Idle Thoughts

The roguelike Myst I never knew I’ve always wanted (★★★★★)

Sometimes the universe just smiles at you.

I wrote about Animal Well a little while ago, an onion layer game that’s a puzzle fest hiding behind a conventional platformer. One of my takeaways was that I wished that both those layers were better integrated.

Here comes Blue Prince.

It’s easily one of the most impressive games I’ve seen in a decade. Seriously, if you like puzzle games at all, you should give it a try and go in blind. That being said, I’ll try not to spoil anything.

First of all, they’ve done it. They made a roguelike puzzle game. I think we’ve come close to the point where everything was successfully turned into a roguelike now.

Your quest in Blue Prince is to investigate a mansion full of puzzles, like Myst or the 7th Guest, in search of the mysterious room 46. So far, so meh. But it’s also a board game kind of thing where you place rooms with special effects on a grid in order to get as far as possible. You literally build the mansion as you go every time you open a new door. I don’t think it needs to be stated how cool that concept is. The kicker is that every one of those rooms can be explored, since this is a first-person game.

On top of its more mundane board game effect (ex. +4 coins), a room can contain secret interactions or documents you can read. Those could be simple tutorials. In fact, the game has no overt tutorial, just a series of notes scattered in multiple rooms. In Blue Prince, you learn as you play. Those notes could also contain a bit of harmless lore… but it could be a hint for something going on in another room. You really should put your tin foil hat on when playing Blue Prince. That deer head is really looking at me funny. Is the number of prongs on its antlers a clue to guess which wine bottles to press in the cellar? That’s the mindset you should be in, otherwise this game will eat you alive.

Eventually, you’ll run out of something: keys, steps (stamina) or you’ll just plain be forced to put down rooms in a way that fences you in. It’s time to Call it a Day. The mansion resets after every day. That’s the roguelike part, you know?

But like every decent modern roguelike, there are a few avenues of permanent progression. Those are not very significant at first, but they do add up. Your personal knowledge of the game’s intricacies also increases, making it easier to go farther into the mansion.

Blue Prince is not a board game with hidden puzzle elements, nor is it an adventure game with board game mechanics. It’s both at the same time and in equal measure. That’s the genius of Blue Prince. Becoming better at the board game lets you find new clues for the puzzles and solving puzzles unlocks perks for making the board game easier. It’s a virtuous cycle.

I don’t think the randomness is just a gimmick. I wrote in my Talos II review that being able to tackle multiple puzzles at once helps alleviate frustration. Sometimes it might “click” while you’re doing something else. And there are a lot of threads to pull at in Blue Prince. And I mean a lot. The whole point of randomness is to make you think on your feet, to switch avenue of inquiry when a new opportunity presents itself, to juggle between a shot at story progression or a smaller permanent upgrade. Should I use my last few steps to bring this mysterious key to its lock? Should I put this new rare room I’ve never seen before despite the fact that it’ll sabotage my run?

Drafting a room for the first time is always a treat. What new mysteries could it contain? Or, even better, maybe it holds a clue related to a puzzle in another room that’s been nagging me.

In terms of a Myst-style puzzle adventure game, Blue Prince pulls a few tricks I’ve never seen before. Because of the random nature of drawing room cards, the devs can’t be sure if a player will have seen this or this room. So they’ve introduced redundancy in the clues. In other words, the clues to solve a puzzle can be found in more than one place. Sometimes you can even reach the same result through a completely different puzzle. Puzzle redundancy. It’s an interesting idea.

There’s also a hint system of sorts integrated in the game. In fact, I count at least four different hint systems and not a single one of them makes the faux pas of advertising itself as such. In fact, I’m not sure the word hint is ever used in the game. Machinarium had you play a trite little mini-game before giving you your hint. Blue Prince is much too clever for this. Those hints have to be earned by, you guessed it, playing the board game. It doesn’t even feel like spoiling yourself. It’s more like compensating for your puzzle solving deficiencies with your strategic acumen.

