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dkirschner's Blue Prince (PC)

[December 31, 2025 09:41:06 AM]

I LOVED Blue Prince...until I didn't. Fasten your seatbelt because you're on the complain train. Wait, trains don't have seatbelts...do they?

Blue Prince has a great concept. I went in blind and quickly realized that I was not playing a regular puzzle game. I was playing a roguelite puzzle game with (mostly hidden) deckbuilding elements. Cool.

So let that be a spoiler warning of sorts. If you want to be completely surprised by how it works, then don't read this.

In Blue Prince, the first goal that you have is to reach "room 46" in a mansion. The mansion is laid out in a 9x5 grid of rooms (that's 45 rooms; the 46th is a mystery!). The gimmick is that the rooms reset every day. You have x number of steps you can take in a day before you have to "call it a day," resetting the mansion and starting from the beginning.

Imagine you are an architect. You begin your day in the entryway, which has doors facing west, north, and east (and south to outside). You choose a door and "draft" a room. What that means is that you are presented with three rooms from your deck (you can never see your deck, so you don't know exactly what's in there; I assume one copy of most rooms to start, though later on you get slightly more info about what is in your deck and are able to manipulate it a little bit). You can choose one of those three rooms to build. Rooms:

- have different configurations. Some are dead ends, some have 2 doors, or even 4.

- cost different resources. Some rooms cost gems, some require keys to open, some are electronically locked, etc.

- are of different types. Some are bedrooms, hallways, green rooms, red rooms, shops, etc.

- have different effects. For example, bedrooms tend to give you steps (e.g., +10 steps for drafting this room; +2 steps every time you enter; +5 steps every time you draft a bedroom), hallways tend to have lots of doors, red rooms tend to have even more doors but often come with negative effects (e.g., for the rest of the day one of your draft choices will be hidden [dangerous!]; lose 1 gold every time you enter; lose 1/2 of your steps).

- may have items (e.g., gold, gems, keys, or utility items like shovels [dig up dirt], a magnifying glass [scrutinize papers and pictures], or a metal detector [makes noise near metal and makes finding coins and keys more likely).

Those are the basics, then. You build the mansion each day as you walk through it, attempting to strategically map your way to the antechamber, a room opposite the entryway on the far side of the mansion, through whose locked doors room 46 may sit. I say "may" because I never actually got through the antechamber. I got inside it once, but there is another locked door to get out of it that I never figured out how to open. Your main hazards are running out of keys, gems, and steps, such that you will be confounded by a locked door (no key, womp womp), unable to draft what you need (some rooms cost gems and you might be forced to draft a dead end, for example, womp womp), or you tire out and have to call it a day. These were problems for me early on, but I ended up rarely running out of these resources. More often, later on, I would paint myself into a corner, come up against electronically locked doors when I didn't have a keycard or hadn't shut off the power, or, most commonly, I would just not get any useful combination of rooms/items and couldn't solve whatever puzzles I needed to solve, or just couldn't make it into the antechamber.

Those latter problems are what kill this game for me. I really, really, really want to keep loving it, but unfortunately it gets really tedious because, however much strategy you employ, you need a lot of luck on your side. I stopped on day 21 and had played about 16 hours. It was day 14ish, and around 11-12 hours, that I started to get the "uh oh" feeling that I wasn't going to finish, chin resting in my hand as yet another day was ended through no fault of my own. I stopped seeing much new (though ironically on my last "just one more day" run, I saw a bunch of new rooms, solved two new puzzles, discovered a big new puzzle, and felt slightly compelled to continue). Here's the thing. You will figure out what you need to do, but you will be unable to do it unless you are able to find the correct items and draft the correct rooms, often in a correct order (and avoid all the pitfalls I mentioned above, like running out of keys). For example, I know that to get into the antechamber, I need to find one of several rooms with levers that open doors to the antechamber. One lever is found after solving a puzzle in the secret garden, a room that I drafted one time by dumb luck. It requires that you use the secret garden key, which I have also seen exactly one time in 21 days, in a specific area of the mansion to draft the room. This means, by the way, not only that you have to find the secret garden key (again, I am 1 for 21 with that), but that you have to find it before drafting rooms in the specific spots in which you CAN draft the secret garden and/or that you haven’t already blocked off those spaces. Another lever is behind a locked door in the great hall (a room with 7 locked doors). I have double the success rate of this, having found that lever 2 times in 21 days. Again, you first need to get lucky and draft the great hall (I saw it maybe 4 or 5 times), but then, because the great hall has 7 locked doors, you then also need to have tons of keys or the lockpick kit (which lets you sometimes pick locks in normal doors). So, there are three times that I found levers to open a way into the antechamber. The very first time I opened an antechamber door, I made it in, but not the other two, because even if you do open the antechamber door, you need to draft rooms leading to that side of the antechamber in such a way that you can actually get inside. It very well may be that you get to the space next to the antechamber door that you have opened, and then your three options to draft don’t include a room with a door on the correct side. Day over and an hour of your life gone.

