Blue Prince is a game I’ve heard about endlessly before I started playing it this month. Since the start of the year I’ve been told up and down that this game defies genres, that it’s so unique that it’ll pave the way for games to come, that it’s so different it requires investing unique time into it. Raving reviews, but reviews that have an underscore of “this is a game that isn’t for everyone.” Still, I’m a Quirky Lil’ Games Aficionado, so I gave it a shot.

Well, I gave it a shot eventually; It sat in my inventory idly for the better part of the year until one of my friends egged me on to try it.

But I tried it, I gave it a good shot and a good time investment, and I gotta say - this game’s pretty good! It’s not a game I think everyone has to try, nor do I think it’s as revolutionary as everyone is putting it, but it does a lot of things very well. I’ve given it about 17.5 hours as of writing this and I’ve reached the end credits, so despite two of my friends informing me that there is a LOT of endgame content I still haven’t even come close to discovering, I feel like I’ve experienced enough that I’ve gotten a good grasp of what this game does well.

Mainly, my experience was that while this game doesn’t do much new, the things it does do it does very, very well. Central of which is the idea of making the player feel like the house is always just a little bigger than they think.

To those who haven’t played the game yet (I won’t spoil you, dw), Blue Prince is a game where you play as the great-nephew of the wealthy Herbert Sinclair, the owner of a large and sprawling mansion who recently passed away. He has left you his great, 45-room mansion in his last will, but under one condition: You must first discover the 46th room of his mansion. Once you do, this house is yours.

The gameplay is a board-game inspired roguelike affair: every time you open a door of the house, you are presented with three possible rooms. You select one of the three rooms, and that one is placed in front of the door you just walked through. This way you’re building the house as you explore through it, and may create labyrinthine structures by complete accident. If you do end up locking yourself in the house, unable to reach the fabled 46th room, you can decide to exit the house and try again in the morning. The next day, the house has reset to zero, and you must construct it once more.

While most roguelikes take inspiration from Rogue (duh) and The Binding of Isaac, where you improve your character directly and the primary form of gameplay is combat, Blue Prince’s main gameplay revolves around puzzles and resource management, and the only real buff you get is to your knowledge as a player. Each run you must manage the structure of the house to not leave you locked inside, but also manage how much you’ve walked, as your character can become too tired to keep exploring. You don’t get any persistent buffs between runs, but you know more than you did on your previous run, and that lets you explore deeper and deeper. It’s the same “Live. Die. Repeat” affair of any other roguelike, but merely by not falling into the culture of combat that all other games accept as fact it already manages to stand out.

However, I think it’s real strength comes from its non-linearity. Because you’re exploring this house and building it on your own, you may come across any given room in any given order. The game can’t assume you’ll first find the bedroom and then the laundry room, it has to leave little bits and pieces of lore for you to find everywhere around the mansion. Not only is this lore fairly interesting on its own, these bits and pieces also function as gameplay puzzles: when you see an old christmas picture of the family posing around the fire, you both get some context as to the family’s life and who were the important players, but also get to look in the background of the picture and see a code for a safe you didn’t even know existed up to this point!

Not only does this merge the gameplay format with the narrative in a very natural way, it also helps create what people love most about this game: the feeling that this house holds more secrets than you could ever imagine. By making some of the most important, plot heavy elements hidden in plain sight, you make the player’s mind start to race with possibility whenever they realize that this seemingly innocuous object held more meaning than they thought up until this point. “If this painting held a secret, what about all the other paintings?”

I’m not the first person to put this idea that “making seemingly arbitrary elements actually meaningful makes the player feel like the game is freer than it is” on the table, by the way; in his video about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, hbomberguy explains what made the original game so special for him:

A thing I love about games like “Deus Ex” and “New Vegas” is the sense they’re full of secrets and new things to find. A corner of an abandoned vault might have a one-of-a-kind gun in it. A safe in a terrorist hideout has a speed enhancement in it. When you find it, it doesn’t just feel cool. It makes you want to find and open every safe in the world to see what else is in them.

A game doesn’t actually need to do much in order to make you feel like there’s a lot to do, the game merely needs to set expectations for what you’re allowed to do, and then break them. If you enter the game assuming it’ll just be a normal roguelike, and suddenly you find a door that leads outside the house? “Well, shit, I thought I was limited to the confines of the house. What else can I find outside the house? Is it story relevant?” If you look outside and you find a door leading to a room you’ve never seen before, you now are reinvigorated to look through every window and lever of the house, just on the off chance it might lead to something new!

This sense of exploration and openness doesn’t come from having very broad limits, but rather from the player not knowing where the limits are. If I open a game and I see there’s 200 levels to play? Cool, there’s 200 levels to play. It’s a lot, nice, but I don’t feel like there’s much else to it. If I play a game with 5 levels, and within every level there’s a hidden button that unlocks two more? Well, holy shit, how many fuckin levels does this game have? I start sniffing the floors just on the off-chance a strewn blade of grass gives me access to more of this world.

And I think this is what made so many people enjoy Blue Prince: the fact that you never know how much you know. I’ve reached the end credits, and I still have so many puzzles written down in my notebook that I didn’t complete. I now want to go back in the house and see how much more I can find, to finally find the limits of what the game has for me. Nearly none of these puzzles are required to reach the 46th room, by the way, and this actually makes it feel better in my opinion: it’s your choice to go spelunking. Were these puzzles required to finish the game, they’d feel like an absolute chore because I never knew how much I had left and would constantly feel like the ending was being stolen from my very hands; it’d be an exercise in frustrative nonreward.

One of my friends who has already played the game said that this was one of the negatives for them: the game is so heavily reliant on RNG and luck that past a certain point solving the puzzles became a chore. Despite having reached the end credits, they’ve lost the fun they once had. Once these random strokes of enjoyment become mandatory, you resent the diceroll more than you enjoy the little treat you’ve found.

Either way, if you’ve read this far and haven’t played the game, I recommend you do so. Grab a pen and paper (you’ll need it), and start walking around the house. See what you discover, what opinions you make of the game. You might not necessarily love the experience, but atleast you’ll know a little more about what you want in your games.