Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a tile-based adventure game about navigating an ever-changing mansion by placing rooms so that they form a path. When you open a door, you choose a room to place on the other side. The complex combination of strategic planning and random chance led to Blue Prince sweeping both Most Anticipated Game and Community Choice: Most Anticipated Game at the 2024 Thinky Awards.

You play a young heir who has inherited a vast and possibly magical manor from an eccentric great-uncle, but to prove your worthiness, you must find the secret 46th room of the estate before time runs out. You have a limited number of steps, and moving through a room costs one step. You can’t stay overnight, you can’t take anything home with you, and the mansion’s layout rearranges every night.

You explore the mansion in first person, but there’s a blueprint which shows you a map of the entire floor, arranged in a grid layout. At the beginning of the day, only the Entrance Hall, where you start, and the Antechamber, your destination, are filled in. Whenever you open a door, you are offered three options for rooms to place on the other side. You choose a room, which you can then explore.

The most important factor when placing a room is where its exits are. Some rooms are dead ends; others have multiple exits and are a valuable strategic resource. Some doors may also be locked or require keycards to open. Rooms can also contain keys, coins, gems, and other useful items. Most rooms also have special properties, such as never being locked or allowing you to draw a different set of rooms if you don’t like your initial choices.

Because your room choices are so limited, randomness is a major factor, which may dissuade some thinky gamers. This combines with the nightly layout resets to create a roguelike gameplay loop. However, some rooms do carry over elements from previous days, creating forward progress and preventing the game from feeling purely like every day is a new luck of the draw.

Blue Prince’s rich visual design also enhances the experience. The rooms are highly detailed, and the cartoon-style line-art shader gives the visuals a stylized feel. Occasional photographs and notes hint at a story that is mostly kept in the background.

The demo of Blue Prince was so overwhelmingly popular that the studio had to make it cut off after four days of exploration, and the entire demo is slated to be removed on March 10th, one month before the full game releases. Check it out now while you can.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz. It is based on a demo of the game.