for a specific door, and the ability to rotate a room so that its doors face in particular directions. But these abilities are offered very rarely, leaving the player with little-to-no tools for controlling which room(s) will be available for placement on any given day, or at any given time. You are reliant on the random number generator giving you the specific room(s) that you want or need in order to progress. And those rooms also have to be placed such that their doors lead in a useful direction (usually north, towards the antechamber). And sometimes you even need mulitple rooms to show up in the same day. Worse yet, those multiple rooms may need to be linked together in specific ways.
You are largely at the mercy of the game's random room generator.
For example, some rooms require power from the Boiler Room in order for their puzzle to function. But the Boiler Room doesn't deliver power to any room in the house! It only delivers power to adjacent rooms in a single direction. And not just any adjacent rooms, either! Power must be carried by rooms with an overhead duct system capable of transferring power. There's only a handful of those available. So not only do you have to find the Boiler Room and the room that requires power, both in the same run (which requires some luck, in and of itself), but you also have to get lucky enough to draw them adjacent to each other, or to draw an unbroken chain of power-transferring rooms in between the Boiler Room and your desired puzzle room.
Honestly, some of this stuff feels like it's just too much to reasonably expect without more tools at the player's disposal to help force certain rooms to show up at certain times. It isn't just the Boiler Room either. It's also the Schoolhouse and Classrooms, and (to some extent) the Foundation, and a couple others. Thankfully, the Pump Room and Pool do not require an unbroken chain of plumbing in order for them to work together. It's odd that the game requires this unbroken chain of electrical wiring, but does not require an unbroken chain of plumbing, but I'm not going to complain about this one, small mercy.
More generally speaking, the fact the game is so random means that it's easy to find partial clues for a puzzle, but not know if you have all the information necessary to solve the puzzle. This can easily lead to players looking up the solutions online to find out if should even be able to solve the puzzle yet. This is something that could possibly have been mitigated if there were a more scripted progression of room unlocks that would gently guide players to finding all the necessary clues. But as it stands, players are stuck in a situation in which they "don't know what they don't know", which can make things feel a lot more hopeless or unfair than it actually is.
The Boiler Room is particularly frustrating, because it requires getting lucky 2 or more times,
and also solving complicated puzzles in other rooms, in order to utilize the power it produces.
Take what is given
This sounds pretty bad. And it can be pretty bad, if you get unlucky. But it's not quite as bad as it seems. A lot of players have been turned off of the game completely because of how asinine the randomness can get. This is a game that does not fudge its numbers in order to secretly aide the player. The result is that any given person's experience and reaction to the game is going to be almost entirely dependent on whether the randomness worked in their favor or not.
I personally fluctuated up and down in this regard. Early on, I was frustrated by the RNG consistently blocking me from reaching the antechamber. Over time, I learned to stop fixating on trying to reach the antechamber, trying to get one specific room, or trying to solve one specific puzzle. A lot of the frustrations started melting away when I started taking what the game gives me, and working with that. Insead of trying to accomplish one specific objective that I wanted to do, I started to just thoroughly explore the rooms that I was given, and start exploring new rooms that I had never seen before, even if that meant creating a dead end for that day. More often than not, I would find something new that would give me ideas for things I could do on later runs.
In fact, looking back on my play time with the game, I think there were only a handful of instances in which I had legitimately "wasted" runs. Despite all the frustrations with the randomness, days in which I made absolutely zero progress and did not see or learn anything new, were very rare. Most of them were in my early hours with the game, before I had settled into the aforementioned technique of "taking what the game gives me."
The game is full of little "consolation prizes" to soften the frustration of seemingly-wasted runs.
Another way that the game mitigates its RNG is that there are multiple ways to accomplish most tasks. Almost every puzzle that I came across had multiple clues, spread across multiple rooms -- each of which was sufficient for solving the puzzle. There's also more than 1 way to unlock the antechamber.
Most puzzles simply require that you have seen the other room with the clue at some point in the past. They don't necessarily require that you draw both the puzzle room and the clue room in the same run. As long as you have a good memory, a notepad, take lots of screenshots whenever you come across any potential clue, or you keep an internet browser open, then you should be able to solve most of the puzzles in the game. But those few that require multiple rooms to be drafted simultaneously can really drag down the pace of the mid-game, and create a lot of unnecessary frustration.
If I could make just one change to the game, I would add a permanent upgrade that should be made available fairly early in the game, in which there would be a 4th drafting slot. At the beginning of each new day (or the end of the previous day), the player should be able to choose 1 previously-explored room that will stay in that 4th draft slot until the room is drafted, or the day ends. This way, if there is 1 particular puzzle that you are trying to solve (such as a puzzle involving the Boiler Room), or 1 particular room (such as the Coat Check) that you really need access to, you will be able to guarantee that it will be available.
The abilities to redraw or rotate rooms are [perhaps]
the most important abilities in the game,
but they are rarely available.
Alternatively, it would be nice to have a way to save a particular room from a particular draft list, so that you could draft it later in the same run. There were a lot of situations where I got a room I wanted, but drew it in the worst possible circumstance. Maybe it would have dead-ended a run, or prevented me from accessing another room that I needed for solving a puzzle that was immediately solveable. So being able to say "give me this room again later" would have been a godsend.
