Does it ever end? Blue Prince’s spiral is a monument to curiosity

Dayten Rose, 18 December 2025

This piece contains late-game spoilers for Blue Prince. It is about late-game spoilers for Blue Prince. And to any architects reading, believe me when I say I’m aware that not every stone has been unturned yet. This piece is also about that.

One of Blue Prince’s most enduring legacies will undoubtedly be some variation of the phrase, “The game starts when the credits roll.” This inadvertently divides fans of the game into two camps: there are those who have shaken every tree, pressing on until not one puzzle is left to conquer; and there are those who got to Room 46, the game’s only stated goal, and thought… neat! And closed the game. I’m in that second camp. It took me about 20 hours to roll credits.

I buck a little at the implication that this means I (and so many fans) never played the “real” Blue Prince, but I understand why this division of players exists. By sheer volume, the journey to Room 46 is a drop in the ocean. Compared to the start of the game, where the search for Mount Holly’s secret final room is all-consuming, Room 46 becomes a tiny, intermediary step on the path to many of the game’s final puzzles.

But in a game as intentionally architected as Blue Prince, the placement of the credits shouldn’t be dismissed as some kind of practical joke. It is not, as I’ve occasionally seen suggested, a test of faith to separate the true believers from the incurious. Blue Prince holds curiosity itself as something quasi-sacred, and it positions its credits as an altar to the game’s remaining mystery. And through the tension it creates between players, it challenges some deeply held assumptions around puzzle games.

Long before Blue Prince even came out, it was clear that a certain coalition of the player base would crack it wide open regardless of difficulty or scope. That’s the world it was born into, the culture it emerged from, and the promise it keeps. While it would have been trivially easy to create the illusion of depth, the game’s magic is that its depth is completely real.

Blue Prince is, first and foremost, a fair fight. Puzzles may be maniacally tricky, RNG may defeat the most well-crafted strategies, but a player who drags themselves through the Entrance Hall again and again—a brainy Rocky Balboa—will find more questions, more answers, more secrets.

A frequently cited in-game document depicts a jagged spiral, and in a scrawl underneath it are the words, “Does it never end?” The spiral appears all over Mount Holly, as do anagrams of its accompanying phrase. “Investor needed.” “Denoted in verse.” Learning this, I felt… chilled. Simon is alone in the manor, but this spiral haunts Blue Prince as well as any ghost. 

Secret-hunters are convinced that it’s a clue to the game’s final puzzle, and far be it from me to suggest otherwise—these “architects,” as the community calls its sleuths, haven’t been wrong yet—but to me, the spiral works far better as a clue to understanding what Blue Prince is doing thematically. One instance of the spiral in particular clarifies its narrative purpose.

By drafting the Observatory, the player has a chance to view a constellation that provides some in-game benefit. Each time the constellation is viewed, one star is added. At eight stars, it shows Clavis, the Key, and the player gains one key. At 20, Florealis, which increases the spawn rate of gem flowers. And when the Observatory has been drafted 100 times, the constellation takes a familiar shape: the Spiral of Stars.

The effect of the Spiral of Stars evolves each time it’s observed by adding a single word to its description. Here’s a small section of the complete text:

[...] lose three steps for each rank reached, then gain one coin for each day spent, and then lose two stars. If you have less than forty steps, gain one random item from the Showroom. If you have less than twenty steps, open all antechamber doors, then set your steps to forty. [...]

To complete the constellation, the Observatory must be drafted at least 200 times. Of course, the player may not even see the Observatory on every run. Completing the Spiral of Stars requires incredible time, effort, and RNG, and the reward for doing so is an outlandish interaction of resources that, by Day 200, have probably already been trivialized—not to mention that Room 46 has likely been long passed by this point. The spiral continues beyond the point of reason, beyond sense, beyond utility. This is the real Blue Prince, the one that starts when the credits roll.

But the alternative—throwing in the towel, leaving the question unanswered when you know an answer exists—has got to be worse, right? Puzzles exist to be solved, and to finish a mystery game is, ironically, to destroy any hint of mystery. Narratively, too, reaching Room 46 turns out to accomplish very little. Simon inherits the manor and crown, but his claim remains illegitimate until he ascends the throne of Orinda Aries. (If none of this means anything to you, it’s because we’re deep in the spiral now.)

I struggle to square Room 46’s ultimate irrelevance with the sheer emotion of my first time seeing it. My heart pounded until a sudden sense of calm came over me, and the path to Room 46 seemed clear. “Ovinn Nevarei” swelled. I didn’t feel tangled up by the loose threads that remained, in fact, I heard them snapping behind me as I raced forward, proving to Mount Holly that it could no longer hold me back. It’s silly now, knowing how punishing the late-game becomes, but in that moment I felt like I could rise to any challenge Blue Prince threw at me. I finished my time with the game not beleaguered, but filled with hope.

For what it’s worth, there’s another player who stops at the credits: Tonda Ros, the game’s creator. “You never want to turn over every stone,” he said in an interview for the podcast Play, Watch, Listen. “Because when you turn over the last stone, there is no mystery.”

Of course, Ros is just one player, and his approach is not automatically “correct.” Viewing the discourse around Blue Prince’s late game, his peaceful acceptance of the unknown is the exception, not the rule. Confronting the spiral surfaces mixed emotions. Dissatisfaction. Madness. Grief. I’ll add my own to the pile: defeat. I place great professional expectations on myself to solve these games to the extent that they can be solved, and being unable to see Blue Prince through to the bitter end still gives me real imposter syndrome.

Staring this discomfort square in the face is the ever-unfinished project of Blue Prince. It’s a game about curiosity, but only as far as it provides much to be curious about. Curiosity isn’t the subjugation of reality by knowledge, but an acceptance of the unknown. Blue Prince does everything in its power to keep the player from dispelling this fog while, crucially, making it possible to do so.

Nothing supports this interpretation better than the game’s true true true ending (or one of them, anyway). After dispelling the mystery of Mount Holly, his own lineage, and the world itself, Simon is presented with three boxes like the ones in the Parlor Room. In those puzzles, only one box can be true. They read:

YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF YOUR JOURNEY.
THERE ARE TWO TRUE BOXES IN THIS ROOM.
THERE IS NO END TO THIS JOURNEY.

The first box is the player’s last chance to gracefully bow out. Like the credits following Room 46, it’s a stopping point, and contains a heartfelt message directly to the player who chooses it.  The central box is empty. Simon can’t keep running; it’s time to confront the nature of his journey.

Opening the final box triggers a cutscene in which Simon finds the box empty. He looks at the other closed boxes, their contents still a mystery, with what appears to be longing. Then he notices something inscribed on the lid: a spiral.

A cruel joke? Maybe. But think of the path that led there. How many endings does a player have to reject to stand in front of those three boxes? What ending could possibly satisfy them? To such a player, “there is no end to this journey” is less a choice and more a statement of fact. Knowing this, they still leap into the void beyond the path.

There is only one true box in the room. Either Blue Prince allows you to embrace the unknown, or it allows the unknown to embrace you.