Blue Prince - Puzzles Blend With Roguelike

• DEVELOPER: Dogubomb
• PUBLISHER: Raw Fury
• PLATFORMS: PC, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation 5
• GENRE: Puzzle
• RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2025
• STARTING PRICE: 29,99€
• REVIEWED VERSION: PC

Blue Prince is a genre-defying first-person puzzle adventure set in the ever-shifting Mount Holly mansion. Your goal is to find the elusive Room 46 in a 45-room estate, blending roguelike randomization, strategic room-drafting, and intricate puzzles. Let me start by saying Blue Prince is an excellent game. Its design, atmosphere, and mechanics are all well-crafted, but its biggest flaw is the clash between its roguelike and puzzle elements.

Early Fun Fades to Tedious Late Grinds

Puzzles are deep and layered, requiring you to take a note and write things down to keep track of clues and hidden connections. This isn’t a game you can fully experience in just five hours; it constantly reveals new surprises the longer you play. The developers put real care into ensuring you can solve everything solo, with plenty of clues and redundancy to help uncover even the deepest secrets. However, Blue Prince’s endgame becomes a grindy mess where the roguelike elements work against you.

Roguelike elements force you to retread the same rooms repeatedly, and the RNG often leaves you with little control. The worst part? Knowing the solution to a puzzle but never getting the right room layout to actually solve it. That said, the mansion’s daily reset and randomized room-drafting keep each run fresh, but the system just needs a better balance to give you more agency.

Blue Prince revolves around drafting rooms onto a 5×9 grid, starting from three doors in the Entrance Hall. Each door offers three room choices like a Kitchen, Observatory, or Closet with unique exits, items or puzzles. You get 50 steps per “day” (used when entering rooms or interacting), and running out resets progress until the next day.

Smart drafting is also crucial: Hallways link multiple exits, while dead-end rooms like Closets can trap you if placed poorly. Rooms are color-coded by type (Green = gardens, Orange = hallways) and serve different purposes, for example, the Security Room tracks items, while the Boiler Room tweaks house rules. But heavy randomization can backfire. If keys to unlock rooms or items don’t appear, some runs just feel like dead ends, which happens far more often than you’d like.

RNG Tests Puzzle Mechanics

Back onto the puzzles, they vary from self-contained challenges like math problems or combination locks to sprawling mysteries that connect clues across multiple playthroughs. For instance, you might find a note in the Study that hints at a safe code in the Den but only after several days of observation will the solution become clear.

What makes the game special is how naturally it presents clues. You’ll find hints hidden in letters, books, and environmental details, rewarding thorough exploration rather than obvious signposting. Permanent upgrades help balance the randomness, for example, you can install Upgrade Disks in DOS computers to improve rooms adding extra steps or keys for all future runs, and solved puzzles stay solved.

Story reveals itself through exploration rather than cutscenes, uncovering family secrets, political drama, and the mystery of a missing author. Like Gone Home or Outer Wilds, you piece together Mount Holly’s history through notes, objects, and environmental clues. The subtle storytelling delivers satisfying “aha!” moments when a painting suddenly makes sense after 20 hours. There are cut scenes, but they serve more as an introducion than properly continuing the story.

Blue Prince offers great replay value. While challenging, with no hint system or difficulty options, each failed run teaches you something new. When the roguelike elements work in your favor, the game shines, but when luck turns against you, forcing constant day resets just to progress, frustration can outweigh the fun. Unfortunately, this does hurt the overall replay value.

Very Rewarding Game Once You Get Hang Of It

Every one of the 45+ rooms is packed with detail, whether it’s the cozy fireplace in the Den or the unsettling depths of the Boiler Room. Small touches, like a knocked-over candlestick or a hamster wheel in the Bunkroom, make the world feel alive, leaving you wondering what’s just decoration and what’s a clue. The 3D art also pulls you in, with clever details like hallway windows appearing along the mansion’s edges.

Blue Prince starts strong, the developers cracked the code on RNG-driven puzzles by flooding you with enough challenges to always feel progress. But after dozens of hours, you will eventually hit a wall. The shrinking room pool turns progression into a grind, and the mansion demands you keep backtracking. The big puzzles inherit the small ones’ flaws: bloat. Hunting for specific rooms becomes tedious, first finding the right layout, then hoping prerequisite pieces appear in the same run.

On top of everything mentioned, we can’t forget that the game also has its own resources, specifically keys, gold coins, and diamonds, which you use to unlock rooms, purchase special blueprints, or to use various useful objects, such as a sledgehammer to break locks. There are also passcards and batteries that help open shortcuts or power devices.

In the end, this is a thinker’s game; challenging but deeply rewarding, where every discovery feels earned. The striking cel-shaded art and moody soundtrack also pull you into its world completely. While the randomness and difficulty might test your patience, it’s an essential experience for puzzle lovers, especially for fans of Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn.

The game review is based on the version available through Xbox Game Pass

3.8