5/5 ★ – DanteSnowcone's review of Blue Prince.

I don’t think I’ll ever have a puzzle experience like this again. The depth of the world, the intricacy and variety of the puzzles, and the complexity of the mansion all coalesce in this masterful expression of environmental storytelling and brain-bending mystery. A few months ago I wrote a review about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — another great puzzle game — saying that I have never taken so many notes for a video game. I had about 5 pages of notes for that game. I’m at 16 pages of notes for Blue Prince, and about 400 screenshots. There’s just … so much going on here. Blue Prince is really two games in one. The first game is the one with the mansion-building mechanic that they introduce at the very beginning, which culminates with the player eventually reaching room 46. This is effectively a deck-builder roguelite, where your deck is the available rooms of the mansion. Items and resources can help you move forward on a single day, but some important things carry over to future runs and make each day a little easier. The credits roll after you reach room 46, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The second game is a mystery that requires you to find secrets hidden all over the mansion in a search for answers. What happened when your mother disappeared? What is your family history? What’s going on with the quiet turmoil across the country, and how does your family fit into all this? To find out, you keep playing the same game you’ve been playing, drafting rooms and creating a new mansion every day, only this time your goals change depending on what leads you want to chase down. It is in this game that you encounter one of the greatest explorations through a world I’ve ever had the pleasure of enjoying. There are just so many god damn puzzles packed into this game. Word puzzles, number puzzles, logic puzzles, deduction puzzles, reading comprehension puzzles, and more. It’s been so interesting to see what puzzles resonate with which players. I’m a big word puzzle guy, but I couldn’t make any headway with a specific wordplay puzzle for days; I am not particularly a rebus enjoyer, but I cleared a certain notorious rebus-type puzzle pretty quickly where many seem to have banged their heads in frustration. You need to open your mind to all possibilities and follow any lead you come across to make headway in this game. I totally understand many people’s frustration with the RNG component of the game, but I think it encourages the player to take a different approach to the game. Instead of trying to solve one specific puzzle at a time, it is better to keep a list of goals and pursue whichever ones become possible through the mansion you create. The game basically tells you to do this from the beginning, and I know this is not how many people want to play the game, but I found that this strategy kept the game fresh and ensured I was never stuck on anything for too long. Also the game eventually gives you many ways to help you get the rooms or items you need; at a certain point I never went more than one day without being able to place the rooms I was looking for. I’ve reached what seems to be the end of the game, but there are still a few things left undone. This is probably not a good starting point for someone trying to get into puzzle games for the first time, but I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone looking for a puzzling journey that is unparalleled in its genre. I want to shout from the mountaintops about this game. Blue Prince was clearly designed with love and passion by a mad genius, and my wife and I will always remember this game fondly for the music, the scenery, the many aha moments, and everything that makes the game so special. This is, unsurprisingly, a game best played with as little prior knowledge as possible, so stop reading and start playing! Time played: 100+ hours Played on PS5