A Mansion Mystery, Room Drafting dilemma, and Plenty of Puzzles… This is Blue Prince.
As always this review is spoiler-free as best it can be. All of the footage has been taken from
the first few days and is mostly used to showcase mechanics.
Sat on my desk are a stack of notes and scribbled drawings that show the slow decent in to
madness of someone who tried to find the 46th room in a Manor filled with only 45 rooms.
Single words written all in capitals, circled and underlined occupy pages holding doodles and
sketches of entire layouts of days I spent searching Mt. Holly trying to unravel the secrets
that lie within.
I know I’m not alone in this outcome. The game advises you to take notes and if you’ve seen
any of the praise that other reviewers are lavishing this game with you’ve seen tales like this
one already. If you pick up Blue Prince you’ll end up joining this alum as well. You too will
end up with a red string corkboard filled with room names, letters, pictures, sketches,
doodles, and crazed screaming.
Blue Prince sets you up with a simple premise. You are the heir to Mt. Holly, and you’ve been
tasked with finding the mysterious 46th room. Only hurdle is you’re not allowed to spend the
night in the manor, and every morning when you go back to exploring, the layout has
changed. A dead-end that used to be a hallway. A drawing room where before there was an
observatory. Every door you open in Blue Prince holds new potentials and new pitfalls, and
this right here is the system that I adore the most in Blue Prince. Some of my favourite board
games utilize a tile drafting mechanic. Carcassonne, Betrayal at House on the Hill and
Suburbia all occupy top spots for me, and so Blue Prince taking this idea and running with it
just reached out and smacks me in the face to get my attention.
You start each day standing in the Entrance Hall to Mt. Holly, 3 doors before you. Every door
you interact with within the Manor will draw 3 room tiles from your pool, you’ll then pick one
to play down. Over the course of the day you’ll build out your own version of Mt. Holly hoping
to get closer to the answers held within. They say there’s a fine line between madness and
genius and you’ll be flipping sides so frequently they’ll start blurring together. You’ll discover
a new room, holding clues to a puzzle you’d been tracking down, followed by a room that
you find nothing in at first, until an hour later when you realise it held the answers to
something, if only you could find it again. Each dead-end you place down early removes it
from your pool for later, but will you have enough keys to get to your destination.
Your notes are going to be your life line to keeping track of everything going on in Blue
Prince including your pool of rooms. You might have a few notes regarding which side of the
house certain rooms are drafted. Or you could take meticulous notes. Every room in the
pool, how many doors it holds, the shape and colour. That’s the freedom on show here, there
isn’t a wrong answer, it just depends what your current goal is. You could strategically play
down dead-ends and right angles at key locations to optimise your hallways and ability to
head north, further in to the mansion. You could build the manor up on one side of the house
looking for specific rooms to give you the answers for the next puzzle you’re working on.
Blue Prince isn’t just a game about getting to that magical 46th room. There’s backstory and
side puzzles going on here, if you want it. You could hit that 46th room, roll credits and stop
and have an enjoyable time breaking that mystery. If you want to though, you could break
those other puzzles down and figure out more of the story. The expression when one door
closes, another opens is a mantra you should hold on to if you want to prevent frustration at
hitting a dead end when you needed just one more door. Because there’s always something
you can be working on.
Which works to Blue Prince’s benefit but also showcases the frustration you can end up
hitting. The randomness you can encounter, can be mitigated somewhat by understanding
the drafting mechanics at play, and knowing what rooms you’re looking for. This knowledge
doesn’t help with the exasperation you can have on your third day of hitting a dead end or
not getting the setup you need. It’s like, knowing everyone is driving home from work at the
same time, doesn’t prevent you getting annoyed from being stuck in traffic. Knowledge is
great, but you’re human, and sometimes things suck.
There was a point around day 20, where I had a few side projects and getting to the
Antechamber at the top of the Manor. I’d knocked off a good number of puzzles, modified my
drafting pool somewhat by this point, there were smaller goals I could work towards, and
some I’m sure I still haven’t even discovered at this point, but the core ones I had on my list
broke down as follows. I needed 3 items and a specific room. For the other one, I needed 2
specific rooms and a certain pattern to my Manor. For days in a row, I ended up seeing
fragments of each, and making no progress on any, and there was nothing I could do except
rack them up and go again.
I’m sure there might have been other aspects to work on at that point, but I either wasn’t
smart enough to see them, or I’d already wrapped some of them up. When you get that far in
the game as well, you are juggling these ideas and half finished puzzles, and you’re trying to
focus on what you can see. It’s valid to work on the puzzles you have going, but don’t
neglect new rooms and adding more ideas to your lists and scribbles of pieces that might
slot together, rather than focusing on just one thread because when you miss that piece you
need, frustration will set in, and if you have it happen several days in a row, it can wear you
down.
The rest of the game is strong enough to keep it enjoyable , the core goal of getting to 46
while working on other mysteries is stellar. It however can flare that frustration though when
you’re trying to progress the few remaining puzzles you have, and you feel like you can only
influence the odds so much. If you’re unlucky, you’re still unlucky regardless of how many
people online are telling you that it’s your fault not the games.
Blue Prince will set you back £22, 26 Euros or, an amount of dollars. During our 25 hours of
playtime we unlocked just a single achievement out of 16 available. Some of these are going
to require time investment from you. If you bounce off of Blue Prince, it’s most likely going to
be due to the frustration that randomness can end up causing. If you’re able to tolerate that
or take it in stride, then you’ll find an exceptional puzzle game opening its doors and
welcoming you inside.