Blue Prince, like most of the better puzzle games, introduces variations on a theme. Lorelei is also a great example of this. Puzzles reuse certain concepts, dragging you further and further inside a spiral of the game’s very own puzzle logic. You can fully expect the game to develop an obsession over a particular number and develop its own symbolic universe. In fact, Blue Prince is so committed to testing your knowledge of its intricate world that it does the cheekiest thing you can imagine…

The main developer of the game, Tonda Ros, has a background in cinematography. He states in an interview that his main inspiration is a puzzle book from the eighties, Maze. I had never heard about this book before, but once you see the link, it’s really hard to unsee it. Perhaps it is why the game is blessedly free from puzzles that require you to have knowledge of programming language. Then again, the man sure likes his puns and his homophones. Be prepared for that.

I watched The Making of Animal Well recently, and it turns out Videogamedunkey’s main contribution was to convince solo dev Billy Basso to make the riddles “less evil”. I don’t think Blue Prince is like this. It certainly feels more benevolent. Is it an easy game? Hell no! But if you’re willing to put in the time, the game gives a lot of help in return. Blue Prince doesn’t ask you to track down 50 objects in a huge map with no clue as to what is where. In fact, Blue Prince never asks you to track down more than a handful of items and gives you a (vague) clue as to where they are.

Gosh, even the trophy system is clever. Firstly, all of the achievements are meaningful. No “you’ve drafted your first room, here’s a trophy” here. More importantly, it’s not enough to solve the puzzle or do the thing: the trophy only pops when your character physically picks up the gold cup. It doesn’t always spawn right when you accomplish something, but it’s always in a logical place.

Oh, and there’s also a story. It takes a surprisingly long time for it to reveal itself, but there’s a lot to unpack. You know the drill: uninhabited puzzle mansions all have documents lying around detailing the tragic backstories of its occupants. But here, for the protagonist, it’s much more personal. You’ve been in this house before. You grew up here. Where’s mommy?

Eventually you’ll reach the end and inherit the house. It’s literally the goal of the game. In a more meaningful sense, you’ll also develop a sense of ownership. Navigating the house becomes much easier. You know its tricks. You’ve also made it your own with certain upgrades. I mean, every house has its quirks. But here, instead of wobbly door handles, you have a House of Leaves with a teleporting library and you need to traverse a labyrinth to find the mansion’s sole bathroom. That is, if there is one this time around.

Reaching the end is not the end. This isn’t really a spoiler; it wouldn’t be much of an onion layer game if it didn’t have hidden layers. There’s a lot to find in Blue Prince. In fact, I don’t think that everything in the game has been found at the time of writing this. I’ve been trying to solve everything on my own without looking anything up. I can say with some pride that I got quite far. I became almost obsessive. My personal notebook looks like the scribblings of a madman. In the end, I decided to look up some things. Shameful, but there’s only so much time I can devote to testing fanciful theories. To be honest, the magic of the game was gone the second I started looking up answers. Gone is your personal quest: you are now a single voice in a sea of buzzing opinions, theories, spoilers and outright whining. That’s why I encourage you to go in blind and progress as far as you can. Besides, I’ll never understand the point of puzzles so complicated they have “to be solved by the community”. If a hundred thousand people haven’t found the answer, including people who have literally nothing better to do all day, what makes you think you’ll be the one to find it?

But more than that, the endgame loses Blue Prince’s main strength. Obviously, the deeper puzzles get extra complicated. However, the board game part becomes trivial. In other words, the board game and the puzzle game part ways. Blue Prince becomes an especially obtuse puzzle game with extra busy work every time you want to try something. I don’t resent the game for having a deeper layer, I do admire it, but I still don’t think we have an onion layer game that fully integrates its apparent game with its hidden puzzles all the way through. Maybe it’ll happen soon. It seems like there’s onion layer games coming out of the woodwork now, each with its own genius who has toiled on his baby in obscurity for a decade.

If video games are art, it’s because they can make you feel emotions through its rules. The feeling we’re reaching for here is excitement, wonder: exploring the world with the sense that there are deep meaningful messages hidden in every corner. Who doesn’t like a good mystery, especially one where you know the solution is within your grasp? A locked door is mysterious and exciting, but also frustrating. There’s a balance to be reached: hide the key in plain sight and it’s a bore; hide it too far and players will give up or look up the solution. Either way, the magic is lost.

The biggest praise I can give Blue Prince is that it sustains this thirst for discovery, this sense of wonder, for much longer than any other game I can think of. Any way you cut it, that is a massive accomplishment.