Adventure Corner ~ Blue Prince

Welcome to Adventure Corner, a column where members of the RPGamer staff can give their thoughts, impressions, and pseudo-reviews for various adventure titles that don’t come under our usual coverage. Adventure Corner is aimed at delivering opinions on a wide range of titles including visual novels, point-and-click adventures, investigative mysteries, and so forth.

In this edition of the column we take a look at Dogubomb’s enigmatic puzzle adventure Blue Prince.

Blue Prince

Tucked away behind a collection of mountains, the Mount Holly Estate sits empty, awaiting its new inheritor. That individual is Simon P. Jones, a young man armed with little more than his wits and a written will from his great uncle Herbert S. Sinclair stating that he will only inherit the estate if he reaches the 46th room of the 45-room mansion. What unfolds over the subsequent days and weeks is a puzzle game unlike anything else. Blue Prince is a mystery so dense and layered that many players will never truly reach the center of it.

The core of Blue Prince plays out over a series of runs, each representing a day. Each day, Mount Holly Estate resets its nine-by-five layout, meaning that the house must be rediscovered room by room. These rooms are selected by picking one of three options drawn from a general pool, effectively randomizing the house. Attempting to traverse the massive manor is a tiring experience, so the player is limited in the number of steps — the number of times the player can enter a room — before they must rest and begin a new day. Therefore consideration must be made in the layout of the house and how easily it can be traversed without spending too many steps merely walking through it. Exhaustion isn’t the only obstacle either. Too many dead ends is the most common way for a run to end and locked doors, which require keys or other items to circumvent, increase in frequency deeper into the house. Many runs will simply end by running out of doors to open, preventing the player from reaching Room 46 for the day.

Reaching Room 46 first requires a general knowledge of the available rooms. Rooms have a static shape and feature that can be relied upon, such as giving the player a key to unlock a door or a gem that pays for accessing rarer rooms with an additional cost. But that static shape can also hurt the player, as any doors the room contains that lead to a wall terminate and cut off a potential point of expansion. Some rooms will have explicitly negative effects that must be played around, such as obscuring one of the options when drafting. Players must balance their resources and adopt certain drafting strategies in order to progress through the house and make it to Room 46. Even then, getting inside the room requires more than merely reaching it.

Players are presented with three room options at each door.

This is only a surface level read of the game. While the core gameplay loop remains unchanged, the context and scale for what it is trying to achieve changes drastically, albeit slowly. Most, if not all, rooms contain small details that initially seem innocuous. Paintings in the room seem to change with every run. Handwritten notes pop up with information pertaining to the erratic nature of the house. Certain rooms begin to appear that hint at a more sinister home. Massive surveillance, heavy religious iconography, and mysterious prophesying mechanical genies build a collage of a man with strange obsessions and a unique world in which he is a major point of interest.

The game keeps peeling back more layers. Minor notes contain details to puzzles yet undiscovered, room placements become more meaningful than a simple pathway to Room 46, and what starts as some light flavor to add character to the estate ultimately reveals a grand cast of characters caught up in a historical conflict potentially dating back centuries. It’s nearly impossible to talk about the sheer grandiosity of the ideas at play without spoiling some of the surprise, but at the same time the text of the game is filled with so much that any details are easily lost without context. Reaching Room 46 without a notebook in hand is doable, but trying to parse any of Blue Prince‘s more enigmatic elements will likely overwhelm without one.

The only downside to the whole experience comes from a split between what the game allows players to accomplish and what the player may want to do. Beyond just knowledge gained, Blue Prince has several forms of permanent upgrades that obviate some of the more basic elements of the game and start players in a more advantageous position. Even accounting for this, players need a certain willingness to play along with the hands they’re dealt. There are more than enough threads to pull at in any given run, but many times which threads are available is out of the player’s control. There isn’t really any way around this — the core of the game’s systems is built around it — but it does mean that there is less player-driven direction than other kinds of deduction-based adventure games. Sometimes all the preparation can’t save you from a few bad drafts, especially closer to the finish line. This is meant to be offset by learning new things even on failed runs, but as the complexity increases the tradeoff of knowledge gained versus the frustration of a literal dead end becomes a shakier proposition. For the people who truly click with the game, reaching Room 46 is only the beginning. For others, Room 46 is the last natural off-ramp that satisfies. The problem lies in the murky areas in between, where fatigue and resentment slot right into the game’s massive play time.

Welcome to the moody, overcast world of the Mount Holly Estate.

In spite of that, there is something truly special about Blue Prince. Beyond its unique blend of board game, puzzle book, and classic point-and-click adventure game, a sense of mystery permeates the very game itself. A beautiful, bold art direction gives the game an easily understood visual language, a necessity given the complexity of many of the puzzles. Mount Holly Estate itself is dwarfed by mountains on all sides, isolated from the rest of the world. The simple act of walking through the halls gives off an eerie majesty, something astounding in its design but utterly unnatural in its very existence. The excellent score, moody and understated, is the only real accompaniment the player has and helps to underscore that very atmosphere. This isn’t a horror game, at least not in the way we properly think about them, but it captures an uncanny vibe in the same way the best horror often does. Even when repetition sets in, there’s something about looking back through a series of doors that have been opened in a straight line, each room featuring a wildly different style, seemingly stretching to infinity, that is so unlike anything else it just sticks in the mind.

On merit of novelty alone, Blue Prince is worth a shot. It won’t be for everyone, and even puzzle and adventure game devotees may grate against its random core. There is no one correct answer that must be figured out; it’s all about the winding path one takes to get there. The usual structure of a roguelike asks players to master its systems, gain intimate knowledge of how they work through repeated experimentation and seemingly endless possibility space. To be fair, Blue Prince asks this of its players, too; but where so much of the modern roguelike space is taken up by combat rooms and managing meters, Blue Prince asks players to look past the wire frame and into something more cohesive. Regardless of how many “Best Games of the Year” lists it makes it onto, it’s unlikely that anything else this confident and original will even be part of the conversation.

Disclosure: This article is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.