It’s been a long time since a game has left me this conflicted. Developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, Blue Prince has you playing as the heir to a peculiar rich man’s equally curious mansion, but one thing stands in your way before you can claim the goods: you have to find a room in it that shouldn’t locally exist. That’s because the place is supposed to have 45 of those and the one you are aiming for is the 46th. If you think that’s the weirdest part of the game, well, you’re wrong.
Blue Prince’s main environment, the aforementioned manor, has a quirk: it shifts everyday, shuffling its interior and becoming something entirely new on a day to day basis, and as you explore and put it together, there’s very rarely a run exactly like the other. It’s randomness stacked upon randomness as you step through each door frame and have to pick from a hand of cards, representing a different room. And for each of those, you might need a key and any number of gems, which you can either find while exploring or buy using gold coins that are also picked up all around.
But it’s not all just a matter of putting together the perfect layout with the scraps that the game gives you. There are also a pretty big array of puzzles to figure out, and without running the risk of spoiling what Blue Prince is about any more than I already have, I can say that you’ve got your job cut out for you if seeing this through its conclusion is the plan. It’s a very busy game for as breezy go-to-go might feel, and as pretentious as it can sound for one to actually suggest you take notes, you should indeed do so.
The thing that has me most down on this one is how easy it is to just waste time playing it. Blue Prince is a slow burn. Emphasis on SLOW. If you are not in the right mindset when playing it, you can just burn away in-game days and real world hours just hitting your head against its pastel colored walls ad nauseam without a shred of what you could call progress.
Then again, it’s definitely a game with a touch of the Dark Souls’ notion of progress through experience, but even so, that only takes you so far in a roguelike-structured title like this one, where regardless of what you know, you might not be able to apply it if the darn thing refuses to cooperate with you.
On the other side of the gold coin, when it all sings, Blue Prince can make you feel like a million bucks. It’s very clever in the way it gives you just enough rope to hang yourself and kill runs, or make a neat little bow with it. It all depends on knowing the right thing to do at the right time, which is good, but you’re also required to have the necessary tools, most, outside of knowledge, are also randomly dolled out in the form of in-game items, wherein the note-taking comes in handy! When it all clicks, it’s like conquering a Professor Layton game: you’ve beaten the master and are now waving to the crowd.
Those moments are few and far between though, and if you’re the type of player that easily turns away from games that are as demanding as this, Blue Prince will most definitely frustrate you. I say that as a fact because I came close to deleting it and moving on to something else many times, and I tend to have a certain amount of patience with them. If, however, you manage to stick with it and come to appreciate the rhythm which it operates, there’s surely content there to please you.
The game’s played from a first-person perspective and it looks like an European animated feature thanks to its character designs and color palette, the latter, coupled with its simpler polygonal models, can make finding interactions around the manor a bit tricky. You have to be curious and dot around in order to find what you need – and might not need – much in the way that you do in a point ‘n click adventure game when you get stuck at times, which can get annoying and would’ve been made a non-issue by having some sort of highlight or slight visual/aural clue system. It doesn’t.
The game is akin to classic Myst and Riven, where exploration and mystery take the reign and everything else, the back seat. The aimlessness feels the same, but wherein the oldies had people going with their visual spectacle, Blue Prince falls short in that regard. It makes up for that by offering plenty of conundrums, both obvious and not so. Its world is not nearly as sparse, either, so it’s a big plus for what Tanda Ros has put together in solo mode over a number of years of work.
Blue Prince is as peculiar of a game as its protagonist’s deceased relative. An odd puzzle/adventure game with progression and pacing that often get in the way of your success for the sole benefit of artificially keeping the journey going. If you do happen to resonate with it, you’ll find a good distraction to poke at for hours, one that’s best suited for multiple sittings and plenty of sleuthing both in and outside of it. It’s the type of thing you’ll have to sleep on and maybe might find the next solution, or just want to chuck your chosen gaming system out the closest window.
