Blue Prince is a mystery-packed mansion that will crank open your mind

The house at Mt. Holly has 45 rooms. But the placement of each of those rooms is up to you — and it resets every day. You’ve been left the house and its estate as an inheritance, but only if you can find the mysterious 46^th room. 

In this way, Blue Prince blends its puzzles with both deck-building and roguelite elements. When you open the entrance hall door at the start of every morning, you’ll be given a choice of three rooms that might lie beyond it. Each of them has a fixed number and orientation of doors, limiting your path through the house, and each room has its own small bonus — or, in some cases, a drawback. 

You might, for instance, draw the bedroom, and get rewarded with 10 additional steps to use throughout the day. Or you might draw the weight room, and lose half of your carefully scrounged footsteps. (The game’s step counter is a limitation on your movement; you can’t walk forever through the house, and if you run out of steps, you’ll have to come back the next day and start from scratch.) Or you might draw the parlor and have to solve a truth-and-lie logic puzzle to get gems, which you can spend on drafting more useful rooms later. Or you might find the nook, which always has a key; keys become increasingly necessary as you progress, since doors become more likely to be locked.

And then, packed in everywhere and anywhere, there’s the intrigue. In one early run, I opened a chest to find the “Key to the Secret Garden,” which warned me that it would not be an easy room to locate. It wasn’t until much later that I got access to the orchard, which explained how and where I could get access to said garden. But then I had to wait to run into the key again. That wait could have been a drag, except that (at least in the game’s first 10 or so hours) I was juggling dozens of these small cause-and-effect bits of progress at once, so there was always something to make me feel like I was moving forward.

This gradual accumulation of knowledge is almost the whole of Blue Prince (one early room recommends having a notebook at hand; I filled several pages), although there are some architectural elements of the house that become permanent, making future runs more likely to be fruitful. These moments tend to feel big, some of them even having very atmospheric cutscenes that break up the routine of drafting door after door. You’ll also be collecting passwords and codes that stay the same across runs. Mainly, every new draft is a question of what you will learn about the estate and how you will apply that knowledge in future runs.

Spending run after run in the house gives you a lot of time to appreciate just how finely it’s built. Every room has a different walking sound to reflect the kind of flooring it has, for example. There are moments when the creeping dread of being alone in a shape-shifting house suddenly cuts through, momentarily but completely changing the atmosphere. And there are dozens of architectural details and notes and bits of clutter that all go into building up an idea of the history that once went on between these old walls.

With so many details hidden in every room, though, it’s important to bear in mind that the house also holds many, many mysteries that go much beyond your inheritance. After a while, discoveries that didn’t lead to something useful for the specific goal of finding the 46th room sometimes started to feel like disappointments, until I rolled around to the other side and started to appreciate just how much more is going on in this mysterious mansion. Being open to these grander puzzles, and accepting that solving one big question is only a sliver of what the game has to offer, made it much less frustrating.

Having said that, that willingness to be open is sometimes difficult to maintain when you run into a string of bad luck. Unless you are enlightenment-levels of willing to accept everything the game has to throw at you, sometimes you really will want to do a few runs just looking for something specific, which is never guaranteed. And unfortunately, the first several minutes of every attempt do end up feeling very samey, as the game doesn’t usually start offering more interesting rooms until you’re some way into the house. Some rooms are also just straight-up annoying. There’s a math-based puzzle that I hated every time, and it becomes harder and harder as you do more and more runs — but it’s very punishing to skip it because it grants keys, which are extremely valuable. 

Because of friction like this, I think that Blue Prince is going to live on the strength of its community. There came a point where repeating runs was not getting me anywhere, and every time, I would dread having to spend 10 or so minutes going through the motions again before getting a chance of seeing something new. (Or at least, something new that was going to make me feel like I was actually progressing toward a goal that I was interested in.) It turned out that I had missed something I could interact with in a room that I had previously written off as useless, which I only found out by talking to other people who were playing. Figuring that out had me rolling credits within a couple of hours — and more importantly, those couple of hours completely recaptured the enthusiasm and sense of discovery I’d had in the early game.

Seeding those kinds of hints without spoilers isn’t easy, but I do expect Blue Prince to grow the kind of fan base that can pull it off. It’s good now, but that will make it even better.

Blue Prince will be released April 10 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a prerelease download code provided by Raw Fury. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.