I just got over my Balatro addiction. Lord. I don’t have time for this!
Okay, maybe I have a little time.
Blue Prince from developer Dogubomb and publisher Raw Fury is a captivating adventure that is part of luck, strategy, and a lot of patience. Its simplistic gameplay is easy enough to drop into, while its strategic side will tickle your cognitive curiosity and keep you engaged from the moment you set foot in the old mansion that drives it all.
Let’s discuss this properly put-together puzzler that is as complicated as it is mysterious.
Kicking things off
The story behind Blue Prince is a mysterious one. You are the grand-nephew of a relative who has left you a mansion in Mt. Holly. You must create rooms within a certain number of physical steps that eventually lead to a supposedly non-existent room 46. That room will uncover other mystery pieces you pick up along the way.
As stories go, this fits right in with MYST and The 7th Guest. You pick up clues in rooms that piece together a bigger storyline. Nothing that hasn’t been done before in the industry, but a motivating factor with this type of game. The story is good enough for you to get hooked and keep uncovering clues, even amid constant failure.
It’s a solid jumping-off point to gameplay and one that probably isn’t going to pay off as big as when you finally succeed in your journey.
Building success
With such a simple story, how does the gameplay work within it? Good question. It works well, as the gameplay is mixed with a hefty dose of luck, balancing risk/reward, solving puzzles, and building the right structures to progress towards the end goal. This onion has a lot of layers and surprisingly they all work well together.
Basic gameplay concept: the first onion layer
When you start Blue Prince, you are thrown into a foyer with three doors. Once you choose a door, you’re given three options of how to design and build the next room you’re going into. These blueprint options are random, and you must choose the best room based on its items, puzzles, and/or progression. Imagine that you’re building rooms for a house as you go from door to door, and you get the concept.
What’s remarkable about this first layer of gameplay is that it seems simple. All you must do is concentrate on where doors are positioned and what movement options to the next room you have available. Your goal is to make it to the top of the map you carry, where a mysterious room awaits your connection to it. It’s not hard to pick up on this, but it is tough trying to anticipate the best route when you don’t know what rooms will be given to you for building and what doors, if any, will be available in those rooms. It’s an interesting and random concept for gameplay but it is easy to catch onto and eventually starts to make sense.
Beyond just building, the game also gives you a limited number of steps you can take during your day-to-day movements. Those steps are decreased with entry to rooms or with special rooms that have step entry fees. Should you run out of steps, then you will have to call it a day. This means you leave the mansion and come back the next day fresh/ready to roll. This also means that you lose any items (coming up in the next section) that you may have collected. You reset to zero, where you must build new rooms, and essentially start over again.
The good part about starting over is that you might learn things from your previous mistakes. That gameplay element alone will ensure that you will be ready to rock and roll again. And the face of failure is so unexpressive during this reset moment that you won’t walk away from the basic experience frustrated. It’s a kind of Stardew Valley positivity, where failure feels like just another chance to do better. That is a good place to be with a tough game.
The second layer of the onion
For every room you’re randomly given, you’re more than likely going to acquire some attribute with that room. You might have a room that gives you coins to collect, which you can spend later. You might have a room that offers you keys, or gems (or both), that you will need later to access other rooms/doors. You might also get a room that has a puzzle inside of it (indicated by a puzzle piece) that will require your brain to start working, possibly forcing you to solve a word puzzle or basic math. Regardless, the fact that you have attributes, though random, with each room build, they act as important strategic decisions when it comes to progressing in the game. For example, it might be worthwhile to build a room with no other visible exits if it means picking up keys, gems, or coins. This is especially true if you have a previous room that contains multiple exits. Or you may want to build a room that gives you more steps. Or even better, have a room that gives you a straight shot north to your ultimate destination.
How you navigate your choices and what direction you decide to go with builds or movements depends solely on what you’ve done so far. In a sense, this game is driven by your choices and will uniquely move its gameplay to said choices. I think that is what keeps the core gameplay interesting because it’s completely up to you how the game flows and what best strategies to make when trying to complete it. In addition, this type of gameplay flow makes each journey something new, which keeps the game fresh.
The third layer of the onion
The third layer to this onion comes in the form of items you can purchase and/or collect. Along the journey in this game, you’ll come across items, coins, and/or stores. The latter two work together, as the more coins you can collect means that you can purchase things, such as more steps. It’s a basic concept and the items you purchase aren’t necessarily huge game changers, but rather just items that make strategy and decision-making easier.
Now, as for the items that aren’t coins/keys/gems, you will come across specialty items that will help you upgrade capabilities during your room navigation. These could be something like a lockpick that mostly works when you don’t have a key. This could be a multiplier that ensures coins in nearly every room. It could also be a magnifying glass that helps you ‘read’ notes ‘carefully’. There is a large variety of items to run into or purchase, and each item brings another bit of help to the building portion of the game or the progression (or both).
To make this onion even tastier, there are specialty rooms that provide you with more access and items. These rooms could be something as complicated as key rooms where you can purchase special keys (some keys offer up more room attributes when used) or maybe a menu of edibles that give you more steps (or steps for next time around). There is even a specialty room that allows you to save an item, such as a lockpick, for the next go-around in the game.
These additional items and specialty rooms add yet another layer of strategy and complication to the progression process. They help and sometimes hurt decisions, but no matter which way they turn the gameplay, they’re good gameplay elements that make the simple game of building rooms much bigger. Combined with everything above, you get a very addictive and fun game that offers so much more intrigue than a MYST or The 7th Guest. It certainly makes it more than just a game of puzzles.
You will be back
If you’re wondering if the game is worth all the hype, then wonder no more – it is! The game never feels out of reach, repetitive, or boring. On paper, this game should be an absolute drag, as building rooms and solving mysteries just seems like it belongs to early 90s PC games.
In Blue Prince’s execution, it creates a wonderfully balanced bit of gameplay that never feels like success is out of reach, or easy. In addition, my repeated journey with it always felt like a fresh game thanks to the randomness of blueprints and what each blueprint brings to the table. It will certainly keep you locked in with every action you take and what strategy is born from those decisions.
In short, you will be happy to repeat this game multiple times and never feel like you’ve lost anything with your failure. Because of this, Blue Prince fits right in with games like Balatro. Failing just means you have a chance to do better the next go around. The only problem is when to cut yourself off from the addiction. That’s quite the problem, but a lovely one when it comes to finding good gameplay.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Blue Prince from developer Dogubomb and publisher Raw Fury is everything it is cracked up to be. It’s easy to pick up and play, thick with strategy and play-driven decisions, and simple to come back to repeatedly in the face of failure thanks to some amazing gameplay elements that were methodically built for its design.
