Blue Prince Review - I Finished The Game 50 Hours Ago And There's Still Puzzles To Solve

Blue Prince is a roguelite puzzle game where you draft room tiles to try to build out from the Entrance Hall in search of the mysterious Room 46. I'm an avid fan of puzzle games that require you to break out the pad and paper, so when I tell you that I reached Room 46 at about 18 hours of gameplay, but I've currently got 68 hours played there's a lot more to Blue Prince than meets the eye.

The game begins with a simple story: your uncle Herbert Sinclair has named you, Simon Jones, the sole inheritor of his Mount Holly estate. This will include his home, land, employees, and fortune with the big asterisk that he must first find the fabled Room 46 in his mansion.

You're given no hints as to how to reach it, or about what a challenge searching the mansion will be as every day you begin with only the Entrance Hall in the southernmost row of the house and you need to approach doors and draw from a deck of potential rooms, fitting them together like jigsaw pieces.

As you build out the mansion, you'll get to explore the different rooms, interact with the strange mechanisms of the rooms, and slowly uncover all kinds of secrets. An early example of a room with a singular puzzle is the Observatory. After using two cranks correctly to position the telescope out the window, you can start to receive different prizes each time you draw this card into your mansion.

Beginning the story with a treasure hunt primes the player perfectly to go into each room scrutinizing every aspect, tracking down and making note of things that interest you, and testing out as many theories as you can. I had an incredible time noting down the leads that I was currently tailing, and even I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed when that list got into the double digits.

Blue Prince And Blueprints

You explore the house and its grounds in the first person, immersing you in the world and also making it easy to miss out on interesting clues here and there if you're not looking closely enough. There are also a variety of things you might not have known could be interacted with, or need certain criteria met to be useful.

There are ways that you'll get stopped from exploring, unlike a standard roguelike, where it might be more difficult enemies Blue Prince will control your exploration through luck of the draw and the different kinds of items you'll find around the mansion.

Each day isn't just a matter of filling up the 5x9 grid, as rooms might only turn left or right, or have no exits at all. You also have a step counter that is constantly lowering by one for every room you enter. Add to this locked doors that require you to collect keys on your journey, gems required to pay for creating rarer rooms, and rooms that work against you.

Red Rooms are dangerous rooms that will begin to impart negative effects on you. The Archive will mean you'll only be able to see two of the three drawn floor plans, the Chapel will steal a coin from you every time you step foot into it, and the Weight Room will drop your remaining step counter in half.

Some runs you'll make it all the way through the mansion, even filling up every tile in the house, and other runs will get cut short as you only draw left-facing tiles and get stuck in a tiny loop.

Layered Puzzle Solving

Blue Prince is a game of many puzzles, some are simple single-room contraptions, while others will require knowledge you've acquired across multiple runs, a collection of carefully collected items, and a combination of specific rooms to be drawn from the deck.

Something that the Blue Prince does so well with its puzzles is how disconnected they all are from one another. While playing the game, I knew that there were certain puzzles that I should be looking out for to complete next, but just by happenstance, I'd stumble into the solution of a completely different puzzle, revealing some whole new aspect to the game that I had never even considered would be present.

By having these puzzles and clues so spread out across so many of the rooms and having basic requirements to incredibly complex ones it means that even if there was a single goal I had in mind if I didn't happen to draw that specific room on any given day there was pretty much always something for me to do.

At least most of the time…

RNG Can Break This Experience

As Blue Prince is a game with finite content, there were definitely a few times after I had reached Room 46, and solved another wave or two of interconnected puzzles, that there were specific goals in mind that might have required a specific room be drawn or a certain combination of items appear.

If you're in it for the long haul you'll find that there will be a few times that your options get bottlenecked. When each run can be anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour, if you don't happen to have the stars align for what you're after, it can start to feel like you've wasted that time.

There are some ways you can do some level of manipulation of rooms or likelihood to generate certain items, but normally, the scenario to set that up is also by chance.

An easy example of this might be if you're looking to light a candle, to do so you'd need to combine the Metal Detector and a Magnifying Glass. For something as simple as lighting a candle, you're now looking at the need to draft the room a candle would be in, drafting the Workshop, and hoping that the Metal Detector and Magnifying Glass appear somewhere in your mansion.

You might draw a room that could have a chance to make the Workshop a more common card, likewise, accessing a certain computer could allow you to request a Magnifying Glass to be purchasable at the Commissary (but then you'd also need to make sure you draw that room).

You definitely never feel like the requirements are helpless, but it can be frustrating to put a few hours into the late game and not feel like you've made meaningful progression.

Progression And Momentum

While the core structure of the game repeats as a roguelite there are a variety of opportunities to make the experience easier from run to run, some temporary, while others are permanent. For those times where you have a special item but the room where you want to use it isn't drafted, there's a chance you might also draft the Coat Check Room. Checking an item here pulls it out of the normal rotation and instead guarantees it the next time you obtain the Coat Check. It's a great way to make an otherwise rare item just a little bit less rare.

There are also permanent upgrades that will allow you chances to do more each run and make meeting certain criteria that much easier, but I don't want to go too far into spoiling those. Some of these permanent upgrades also include making improvements to the rooms you already have, or even adding new rooms to the room pool.

Looking back, it's quite astounding to me how the core of the gameplay has been so consistent, yet the upgrades make exploration more and more consistent.

Post Room 46

As I alluded to in the introduction, I reached Room 46 in less than a third of what my current playtime is, and I assure you, between writing this review and when it will be published, I'll have likely put in another 5-10 hours. Reaching Room 46 is only just scratching the surface of this incredible puzzle game.

Rooms that you'll have passed through literally 100 times will be revealed to hold incredible secrets once a certain clue has been deciphered.

Every new layer of the puzzle you solve and open the way for an additional layer will be an incredibly rewarding experience while fueling a puzzle lover's desire to continue deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.

Not just the puzzles will continue after finding Room 46, as the story of Simon, his eccentric Uncle, and his entire family tree will continue to expand… but if you want to learn more about that, I'd highly recommend you just get lost in the game.

Blue Prince Review | Final Thoughts

Blue Prince takes a concept that is not wholly unfamiliar in a game, using deckbuilding and roguelike mechanics, to explore a 'dungeon' of sorts, but dials it up to 11 for a puzzle lover's brain. Exploring the mansion and interacting with its different mechanisms is easy to do, but so satisfying when completed.

If you were to complete the base experience you'd still get a complete experience filled with exploration, puzzles, and satisfying feelings that you've overcome the obstacles that the game has had to offer you. If you're a player who is looking to complete the deeper experience you'll be returning for hours on end.

If you're a fan of puzzling games with intriguing stories you'll likely not only enjoy this game but devour it. If you aren't too sure about more complicated puzzles you can still enjoy the game and reach Room 46 and put it down when the puzzles stop being interesting, if you can.

Blue Prince was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher. All screenshots were taken during the course of review over 72 hours of gameplay.