Here are some other examples of not getting what you need or things taking a long time:

- I found the chess puzzle after 20 days. I assume that solving this requires finding a bunch of chess pieces scattered throughout the mansion, which will take who knows how long. On my last two days, I found three unique chess pieces. I have no idea how long finding the rest will take. I will basically have to draft every single room until I find all the pieces, and they could be hidden in super rare rooms! I said I found like 4 new rooms in my last (21st) run. These are rooms I'd never seen before. If you need those rooms for something, good luck!

- Apparently there is an item, a wrench, that is super useful. Never seen it. Not in the toolshed, not in any item closets, not in a shop, not for trade, never. I am sure there are other items I also never saw.

- One very useful item is the shovel, which lets you dig up things when you see dirt mounds (common in green rooms and underground areas). If you draft a particular room outside in the west wing, it increases the number of dirt mounds found throughout the estate that day. I was never able to draft that room and get the shovel in the same run.

- Another shovel one…if you draft a laboratory, you can set up “experiments”, which are cause-and-effect actions like “every time you eat an apple, gain 5 additional steps” or whatever. You are given three causes and three effects to mix and match. One of the causes is “dig up junk” and one of the effects is “permanently increase your allowance (starting gold) by 1.” Permanently increasing your allowance is awesome. Anyway, I found “dig up junk” twice and of course never got a shovel. One of those times I had more dirt piles too! And I found “permanently increase your allowance” twice and was never able to do the cause that resulted in the benefit. You just have to get lucky.

- There is a room, the boiler room, from which you can send steam power to other rooms. Some rooms have piping for steam, but most don’t. There are like 5 rooms that are affected by the boiler room, that can be powered. The catch is, you have to actually draft them in such a way that you pipe the steam physically through them. I NEVER was able to pipe steam anywhere. I would route the steam, draft rooms from the boiler room, and get a bunch of bedrooms or something that don’t need power or don’t even have piping to chance drafting something useful after that. Solving the various boiler room power puzzles would require getting multiple specific drafts in a row. That is crazy.

- And so on and so forth x 100.

It’s not just the randomness that is bothering me, but the over-reliance on it. Yes, there is some strategizing. For example, you can boost your chances of getting a shovel by drafting a room that lets you request items that will appear the next day, gunning for rooms with items like closets, or building a commissary and hoping there is one for sale. And there are permanent upgrades for meta-progression that are helpful. For example, I was up to starting each day with 2 gems, 11 coins, and 20 extra steps. You can also permanently upgrade some rooms, manipulating water in the pump room persists, etc. But you just cannot get around drafting the “wrong” rooms, not getting items you need when you need them, etc. If you aren’t getting what you need, there isn’t really anything you can do. I mean, it’s not engaging. Like, you just draft rooms until you decide to call it a day. It’s slow, and it gets repetitive. The meta puzzles are cool as hell, but the per-day puzzles are a slog, figuring out the box riddles or (and this is actually a puzzle) solving increasingly complicated arithmetic problems on the dartboard. If I have demonstrated that I can solve arithmetic puzzles 10 times, can you please not make me do it anymore?!

In most roguelites, there is combat that keeps you engaged, even if you fail a run. I’m not faulting Blue Prince for no combat, but it is missing something to keep you engaged for run after run after run when you are not finding anything new or advancing any of the puzzles. Too slow, too repetitive, too reliant on luck. I still like it…it’s something different…but I’m not going to finish it. It could take me just a few more hours to get lucky and for things to click, or I could see this taking 40 hours, and I have no idea which it will be!