It seems a little early in the year to start talking about Game of the Year contenders, but Blue Prince — the debut indie title from Hollywood-based Dogubomb Studios — already has its foot in the door. The narrative point-and-click with environmental puzzles is available now on Xbox, PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming via Game Pass. Blue Prince also offers cross entitlements via Microsoft’s Xbox Play Anywhere initiative.
At first glance, Blue Prince could easily feel at home in a Wholesome Games showcase. The story revolves around a young man who is set to inherit a familial manor dubbed Mt. Holly. Mt. Holly is a sprawling estate with an air of mystery surrounding it, despite Blue Prince’s endearing art style that evokes the sense of safety one might find in children's book illustrations.
Looks can be deceiving, however. Despite lacking in combat, Blue Prince is a challenging explorative adventure that blends narrative environmental puzzles with roguelike gameplay loop. Think Myst or The Witness meets Hades, but without the hack-y and slash-y bits.
A mystery within a mystery within a strategy game that’s shrouded in more mysteries
While Blue Prince has shot up the charts and become an immediate indie darling, discussion about the game is often vague and shrouded in coded language. This mimics the game itself, which drips in mystery and intrigue but provides little in the way of guidance.
Blue Prince will easily ask you to spend hundreds of real hours exploring every nook and cranny of the manor and familial grounds, from the basement up, in search of Room 46. The game will even recommend that you pick up a notebook to write down your findings as you explore.
The overall goal is to make your way to Room 46, but you only have the current day and a limit of 50 steps to get it done. Each interaction with a door presents new blueprints with which to build onto Mt. Holly in a way that is eerily reminiscent of the Winchester House. Crossing the threshold into a newly built room removes steps from your daily count, and once you’re out of steps completely, you have no choice but to return to your camp elsewhere on the family estate. Each new morning, Mt. Holly will have reset back to nothing more than an entry hall, and players will once again attempt to find Room 46.
Tonda Ros, the creator behind Blue Prince, was reportedly inspired by Christopher Manson’s 1984 choose-your-own-adventure book titled Maze. Maze presented its readers with a challenge to make it to room 45 in a limited number of steps by selecting numbered rooms to explore, which is reflected in Blue Prince’s exploratory roguelike gameplay loop.
The protagonist of Blue Prince inherits a family manor from a recently deceased uncle that he has not visited in quite some time. He must draw on his childhood memories of the home to flesh it out and discover the history hiding within the walls. Each morning, the protagonist (and thus, the player) can enter Mt. Holly.
What players will find behind the manor’s ornate entry hall is a challenging series of ever-changing puzzles. Players can explore Mt. Holly’s many rooms in the first-person, picking up useful items like keys, gems, and coins. When the player clicks on a door to leave a room, however, they face a decision to choose from blueprints to determine what will be on the other side. Rooms are color coded, can have a variety of build requirements like costing gems or keys, and can open up new pathways to explore or result in a dead end.
Blue Prince is a delightfully layered conundrum, where every answer leads to more questions. Players will find the rooms of Mt. Holly are color-coded, themed, and meticulously detailed with hidden clues a-plenty. Useful items like sledgehammers, metal detectors, and shovels can help turn the tide of your journey through the manner. You can locate useful items like extra keys and coins, or destroy walls that may be preventing you from finding something new. Some special upgrades can even provide permanent bonuses, like starting each new day with additional steps or gems.
Not every new room blueprint can be helpful, however. Some blueprints can create additional obstacles, like preventing you from building a path northward without taking additional steps or leading to a complete dead-end. Some rooms, themselves, can be problematic (we’re looking at you, Weight Room. Always stealing half of our step count!) However, even rooms that seem like they are more trouble than they're worth can have benefits if you’re willing to gamble on discovering them.
Because Blue Prince draws on roguelike game mechanics, failure becomes just as much a part of the discovery process as success. Trial and error is the king. Some interactions and puzzle solutions may take the player multiple days — and multiple builds — to work through. However, some of these can lead to permanent unlocks that make significant differences in your overall ability to explore Mt. Holly, making it worth the time commitment.
Blue Prince, developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, is available now on Xbox and Windows PC via the Microsoft Store for $29.99. Buy it once, and play it across your Xbox and PC consoles with support from cloud saves thanks to Xbox Play Anywhere support. Subscribers of Xbox Game Pass or PC Game Pass can jump into the game via console, PC, or the cloud as part of their subscription.
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