Feeling naked
The randomness of the game is compounded by a U.I. that isn't always as helpful as it could be.
There's no in-game log of notes and clues that you've collected. I get why they chose to do this. Thematically, the rules of game say that the character is not allowed to bring anything into the mansion, or take anything out of the mansion. So it makes thematic sense that the character cannot bring a notebook and pencil into the mansion to take notes, nor can he collect notes he finds in the mansion and take them with him.
But then again, the game specifically recommends that the player take notes. So obviously, the developers realize that it's a bit much to expect a player to keep everything in memory without writing things down. The game also breaks its own rules by actually allowing items to be taken into the mansion or brought outside of the mansion, so it's already willing to fudge its own thematic rules for the sake of gameplay. I don't see any harm in including an in-game log. Or at least, have the option to include such a log. Even if it's part of an "Easy Mode", or some other non-default accessibility setting, it should at least be an option!
In fact, thematically speaking, if I were the protagonist, and I was bound by the rule that I "can't bring anything in or take anything out", then I would find the first piece of paper and a pen or pencil that I find in the mansion, take my notes on that, and then just leave it in the Entrance Hall on my way back out to the campsite for the night. Then I can pick it back up on my way back in the next day. In fact, I could do the same with every note or memo that I pick up: just stash it all in the Entrance Hall for reference or collection later.
Personally, I just take copious screenshots of anything and everything that might be a clue, so that I can reference them later if I need to. That means screenshots of every note I pick up, every page of every letter or book that I read, and every odd painting, sculpture, or environmental detail that might be relevant later. And yes, occasionally, I went online to jog my memory for certain puzzles that I know I had seen the clues for, but for which I was too lazy to scour through my screenshots, or go looking for that room again in the game.
The game fully expects the player to need to keep notes.
That worked well enough for the first 10 hours or so. After that, I started finding much bigger puzzles that were on the scale of the whole house, instead of just 1 or 2 rooms, and which require multiple runs in order to collect all the clues. At that point, I had to cave, and grabbed a small notepad and pencil.
The map also doesn't bother to highlight which doors are locked or which doors are sealed behind a keycard. Nor does it show the location of any items that you may have neglected to pick up, or puzzles that you encountered (but haven't solved). Nor does it list the items that are available for purchase in the shops you've drafted. The game expects the player to keep all such details in your working memory. To be fair, any given run in this game usually takes between 20 and 90 minutes, so it isn't asking too much of the player's memory. But if you've done multiple runs in a single play session, they can start to bleed together, and lead to confusion. And with the game limiting the number of times that you can move between rooms, going the wrong way because you forgot which room had that locked chest can mean the difference between a successful run and a failure.
The game also doesn't bother to warn you when a particular item or object will not be reset for subsequent days. For example, I found several stashes of coins that I picked up, never drafted a shop to spend them, and then found that they do not respawn in that room again. As such, those coins (over 100 of them) were just gone!
At the precipice...
Playing this game was a wild roller coaster! The attempts that Blue Prince makes to mitigate its own randomness just do not feel like it is enough! The good will that the game had built started to wear out, for me, around hour 20 or so. At that point, I had found almost all of what there is to find in the rooms that were available to me. I had already reached the antechamber a couple of times, but could not access the basement or the Coat Check, so I lost the Basement Key and would have to try again. But after that, I never got to the antechamber again. Despite all the bonus steps, keys, gems, and cash allowance that I was starting each day with, my inability to progress the main quest came down entirely to the inability to manipulate what rooms showed up, or which items I had access to.
Blue Prince can feel futile at times.
In one case, I would open the antechamber doors, but then not be able to actually reach the antechamber (whether due to lack of stamina or bad luck with the arrangement of doors). Or I would connect doors to the antechamber, but never be able to access the levers to unlock the antechamber doors. In some cases, I would accumulate 200 gold, only to not find a single shop in which to spend that gold. Worse yet, the sources of all that gold would sometimes be permanently depleted, meaning that stockpile of gold was just gone forever!
I was honestly on the verge of giving up on Blue Prince. In fact, after a particularly frustrating play session (day 29), in which I had tons of resources and multiple doorways connected to the antechamber, but failed to open the antechamber, I was ready to give up on the game. But later that day, I decided to give it one more run to see if I found anything new. Well, that "one more run" (day 30) actually was the run in which I successfully reached room 46 and saw the credits roll. That final run was touch and go, but as brutal as the RNG had been in the previous session, it was equally favorable to me in the final run. It gave me a room that I had never seen before, but which made all the difference.
Not everyone will be as lucky as I was. I could easily have had to grind through dozens more days if I hadn't gotten that one lucky room. But I doubt I would have had the patience to do so.
Blue Prince's un-forgiving randomness brought me to the breaking point on multiple occasions. I wish it had more ways to mitigate that randomness, and give the player more control over which rooms you'll find in any given exploration of the mansion. But apparently, it had just enough RNG-mitigation mechanics to get me through to the credits. And maybe -- just maybe -- I'll come back to it from time to time to play some of the extensive epilogue, and discover the rest of its intriguing mysteries.
I went from being ready to give up entirely, to reaching Room 46, both in a single day.