Blue Prince on PC

One of my biggest struggles in life is learning to allow myself to just be open to new possibilities. Y’know, go with the flow, listen to what the universe tells you, yada yada. It’s not my mantra — never was, and likely never will be. And yet, that’s exactly what Blue Prince demands of you. To fully enjoy this game and understand how it works, what it has to offer, you have to, as Morpheus would say, open your mind.

Blue Prince is a puzzle game developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury. You take control of the titular Blue Prince — a fantastic double entendre of a game name — as you explore a giant mansion with 45 rooms. How do you win? By finding the mysterious 46th room. To make things a little trickier, the layout of the mansion changes each day.

You have a step counter that decreases when you enter each room, and you start with 50 steps for every run. Among the rooms, you’ll find little clues that hint at the lore of the mansion, books, small puzzles, big puzzles that span multiple rooms, and more.

The architectural artistry and genius of Blue Prince cannot be overstated. Every room in the mansion feels thoughtfully designed. You’ll find recurring motifs, secret doors, interconnected mechanisms, and subtle environmental storytelling clues that build out a world far more complex than its initial premise lets on.

Eventually, you’ll learn to parse out the important objects from the incidental ones. An oversized chess piece sitting in the corner, for instance, is a hint for a puzzle you might not even encounter during this run.

Each time you leave a room, you’ll be able to draft a new room from three randomised options. This is key, as the different rooms in Blue Prince’s house contain different objects and clues. If you’re working on a particular puzzle, you might want to focus on drafting specific rooms, though your options are always left up to chance, which can lead to frustration.

The trick, then, is to be open to whatever Blue Prince throws at you. This is where I struggled most with the game. As someone who has a very one-track mind, I like focusing on one thing at a time, and being faced with several different puzzles can feel overwhelming. That being said, I eventually reached a point where I was able to accept whatever options I was given and go with the flow.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer to anyone considering trying this game is this: always draft new rooms. If you’re presented with the option to draft a room you’ve never seen before — even if it’s something as mundane as the Lavatory — just draft it. Every room is important, and you never know what you’ll find.

Playing through the game in this way, I was able to create numerous inroads for various puzzles, and I started to feel like I was making progress with each run. Ultimately, Blue Prince rewards curiosity and exploration. That said, not every reward hits the mark.

While most puzzles in Blue Prince strike a great balance between difficulty and payoff, a few particularly elaborate ones — the kind that span multiple rooms, sometimes even multiple runs — can feel deflating.

You might invest significant time tracing obscure clues, activating mechanisms across several wings of the mansion, only to earn a minor collectible or a vague scrap of lore in return. It’s not that the lore is bad (on the contrary, it’s compelling in that “what the hell is going on here” kind of way), but the effort-to-reward ratio occasionally skews off. When the game asks for that much brainpower and commitment, it’s fair to want something more than an ambient detail or a cryptic sentence.

Still, the bigger picture holds together. What Blue Prince nails is its tone and design. As frustrating as it was to constantly run into walls and be rewarded with trifles for my efforts, I have to say that some of the end-game puzzles are genuinely spectacular. I mean, we’re talking mind-bending stuff that really challenges your entire perception of the game and what puzzles are supposed to be like. It takes a very long time for you to get there, though, and given how gruelling the mid-hours can be, I wouldn’t blame anyone who calls it a day after finding room 46.

Blue Prince doesn’t hold your hand. It doesn’t give you maps, journals, or upgrade trees. What it gives you is a space to think, to experiment, and to learn a language that only the game speaks slowly. And when that language clicks, when you realise what a specific object means, or what that weird mural was trying to tell you three days ago, it’s pure satisfaction.

To say that Blue Prince opened my mind would be disingenuous, but it certainly did challenge me in ways I hadn’t expected. This isn’t a game for everyone. Blue Prince demands that you meet it on its own terms, and while that can be a tall ask for a majority of players, I can promise you that it’ll be worth it.

Blue Prince is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.