Blue Prince - ★★★★★
Blue Prince. Here’s the review: look at the rating, buy the game, grab a notebook – hell, buy a nice journal specifically for the game, so that you’ve got something better to remember it by than a few scrappy, crappy notes wedged between shopping lists and fantasy football line-ups – and spend your next month of evenings playing it. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you next week.
Image: Dogubomb / Raw Fury
-
Developer: Dogubomb
Publisher: Raw Fury
Release: 10 April 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 29,99€/$29.99/£24.99
…okay fine. I’ll give you a bit more.
Context. Egocentric context, though – If I spend time writing about myself there’ll be less room in this article to risk actually revealing anything about Blue Prince. While IndieLoupe as a project is in its infancy, there’s a dead-and-buried past out there with around hundred game ratings from the 2010s, only one of which achieved five stars. There’s an unplayed game or two from that mysterious hiatus between 2020 and 2024 which might have pushed the five star boundary – after all, I didn’t expect to give Blue Prince that rating until I started playing it – but I don’t really like giving games five stars. I’ll certainly look for any excuse not to. You could say “so what?”, and that’s probably fair – far be it for me to pretend my opinion is more valuable than anyone else's – but a game really needs to be something special for me to even consider giving it five stars. It goes beyond saying “no notes, this is perfect” and strays into the domain of “I’m going to be thinking about this game for the rest of my life, aren’t I?”
Image: Dogubomb / Raw Fury
I suppose you’ll still want to know something about the game. Plot? Gameplay? Fine. The premise is as follows: in Blue Prince you play as Simon P. Jones, a fourteen year-old who has found himself in one of those dodgy inheritance situations where a deceased relative (in this instance, his great-uncle) says he can have his sizable estate… once one condition is fulfilled. It’s not to stay the night – the mansion is only metaphorically haunted, after all – rather that Simon will need to discover the 46th room of Great-Uncle Herbert’s 45-room estate. A bit eccentric, but it should be easy enough, right? Just search each of those 45 rooms thoroughly, and it’ll probably be hidden behind some bookshelf somewhere.
Except, those rooms mightn’t be where you remembered seeing them, from day to day. If you know anything about the game this won’t come as a surprise to you, but the core mechanic involves approaching a door – any door in the house – and drafting the room behind it. You pick from one of three choices, and I don’t quite understand how, but the game will immediately open up into the selected room. It happens so ridiculously seamlessly that you never question it: it feels like the room must have been there before you chose it. You investigate those rooms, draft more rooms, and try and work your way towards that all-important discovery. Once you’ve explored enough, you can call it a day and start afresh the following morning.
There are a few things that will act against you. There’s some limitations each day: steps, resources, and space. You start each day with 50 (non-literal) steps: each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, you lose a step. Once you’re in a room, though, you can wander around and explore it to your heart’s content. Run out of steps and you run out of energy, and your day is done. In writing it sounds more stressful than it is: you’ll think about it, sure, and plan accordingly, but you’re provided with plenty to get a lot done each day, and winding down for the night and starting again is as good a way as any to find new things to explore.
There’s other resources hidden within the house: coins to buy useful items in select locations, gems which you’ll use to draft particular rooms, and keys that you might need to unlock some of the mansion’s more pesky doors. Too many locked doors and no keys might leave you unable to progress further for a day; so too might drafting too many dead-ends and finding yourself with no doors left to open. As with the steps, you might wish you’d managed a little more in a day, but new opportunities are just a sleep away. It sounds like it could get tedious, but with many hours sunk into the game, I can’t say I ever found my patience wearing thin. Think about all the permutations possible: it’s a big number. I can promise you that you’ll never see the same layout twice.
Image: Dogubomb / Raw Fury
The first is to stick with it. I don’t think you need to for too long – for me, it felt different, special, early into my playthrough, but lots of great games do. It wasn’t until I’d played it for a long while that it cemented itself as that elusive five-star game. I’m not even going to put a timeframe on either of those things, such is my adamancy that you should go into it knowing as little as possible: even that is too much of a spoiler.
Which leads me onto the second piece of advice. It’s not that I want to put any guide-writers out of a job, because good God, have they got a reservoir of mysteries to unlock when it comes to Blue Prince, but I really think the best way to enjoy the game is to know nothing about it, and to avoid ever looking anything up. I know that gets said about other games relatively often, but in Blue Prince you never need to know something to progress, and that’s where it differs. There’s no room that says “you’re stuck here until you solve this riddle,” if anything, there’s rooms that say “you’re not going to solve this riddle any time soon, and that’s fine.”
For a personal anecdote, there was one puzzle I had solved and was a little unsure whether I’d done it ‘the right way,’ or if I’d somehow lucked into the answer. I got my rewards, sure, but it was the first and only time I encountered a feeling that I might’ve inadvertently reached the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. In my curiosity, I had a quick check with some other journalists to see if my reasoning had been correct: if I’d actually ‘solved’ the problem. The answer to that doesn’t hugely matter, and I didn’t get any extra information that I could use elsewhere, but even that I somewhat regret doing. I know everyone is different, so perhaps I’m being too precious about wanting everything to have been ‘my own work’ but the joy I get from Blue Prince, what makes it the masterpiece of gaming which I’m claiming it to be, is from putting my own unique pieces of information together to answer the game’s questions. The non-linear nature of Blue Prince means that someone else might have just happened to encounter something long before you did, and asking them might well deprive you of the sense of wonder you’d get once you finally make that discovery.
Image: Dogubomb / Raw Fury
There has to be a word in German for wishing you could forget something, not because it was awful or traumatic, but so that you can experience it all over again as if it were the first time. In a way, I hope the video version of this review gets buried in other people’s playthroughs, because I’m fascinated to watch as many of them as possible. I’ve had my first experiences with Blue Prince, and I can never get those again, but perhaps playing vicariously through others will scratch that itch. Once I’m sure I’ve uncovered all the game has to offer, of course. More than that, though, I’m fascinated to see how things differ, how things work when people draft a room on their first day that I might not have seen until much deeper into my own playthrough.
Shortly before finishing this review, I watched an excellent interview of Blue Prince’s creator, Tonda Ros, from Jordan at the Myster Rogers YouTube channel. Towards the end of that, Ros said that as long as one person really loves Blue Prince, then that’s all he cares about in terms of the game's success. I n me, he’s already accomplished that, but I suspect there will be many, many, many, more. Blue Prince is awarded ★★★★★ by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.
