Editor's Note: The following article contains light spoilers for Blue Prince.
If you’re looking for a speedy way to uncover the secrets of Dogubomb’s mystery mansion puzzler Blue Prince, then I’ve got awful news for you: not even developer Tonda Ros has all the answers. Of course, supposing those answers were available in the first place, I’m not sure he would have told me during our chat. Like wandering the halls of Mt. Holly itself, Ros walked a wide circle around the mysteries his game has in store. “I think some amount of ambiguity is needed when talking about a game where player discovery is the driving force.”
There’s a bit of give and take in his reticence to tell all. Blue Prince may look like it’s full of blank space, but Ros is as happy—or happier—to let players fill in those blanks themselves. You won’t find a definitive map of the place anywhere. Just like the rest of us, Ros discovered the game by opening the door and feeling out the space inside the idea, one step at a time.
It started as two unrelated projects. “First, as a concept for a physical tabletop game involving drawing cards and drafting rooms,” explains Ros, “and the second, as a first-person puzzle game set in a large mansion of many doors.” Despite a vague architectural throughline, it wasn’t immediately obvious that these two concepts fit together. “This was eight years ago, before I even had an idea of what a roguelike game was”—remember that eight years ago, Slay the Spire was just breaking into early access; roguelike deckbuilding elements just weren’t in the collective toolkit—“so I’d say the mechanical core of Blue Prince comes entirely from the world of tabletop and card games.”
Before long, the first inkling of Blue Prince began to appear, inspired by Ros’s longtime fascination with Myst and Riven. The key concept “practically justified environmental puzzles.” Rather than solving isolated puzzles in sequence, what if the entire setting revolved around the process of puzzling, exploration, and discovery? From that point on, Ros did his best to avoid any other direct analogs that might cloud that initial vision. “I didn’t look to any other video games for inspiration,” he tells me. “Part of my process is to sequester myself and figure things out on my own, without research, reference, or tutorials.”
Ros does give a nod to Billy Basso, another DIY dev whose journey they relates to: “Working on a project for 7+ years isn’t that uncommon in our industry, but it is a very long road to walk for your first game.” That the products of those parallel journeys—Animal Well and Blue Prince—culminated in such close proximity to each other is a twist of fortune for which we should all thank the Thinky Fairy.
It’s one thing to imagine a deeply interconnected world of environmental puzzles and another to put it into practice. One of the major design challenges was weaving this web. “Of course, it’s a lot easier to design a puzzle when it doesn’t have to exist or be part of the world,” says Ros. This is part of what leads to the physicality of Blue Prince. Rather than looking at problems from one angle, players are free to manipulate them and view many different angles. And the only way to make those discoveries is to actually get inside and start chipping away the layers of each room: what information is given when you draft, how the room actually looks on the inside, and “the interior gameplay of a room, which are the systems physically within a room which aren’t always described on the floorplan.”
That led to some difficult knock-on effects on the development end. Right away, Ros gave up some of his ability to tune difficulty by scattering tutorialization across the map rather than handing it to the player up front. To learn about redrawing rooms, your options are to deduce the rules yourself or to draft the Drawing Room where that particular tooltip is located; explanations of various room types, items, and puzzles are valuable commodities and often separate from the concepts they explain. “I’m just not a fan of handholding,” says Ros. “Drop me in a world. Let me figure the rest out.”
Some rooms are more forthright about their puzzliness—Puzzle Rooms like the Parlor and Billards Room—but, Ros says, “they are far from the only rooms in the house that contain puzzles.” And because those less-isolated puzzles often span multiple rooms and runs, certain floorplans couldn’t be modified without altering the entire fabric of Mt. Holly. “It’s a lot easier to audition different amounts of gold that the Pantry grants you than it is to redesign something complicated like the interconnected house-wide electrical system in the Utility Closet.” But the game’s interconnectedness was necessary for the feeling of progression Ros targeted, where a player succeeds by gradually cultivating an understanding of the world’s inner workings.
On the player’s end, the payoff is immediately worthwhile and reflects Ros’s preferences as a puzzle gamer. “For me, I love challenges that allow for creativity in the way players can approach them," he says. "Puzzles that encourage players to think outside the box, that allow for sequence breaking, or alternate solutions.” Certain puzzles rely on rooms and items being served in a particular order, so that variance is baked into the very foundation of Blue Prince. (I can’t count the number of times in my own playthrough that a random decision has unraveled into a well of mystery I would never have encountered otherwise.) In fact, Ros claims, no individual puzzle is necessary to reach the ending.
Ultimately, there’s no right or wrong way to play Blue Prince—“intended solution” is a dirty word over at Dogubomb—but I made sure to cover a few bases in my chat with Ros that I thought would save some more hardcore puzzlers a few headaches. Namely, on the question of whether Blue Prince contains mysteries that will take players outside the game itself, Ros tells me: “The entire experience of Blue Prince is contained entirely within the game, and all of the challenges are designed to be able to be solved by a single player without outside information. There are no external ARG elements or puzzles that require community effort to solve.” So, those of you with QR scanners at the ready, feel free to sheathe them now.
And for those daunted by the prospect of muddling through on your own psychic power (trust me, I see you), Ros says that co-op is an equally rewarding way to play. I personally knocked out a run just about every night before bed on my Steam Deck, but I imagine you’d have a hell of a time putting it up on the big screen and batting around ideas between runs.
The point is, the best way to play Blue Prince is the same way it was developed: exploration. “The more you explore,” says Ros, “the more you will come to understand how the rules that govern this house work.” And with every new run, fresh idea, or bolt of inspiration, another door opens.
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