Blue Prince came seemingly out of nowhere. The game with a hell of a pun for a name is the debut game by Dogubomb published by indie label Raw Fury. And if you haven’t tried it out (it’s on Game Pass and PS Plus Game Catalog), you should.
There’s so many ways I’ve heard in passing how Blue Prince is described. The official description says it’s a “genre-defining” game but what the heck is said genre?
Now that I’ve played a bit of this game, I’m still not sure what the genre of this game is, but I do know that it’s actually more in common with typical roguelikes with the light smattering of puzzles, which doesn’t match the vision I had when I heard this game described as a “roguelike puzzler”.
Here’s the gist for the uninitiated. As a will from your late uncle, you inherit his manor on top of Mt. Holly, but with a catch, you must navigate and reach the 46th room in a 45-room building.
Intriguing? And there’s also a few other rules: You can’t stay in the manor overnight, and you can’t carry over your inventory of items out of the manor to bring them back in tomorrow. Also, the layout of the rooms reset every day. Also also, you have the power of generating what rooms that lies ahead of an unlocked door by picking one of three from a drafting pool. Yeah, it’s called Blue Prince for a reason, you’ll be looking at blueprints all day.
And all this rules should make it click immediately: it’s a roguelike. But it’s in-world explanation of why the level layouts change every run is because for some reason your wealthy (and now dead) uncle made a whole house that obeys to the rules of Rogue (1980).
Blue Prince has no combat. It’s pure exploration. Think of it like a 3D point-and-click adventure but with free movement (and roguelike mechanics). It has puzzles, but the puzzles themselves are not affected by its roguelike structure. These are all, for a very good reason, lovingly made handcrafted artisanal brain teasers.
You see, what I had thought that Blue Prince managed to make a game where the puzzles change every run, something like an advanced Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell. I was wrong. Blue Prince is a non-combative roguelike with an added layer of puzzle-adventure gameplay.
That doesn’t mean Blue Prince doesn’t have puzzle elements, there’s at least two rooms dedicated to arithmetic and logic puzzles that gets harder and harder as you continue to solve them every in-game day. But I thought there were more of those.
There are more bespoke, gameplay-progressing puzzles to solve. One includes pressing switches to change a colour that also affects the colour of other switches (something that theoretically can be brute forced but just tedious if you don’t get how to solve them ala Resident Evil puzzles). Some require having the right combination of items and bring them to the right room, which can be tedious due to the roguelike nature of the game where you might not be guaranteed to have the item and the room (though you can slightly improve your chances here).
But no, don’t run into Blue Prince thinking it’s a puzzle game first. It’s the roguelike gameplay that really defines its experience. You can make an argument that piecing together the right combination of blueprints to make your way to the elusive Room 46 up north is a puzzle in itself, which in some ways it is. But it’s ingrained more into a roguelike
And in that regard, it’s a damn fine take on the roguelike genre. You still have dud runs which isn’t fun, but as the in-game days progresses you’ll slowly introduced to the many wacky rooms, at least 45 of them (and this doesn’t count bedrooms, so-called red rooms and green rooms, shops and hallways). And slowly but surely you’ll start creating room synergies. It’s a roguelike where picking the right paths is the game, rather than just a means to an end.
Don’t come into Blue Prince expecting elaborate puzzles that puzzle game fans would be amazed at. But if you love making and traversing through mazes of your own creation, and love the idea of how randomness can affect a run-based game (i.e. a rogueliker), you must not for any reason whatsoever skip over Blue Prince. This is a must-play for fans of roguelikes just to experience how much more the genre concept can still evolve. And for puzzle game fans, temper expectations and expect to engage with its roguelike system a lot.
Blue Prince is out now on PS5, PC (Steam, Microsoft Store) and Xbox Series X|S.