If you are wondering if Blue Prince is the right kind of game for you, well, you're asking the right question. Blue Prince is, unquestionably, an astounding game and a creative achievement. But it only accomplishes this by crafting an experience made for a very specific type of puzzle game freak, and not everyone is ready to give Blue Prince what it asks for.

Blue Prince is, very intentionally, made for the curious minds who find obsession in the deep but fleeting satisfaction that comes from finding that which for countless days feel like would forever elude them. It's for the people who get up at night after dreaming of a new theory and decide they need answers more than they need sleep. For people who stand in front of a locked door for hours, scouring their bible of handwritten notes for the 20th time, hoping to see something new like opening a refrigerator at 3AM. For the people who want to have their mind blown and perspective of the world around them shattered from reading half of a handwritten sentence on a torn sheet of paper.

Blue Prince is, genuinely, for the puzzle gamer who wants to suffer.

That being said, I can genuinely say that most people who enjoy puzzle games will enjoy Blue Prince, at least up to a certain turning point, and that point arrives a double-digit amount of hours into the game. If you are happy with enjoying a mystery up until where you find a good rewarding stopping point in the story and let the rest stay unsolved, ready to listen to all the deep dive video essays on youtube to consume the rest, you will likely be happy with what you experienced after completing the first main objective of the game.

If you want to continue past that point, the game will progressively begin asking for more and more of your time to commit to its puzzles and to test your theories. It will leave you with gaps where the only thing you can do for days is to wonder about without an objective until you notice the right detail after walking past it a dozen times. You will feel your time is being disrespected. You will have pages of notes, no idea what to do after your last wild theory came up with nothing, just waiting for a new clue so you can know what to do. Until eventually you find it, and you realize you will need to roguelike-gameplay your way into a specific game state that takes several hours and a ton of gated knowledge to set up, some of which you might not have, just for a chance to see if your theory was right.

If this sounds unattractive to you, I do not recommend you put yourself up to that task. It really is not worth it if the process itself is not enjoyable.

If you're the kind of sicko that read the foregoing paragraphs of this review and thought to yourself "this is literally what I live for" then congratulations, you've found another game to briefly satiate your need for that unique flavor of gratification that can only come from spending days wondering what's behind a door, working tirelessly on dozens of riddles and objectives to open it, and immediately be rewarded with nothing other than one more line of text's worth of knowledge than you had before you even saw the door in the first place. Get excited.

So what is it?

The core gameplay loop of Blue Prince begins with entering the entrance hall of a very large manor, opening a door, and drawing "cards" to choose which room will be behind that door. The rooms you draft will have more doors to draft the next rooms from, and the cycle continues until you run out of doors to draft from.

The objective is simple: reach the other side of the estate by making clever choices in your floor plans, strategically placing hallways, bedrooms, and utilities to help you along your way across the house. Some rooms are dead ends with useful benefits, and some rooms have several branching paths but come at a cost.

In a vacuum, this gameplay system is simple. But it doesn't take long for the game to start drip feeding a large tank of new rooms, mechanics, resources, and entire additional systems outside the house to add depth to the strategy of drafting rooms. Most of these additions are gained through research, such as solving riddles that turn on new features, reading the in-game strategy guides you can find in the house, or playing enough to notice patterns in when you can draft what rooms.

The other half of Blue Prince is the mystery, and how you go about solving it. This is where I feel Blue Prince is absolutely stellar. Blue Prince is a game I sometimes couldn't believe was real. Several times throughout my journey, Blue Prince would have me thoroughly convinced I understood the scope of its tests of knowledge, and it would then promptly shatter the walls to say "Nope, there's more, actually. Much more. Get back to searching for clues, loser."

The game will, very early on, encourage you to begin writing notes in a journal. Like, a real journal. And you might not realize at first just what around you may be worth writing down, but it is definitely a big part of the experience to have your own writing to look back on. If you want to give this game the fairest shot, do not ignore this advice. (Digital notes are fine too, but having a physical journal full of drawings and musings will be fun to look back upon when you're finished with the game, especially if you like to draw.)

I've criticized other puzzle games in the past for their trail of riddles being not much more than "number unlocks door, door reveals number, number unlocks another door, etc. etc." Blue Prince avoids this by having a considerable portion of key information given as reward for solving riddles be information about the world and its history. The game will always try to nudge you to read into words with different perspectives and double meanings. The knowledge you're given for solving one puzzle becomes a piece of several different trails of clues, instead of being a metaphorical key to one lock. Even when the answer is a key code to a lock, it is often is part of a series of connections worth taking note of.

What keeps this part of the gameplay feeling fun is that, for most of the early game, you are never forced to engage with the grand riddles of the world to progress, even while you passively make progress on it. You'll end up with a list of questions and theories to try, but you'll have so many leads that you can never cover them all in one day. Instead, you can just engage with the core gameplay loop, make progress, and you will find opportunities to advance your theories on different riddles as they come up, instead of forcing one.

Eventually however, you will reach the mid-late game where you have a lot wrapped up, and are trying to force one specific theory. This will often require you to repetitively roll for rare floor plan combinations, sometimes over the course of hours. It is easy to feel the game is disrespectful of your time for this, and it kinda is, but in hindsight it is clear the game is very intentional about these mechanics and is built in a way where it "doesn't want" you to solve it, to create a greater sense of mastery over the game's systems when you learn how to manipulate the rules in your favor.

Like most roguelikes, Blue Prince rewards you for learning the tricks of maximizing your chances of success, and takes it a step further by downright requiring you learn these tricks to solve some puzzles. The notorious "trying to power the pump room" phase most players go through goes from being incredibly unlikely to happen, into a very common game state after discovering several other tools and mechanics and gaining the knowledge of how the drafting system works. Manipulating the game's RNG, and discovering how, is just part of the puzzle as far as the game is concerned. Whether or not you find that engaging, is entirely up to your taste.

I just hit the character limit but I think I said enough to explain why it's good and bad so yea