Blue Prince Review – A Brilliant Puzzle Adventure Worth Playing

It honestly feels like Blue Prince was made just for me. This clever puzzle game blends together all my favorite game styles into one exciting experience. Imagine a first-person puzzler that looks simple at first but hides endless secrets beneath the surface. Add roguelite gameplay, where you improve both your skills and your tools over time. Then mix in smart drafting mechanics, like you’d find in a deck-building game (but without the usual complications). Finally, top it off with tile-based map building that feels like my favorite board game, Carcassonne. Even if you don’t love every piece of that puzzle as much as I do, Blue Prince brings it all together beautifully. After spending dozens of hours with it, I can already say this game belongs among the greats of the puzzle genre.

In Blue Prince, you play as Simon, a teenager exploring his great uncle’s strange mansion. To claim your inheritance, you have to find the hidden 46th room in a house where the rooms keep changing. The story starts simply, and while there are helpful clues scattered around, most of the journey is left for you to discover on your own. This freedom keeps the game exciting, because even when you’re unsure of the next step, your goal remains clear — I never felt completely lost.

In Blue Prince, the main idea is how you pick rooms. Each day, you get some steps to use. You use one step to open a door and choose one of three rooms to add. Every game feels new because you build a fresh map each time. To avoid dead ends, find helpful items, and follow clues, you need to connect rooms carefully. It seems simple, but getting good at it feels great!

Rooms in the mansion come in different colors and categories. For example:

• Purple rooms often give you extra steps.
• Yellow rooms are shops where you can buy helpful items.
• Red rooms create challenges, like hiding your next draft choices.

Some special rooms only appear under certain conditions, such as when you explore the house’s edges or reach deeper parts of the map. Figuring out which rooms to prioritize early in your run helps you gather keys, gems, and other tools that will make later exploration smoother. Planning your path and making smart choices feels satisfying, especially when it leads you closer to solving the mansion’s big mystery.

Blue Prince is a masterpiece for puzzle game fans. With its smart design, creative mechanics, and endless surprises, it’s a game I’ll keep coming back to for a long time.

There’s something really satisfying about getting the hang of the drafting system, as it keeps the adventure exciting and full of discovery.

The puzzles in Blue Prince come in many forms, making every room exciting and challenging. Some puzzles are straightforward, like basic math or logic problems. Others involve solving actual puzzle boxes, or figuring out the right sequence of button presses or lever pulls to unlock the room’s secrets. However, these self-contained puzzles are just a small part of what makes Blue Prince special. The real highlight feels closer to amazing first-person puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds. Blue Prince encourages you to observe your surroundings, take notes, and connect clues across different rooms. What starts off feeling mysterious and cryptic soon becomes incredibly rewarding once you figure things out. You might need to search documents for safe codes, understand object placements, or use one room’s function to overcome obstacles in another.

That said, the randomness of room selection can sometimes be frustrating. Even though you can manage the randomness by learning smart strategies, taking risks at the right moments, and unlocking helpful upgrades, there will still be times when luck just isn’t on your side. For example, you might desperately need a room that lets you turn left, but despite your best efforts – including rerolling options with collected dice – it just doesn’t appear. These moments are rare but disappointing when they happen, especially if they end an otherwise promising run.

One small improvement I’d love to see is the ability to save and quit mid-run without losing progress, or at least pause the game properly when opening the menu. Since some runs can last over an hour, it’s tough to play in short sessions, especially on a desktop PC. This is less of an issue on consoles or devices like the Steam Deck, where you can suspend the game and continue later.

Every run offers something new to discover, so it never feels like a waste of time.

The randomness in Blue Prince isn’t a problem because there’s always something new to discover. Even if you don’t build the perfect route or reach your target room, you’ll likely find new areas along the way. Every run adds more clues to your growing list of mysteries. It took me about 15 hours to reach the 46th room, and solving that puzzle felt really rewarding. But even after that, I still had many goals left — safes to open, doors to unlock, books and letters to read, clues to solve, and lots of lore to explore.

What makes Blue Prince special is how the optional puzzles are naturally connected to the main path. Some secrets are visible right from the start, while others appear as small hints that lead to deeper mysteries.

It’s also a game that’s hard to talk about with friends because everyone’s experience is different. Thanks to the random room selections and personal curiosity, no two playthroughs are the same. At one point, I was five hours in and excitedly shared a discovery with a friend who had played 40 hours — but they hadn’t even found it yet! Still, the game never feels unfair. Clues are hidden in many places, so you always feel like you’re making progress.

As you go further, the story becomes more important. At first, learning about your great uncle and family history feels like background, but it soon becomes a strong reason to keep playing. The worldbuilding is well-paced, and everything you discover — about your family, the manor, or the nation — feels useful for solving future puzzles.

Without spoiling anything, the story smartly connects to your actions in the game. Uncovering your family’s complicated past feels natural, even if the pieces come in a random order. Watching the main character grow from solving puzzles for fun to understanding the deeper meaning of the mansion felt just like my own experience with Blue Prince. It’s a quiet kind of brilliance that makes this game truly stand out.

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Pros and Cons of Blue Prince

🌟 Good Things	⚠️ Not So Good Things
🧩 Fun mix of puzzles and exploring	🎲 Sometimes you don’t get the rooms you need
🕵️‍♂️ Story is interesting and keeps you curious	💾 Can’t save the game in the middle of a run
🔄 Every game feels different	⏳ Some runs can feel too long without pause
🗺️ Planning your moves feels great	🍀 Bad luck can ruin a good run
🧠 Puzzles are fun and make you think	🤔 Hard to share the same experience with friends
🕳️ Lots of secrets to discover	🤔
🔁 Keeps you coming back to play again	🤔

Conclusion

Blue Prince is the kind of puzzle game that really stuck with me. Its clever mysteries are tightly connected to the choices you make while building the mansion’s layout in each random run. I found myself thinking about floorplans even in my sleep! The story that slowly unfolds is just as gripping, keeping me searching for clues and room combinations long after the credits rolled. What makes it even better is how the story and the puzzle mechanics are beautifully tied together.

Sure, hitting a dead end can be frustrating, but there’s always so much to discover that the randomness never stopped my progress for long. If games like The Witness, Portal, and Myst are considered legends in first-person puzzle games, I wouldn’t be surprised if Blue Prince earns its place among them too.