Reviews

Spend the Night: Blue Prince

Jason Dean

08 May 2025 — 6 min read

Within the depths of your great-uncle’s home lies mystery and a secret room that few have visited. Can you find it in an ever-changing labyrinth and claim your prize?

In Blue Prince, you play as a young man whose great-uncle recently passed away and willed you his estate. To claim your inheritance, you need to find the mansion’s hidden room 46. The house is unique, as each day rooms will reset, and it is up to you to build new ones. When you open a door, you choose one of three floor plans to craft beyond your current room.

Each day, you begin in the entry to the home. From this main hall you have three doors to build from: left, straight and right. The game provides sparse details on how to find room 46, but the map shows an “antechamber” straight ahead of where you enter the mansion.

The estate is big, and you have a limited number of steps each day to progress through your exploration of the mansion. Food will provide you with additional steps, but if you come to a dead end, you will need to backtrack, using up more of this precious commodity. Once you have used all your steps, you call it a day, and return to your tent outside the home to try again the next morning. Any items you have picked up during your day are lost, and you start fresh in the entry of the mansion.

Blue Prince uses various forms of “currency” to progress through the story. Keys allow players to unlock doors and chests, while gems are required to build certain rooms. Money can also be found and used to purchase food and goods to help you on your journey, if you craft the right rooms.

My first “day” in the game, I did not pay much attention to the rooms I was crafting. They were all new and I was excited to see what each one held. It did not take long before I noticed I needed to have doors line up to make any progression. The doors remind me of the tile-laying board game Tsuro, where players need to place tiles and move their piece along a path without going off the board. Building rooms provides that same feeling. Some rooms have no outlets. Some have locked doors that require a key. If you find yourself without one, it is time to try another path.

While the puzzle of laying room pieces to reach your destination comprises the actual gameplay, at its heart, Blue Prince is a detective game. Many of the rooms contain mysteries that help tell a story. Some of the puzzles help in finding your way to Room 46, while others tell the tale of your great-uncle and others who spent time at the estate. It is worth investigating every corner of a room and clicking on anything you can.

Blue Prince has a very unique style for a puzzle game, unlike anything I have ever played before. The tile-laying aspect of the rooms is fun, especially when you get a new one you have never seen before. The art style is amazing, and it is fun to enjoy the weird art within the game. Puzzles are well conceived, and are not always as easy as a player thinks. The game recommends early on that you keep a journal to aid in remembering important details, and I used mine often.

However, Blue Prince is not without flaws, including some that turned me off. One of the biggest is the game has no regard for a player’s time. Start a run and get interrupted by real life? There is no way to save your progress on a run without “calling it a day” and starting fresh when you return. There are various elements within the game that make you wait for items to happen. I would guess at least one of my 10 hours of playtime in Blue Prince were either me pausing the game to deal with something in the real world, or waiting for something to happen in-game.

My other big flaw with this game is it relies on luck more than skill. A player has no control over what three tiles will show up for them when they move to the next room. There are ways to make some types of rooms appear more or to re-roll the choices you have, but players are always at the mercy of the random number generator in the background that chooses what floor plans you receive.

One minor issue with the game is period confusion. When you start the game, the year is 1993. The estate and most of the rooms feel like they belong in the early 1900s. Maybe this is explained at a later time in the game, but it feels almost jarring to walk into some of the rooms in this game.

As mentioned, I played about 10 hours of Blue Prince, and made it through day 12 in the game. I am honestly not sure if I will play more. It can be fun but the issues mentioned above often rear their ugly head and I end up annoyed. As someone with limited time to play games, I want that time to be enjoyable. With Blue Prince, it fluctuates. As of the time of this writing I have no desire to pop back into it, but I could see that change. For me, Blue Prince is as much of an enigma as the puzzles. I plan to keep my notebook handy just in case, but now it is time to play something more fun.