I played a lot of Steam demos during the most recent Next Fest, but one I totally missed during the event was Blue Prince. Thank goodness for the Thinky community, as someone posted a link to the demo on our Discord which is why I ended up playing it and wow, it's very good. Like, very very very good. It's a puzzle game unlike any other, and I've spent so much time navigating the rooms and corridors of Blue Prince’s shape-shifting puzzle manor it feels like my home away from home.
Note: The demo leaves Steam on July 1st, just an FYI!
Blue Prince begins rather morbidly with the reading of a will. The deceased, Herbert S. Sinclair, wishes to leave his huge estate to his grandnephew (that’s you): the manor house, the surrounding gardens, the lot of it. But good ol’ gramps couldn’t resist a little twist. The Mt. Holly estate is yours IF you can find the elusive Room 46, hidden within the mansion’s many hallways and hideaways. The demo begins as you take your first steps through the manor’s front door, a rather quizzical task ahead of you.
It’s a set-up straight from an episode of Jonathan Creek, and what follows is a very strange and endlessly inventive genre-bending strategy(?) roguelike(?) puzzle adventure game. You don't simply explore the house, oh no, you create it. When you go to open a door, you get to decide what room awaits you on the other side. You’ll be given the choice of three rooms, and picking one will make it magically appear behind the closed door.
Choosing rooms feels like placing stepping stones, as you make your way further and further into the house, though, it’s not as easy as picking a string of rooms whose doorways connect in the right places. With a step counter of 50 that depletes every time you enter a room, you must carefully place rooms with different rules and abilities that will help you keep exploring, as when your counter reaches zero, you’re forced to retire for the day. And here's another twist: at the end of each day, the mansion completely resets, and all the rooms you’ve picked (and any items or clues you’ve found) get wiped from its blueprint.
It’s almost a roguelike in this way, as the aim is to make choices that let you push further into the mansion before your step count runs out and you're booted out. Deciding what rooms to choose from the trio offered to you is strategic. Bedrooms grant you more steps so placing them in a location in the house where you’ll be moving back and forth is a good tactic, you’ll always get four gold coins when you first build the pantry and you can spend it on fruit in the kitchen to get more steps. Placing a garage means a dead end, but you will get three keys which are incredibly handy for any unexpected locked doors. A chapel will cost you a coin every time you enter, but it has three door connections, making it a super flexible room to place on your blueprint.
It's a juggling act of pros, cons, rewards, and rules as you choose each room, but there’s so much more to these rooms than keys and coins. As you push further into the house you’ll start to be dealt rooms with higher ‘ranks’ and as you begin to place those within your map, the first layers of Blue Prince’s puzzle house start to reveal themselves.
A security room with a strange access terminal, a laboratory with a wall of levers, a strange dart board in the Billiard room, and the mysterious antechamber, an unmoveable room always present on your blueprint. Rooms begin to connect in a way you didn’t expect, but not in the physical sense. Your step counter which at first seems reasonable at 50 steps, begins to feel like a resource you need to carefully consider as you’ll find yourself bouncing back and forth to different rooms. A teeny-tiny spoiler (skip to the next paragraph to stay spoiler-free): I found a magnifying glass that let me see hidden details in written notes, so, of course, I had to backtrack and re-examine all the notes I had previously come across and found lots of juicy secrets.
I've found secret rooms, strange symbols, bizarre riddles, locked safes, an eerie children's book that feels important - maybe? It’s mind-boggling how much effort has gone into the demo, and it only makes me more excited for the full release. The demo doesn’t even touch upon the overarching story mystery, which is described as follows: “Investigate a past woven with the threads of blackmail, political intrigue, and the mysterious disappearance of a local children’s book author.” I’m practically frothing at the mouth.
I can’t recommend playing the Blue Prince demo enough. I’ve not played anything remotely close in design to this before, and it’s incredibly refreshing. No release date for Blue Prince, but let’s hope it’s sometime this year.
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