Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC
Simon inherited a 45-room mansion from his late uncle, but in a twist deserving of a Brewster's Millions sequel, only gets to keep it if he finds a hidden 46th room.
There's more to claiming his inheritance than just finding a way through a maze-like building, though. Forbidden from spending a night in the property, Simon returns each morning to continue his search for the elusive room, finding the entire building, bar the south-facing entry hall, has been "reset". To reach an antechamber leading to the mysterious room at the northmost edge of the property, he – you – must re-map the entire building each day, trying to chart a course through an unpredictable web of ever-shifting rooms.
A modern day successor to the likes of Myst, Blue Prince starts out with that simple objective, but soon unfurls into a game of far grander scope and ambition. Its basic gameplay loop is easy to grasp: every door opened offers a choice of three rooms it could lead to, which you place on the mansion's blueprints (geddit?). Each in turn has a variable number of exits, which lead to another trio of potential rooms. The further north you go in the mansion, the more likely you are to encounter locked doors. Moving between rooms, whether placing them for the first time or backtracking through the manor, uses up one step, of which you have a limited number per day. Run out of steps, end up with a dead end, or reach a locked door you lack keys to open, and you'll have to return and start over the next day.
Play with a notepad to hand and you'll feel like a genius when you finally piece something together.
Again though, this isn't about solving a maze, even one you have to map out yourself. Each room you place, drawn randomly from a pool of schematics, offers their own puzzles to solve. Some will be specific to that room – the Parlour has an ever-changing lockbox puzzle that rewards you with gems, needed to place certain other rooms, each time you solve it – while others relate to challenges elsewhere in the house or on its grounds. You'll start to notice hints and clues scattered about, synergies between how this room interacts with or influences that room, realise that certain rooms that can only be placed in particular areas or accessed only from specific directions, begin to figure out how everything relates and interconnects.
And, although everything seems rooted in impermanence, with any items found that might aid exploration removed at the end of each day, you'll start to notice small things that do carry over between runs, ways to permanently open up certain areas or store key objects for later retrieval. Your own, real-world, in-your-brain memory is pivotal, the only thing the game can't reset – play with a notepad to hand and you'll feel like a genius when you finally piece something together.
There's more to the title Blue Prince than that blueprints pun, too. The more time you put in, the more rooms you uncover, the more you'll uncover hints to a grander story involving Simon's family and the strange country they seem to inhabit. Every room, every choice, feeds into a greater whole, eventually coalescing into a surprisingly complex story packed with unsettling implications (no spoilers, but if you find the Rumpus Room, check the machine that looks like Zoltar from Big for a shock).
Unfortunately, the same mechanisms that make Blue Prince so captivating also prove to be maddeningly frustrating at times. The random nature of which rooms can be drafted can sometimes mean multiple loops that feel utterly fruitless. For instance, a Pump Room needs to be powered up in order to drain various water features around the estate (in turn revealing even more mysteries), which requires supplying energy from a Boiler Room, with its own puzzle to solve first. If you're extremely lucky, you might be able to draft the latter facility right next to the Pump Room, and the power will flow directly between them. If not, a circuit from the Boiler Room to the Pump Room can be created, linking through certain other rooms or room types, but you'll also need the literal luck of the draw to be able to lay those rooms out accordingly.
There are some tricks to improve the odds. One room lets you adjust the rarity of certain other rooms, for instance, but only of a randomised selection each time you draft it, while other rooms or dice items allow you to re-roll the selection of rooms you can choose from. It's still entirely possible to lose day after in-game day never really making any progress though, and while there’s no in-game penalty for how long it takes to reach Room 46 – or to uncover any of the many secrets that remain even after that – the drain on your own time can grow wearisome.
Thankfully, Blue Prince is rather unusual in that it doesn't demand you solve all of its nefarious puzzles to proceed. Unlike past giants of the genre, being unable to work out a brain teaser doesn't mean the rest of the game is off limits. You may not solve that Pump Room conundrum in good time, but you might find a way to open up the Garage and get into the west side garden, or figure out what the Breaker Box is really for, or how to light up the photo lab in the Dark Room, or any number of other secrets crammed into the mansion.
A puzzle adventure of extraordinary depth, Blue Prince can be infuriating, but the further you venture into this darkly compelling mystery, the more you'll want to return to see what else it might be hiding. A masterpiece – if you have the patience for its more frustrating aspects.