I have played...quite a bit of Blue Prince. You can see my hour count above.

I'm not a critic, but I do feel compelled to write a little review…I did get the game for free, after all, and I feel like this is my way of paying for it. But in truth, I *wanted* to write about it, because this game is very, very special. So, a bold sentence, to begin:

Blue Prince is the most intricate puzzle box ever designed by a human being.

Sinking in, I hope...

...but let's put a pin in that, for now.

The game presents itself to the player as a reasonably fun, almost board game-esque roguelike. There are 45 rooms in a mountaintop manor; each time you attempt to open a door, three blueprints at random will appear. You'll need to choose one, and as the door opens, that's the room that greets you, just like magic. Some of these rooms have resources that allow you to create better or more interesting rooms, some have keys that open locked doors (which appear with increasing frequency as you move through the manor), and some have items to help you manage your house as you begin your search for its elusive 46th​ room, required to come fully into your inheritance of the manor and its surrounding lands. Still, you have limited stamina each day; once that stamina is exhausted, the manor resets to its nascent state overnight, and you'll need to begin anew the next morning.

After you progress through a few days' worth of rooms, you might begin noticing connections between them. Wait, is this thing related to what I saw in the…? Hold on, if I manage to place this room next to this other one, does it activate the…? Huh. And what about…?

You might create an "active projects" page in your notebook, to keep track of interesting interactions and threads to pull on. The randomness of the roguelike structure means it isn't always easy to reach a specific room or create the precise configuration you wanted to test, but almost always some level of progress can be made, some secret gleaned on a run. You'll have runs that just barely fall short, frustrating in how close you were to uncovering something new, but equally will you have runs where everything just seems to slam into place, where you pulled the precise right room you needed at the precise right time, wondering if there must be some secret magic in the code, governing the RNG to land exactly right.

Maybe you'll reach that 46th​ room. Maybe you won't. But even after the credits roll…and in general, they don't take terribly long to reach…there are still so many mysteries unanswered. And it is here, unfortunately, where I need to begin to speak in more general terms, because it is the creator's fervent wish to preserve a sense of mystery, of discovery, of what comes afterward. I'll do my best to respect that wish, so apologies if I seem vague.

As you progress deeper, the puzzle box keeps going. The game feels, in some ways, like 2024's Animal Well, onion layers of secrets being pared ever further back. But it didn't take terribly long in Animal Well to get to puzzles that no individual could ever be reasonably expected to solve; it required the wisdom and efforts and random experiments of hundreds, if not thousands, of people to find obscure interactions only vaguely hinted at. But if Animal Well was an abyss of secrets, dark and terrifying, Blue Prince is a natural hot spring of them, inviting and warm. There is informational redundancy within the game, as well as natural, diagetic markers that pop up from time to time, gently coaxing the player in the right directions. Ofttimes you'll find many of these markers point to things you'd already brilliantly solved, ten hours ago. Ofttimes they'll contain revelations that you can't *believe* you hadn't found, if only you'd done the obvious thing!

There are so *many* of these interactions, secrets miniscule and gargantuan, that I encourage everyone to play in small groups; form a "book club", if you can, with this game. Refuse to share answers, but instead offer subtle hints if pressed; exclaim, perhaps, at the madness you've just uncovered; discuss the narrative and surrounding lore. And a shocking amount of lore there is: the world of Blue Prince is genuinely fascinating, possessing a depth and verisimilitude found only in great works of fiction. I know the countries of this world, and their histories, and the colors of their flags. So, too, will you.

I think, in great works, you can often *feel* what a creator loves, and it's worth noting that Tonda Ros loves *words*. He luxuriates in them, in meanings overt and subtle, in linguistic misdirection, in how they come together to create meaning. Consequently, I am sad to say that the game is only available in English; Tonda told me he does indeed want to localize the game to other languages, but I admit, as far as I've come, I don't quite know how that would be possible. If English isn't a fluent language for you, you may miss some important things…but I would still recommend it, regardless.

In an interview, Tonda said, "People start playing the game, and they think, 'Why did this take eight years to make?' And then, later, they say 'How in the world did you make this in only eight years?'" We're right to ask that, of course. The puzzle box is far too marvelous, I'd say, for this narrow margin to contain.

Anyway.

You should buy Blue Prince.

Ten out of ten.

I'm mostly making this review because there are some really trite negative reviews. To the uninformed reviewer that said there isn't any 1440p, they are trolling. There is 1440p and to the vacuous reviewer that said that it doesn't restart when you run out of forward moving rooms, they should play the game longer because its a puzzle game... for a reason. All rooms have secrets and its baffling how you didnt realize that even 0.8 hours in.

Its very fun btw. This is one of those, don't look up anything games. Just play.

Ever play Betrayal at House on the Hill and love the part where you build the house out of modular tiles? Yeah, this is that but also Myst, in the best way possible.

Play it.