Blue Prince (video game)

Blue Prince
Developer(s)	Dogubomb
Publisher(s)	Raw Fury
Director(s)	Tonda Ros
Engine	Unity
Platform(s)	PlayStation 5 Windows Xbox Series X/S
Release	WW: April 10, 2025
Genre(s)	Puzzle-adventure, roguelike
Mode(s)	Single-player

Blue Prince is a puzzle adventure game with roguelike elements developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury. It was released on April 10, 2025, for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S systems.

The game challenges the player to explore a mansion with ever-shifting rooms, represented by ad-hoc construction of the mansion's rooms through the drafting of randomized cards representing new rooms, with the goal to reach a hidden 46th room. Failing to reach the 46th room after using all their footsteps forces them to leave the mansion and restart with most of the mansion reset and randomized for the next run. In addition, the mansion includes lore and other mysteries that can be solved by the player.

Blue Prince was developed over eight years by solo developer Tonda Ros, influenced by the illustrated book Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson and other puzzle books along with tabletop games that featured drafting.

The game received critical acclaim upon release.

Gameplay

The player takes the role of Simon P. Jones, who has been willed the Mt. Holly Estate, a mansion owned by his deceased great uncle Herbert S. Sinclair. The one stipulation in Herbert's will is that Simon must locate a hidden 46th room within the mansion in order to secure his inheritance. Failure to reach that room within the span of a single day means Simon must start the search fresh the next day, as the house's architecture is rearranged overnight. While discovering the 46th room is the primary goal of the game, there are other mysteries that the player can discover related to the mansion, such as the disappearance of children's author Marion Marigold.

The mansion is represented by a grid of 45 room tiles, nine rows by five. Only two rooms persist in the same locations every day: the Entrance Hall where the player starts, and the Antechamber that leads to the 46th room on the opposite side of the map. Upon opening a door to a new room, the player is prompted to draft that room by choosing one of three randomly selected floor plans to place in the adjacent space. However, the doors and walls of the new room must align with rooms already placed, and a number of rooms are dead-ends.

When placing a room, the player is informed of the room's contents. This can include keys (used to open locked doors to other rooms), gems (used to purchase certain floor plans), coins (used to purchase food and tools), and tools that can help access spaces in specific rooms. Rooms may also include puzzles, some which are isolated to the room itself, while others require searching through multiple rooms to deduce the answer. Rooms have different tiers depending on which row of the grid they have been played, with higher tier rooms having more complex puzzles or more lucrative rewards.

Traversing from one room into another costs one "step". The player begins each day with 50 steps, but can replenish them by eating food items and entering bedrooms. Once the player exhausts their steps or otherwise finds they cannot progress further, they are forced to leave the mansion for the night and abandon all objects they have collected. There are means to have items carry between runs, as well as gain permanent upgrades that provide extra steps, gems, or coins at the start of a run. The player also retains knowledge of the larger puzzles in the mansion, and is encouraged to take notes. Once the player has successfully reached the 46th room for the first time, they unlock challenges for future runs, and can collect trophies to denote completed challenges.

Development

Blue Prince was primarily developed by Tonda Ros. Prior to development he had frequently held annual gatherings for his friends at different rental vacation homes, spending time to devise a puzzle game spanning the home based on ideas in the 1992 board game Jewels in the Attic. He had been inspired by the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, which had shown him that it was possible to create complete games with a simple toolset of development tools. After playing through the games Gone Home and The Witness, Ros became inspired to test ideas with the Unity game engine, finding development would be easier than he originally thought.

A principal influence for Ros for Blue Prince was the Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson, a book featuring 45 illustrated rooms that challenged the reader to find the shortest path from the entrance to the center of the maze and back out, and when first published, featured a monetary prize for those that solved it within a limited time. Maze had intrigued Ros in his youth, and he considered it a predecessor to modern day first person adventure games. Ros was able to find an online Maze group and through them contacted and commissioned Manson to develop art and one of the puzzles within Blue Prince. Other puzzles in the game were inspired by those of Martin Gardner and Raymond Smullyan. Other "armchair mystery" books contributed to Ros' ideas for Blue Prince, including Masquerade by Kit Williams. Another area of influence for Blue Prince were card and tabletop games that featured drafting, where players select a card or other token from a random pool, such as in Magic: The Gathering and Agricola. He wanted to make the puzzle solving similar to how The Legend of Zelda games would place clues to puzzle solutions in disparate locations but would not require the player to find all the clues to progress.

Around 2016, Ros started to toy with developing a prototype, intending to only spend about six months on it, but as his ideas came together, opted to quit his commercial development job to focus on the game, spending eight years to develop it further, using his private savings as well as ad revenue for a Magic: The Gathering website that he had been running. While the game was mostly developed solo, Ros commissioned work from others, including art director Davide Pellino and the jazz duo Trigg & Gusset, to help with the atmosphere of the game. Ros had brought Pellino around two years into development to replace the base Unity assets he used to prototype the game with original art; Ros thought this effort would have taken six months, but this extended to three years to develop a unique art style for the game. The game was fully playable by 2021, after which Ros spent most of the rest of the development period balancing the game, making sure that hints to the puzzles and game's structure were presented in multiple places, as well as "widening the well" by expanding the mysteries and supporting lore that the player could find within the game.

Ros was originally planning to use the name "Bequest", but during development, a game with that name was released on Steam, so he sought another title. He opted on Blue Prince partially on its wordplay on "blueprints", but it also became a theme for puzzles with the game. Ros uses the concept of "drafting" as a double entendre, referring to both the selection of a new room from a random set, and the idea of drawing up blueprints in an architectural plan.

Reception

Reception

Aggregate score

Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	84/100 (PlayStation) 92/100 (Windows) 89/100 (Xbox)

Review scores

Publication	Score
Eurogamer	5/5
Game Informer	9.5/10
GameSpot	9/10
IGN	9/10
PC Gamer (US)	92

The Blue Prince release on Windows received "universal acclaim" according to review aggregator Metacritic with an average score of 92/100. Versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S received "generally favorable" reviews. At the time of release, it was the highest-rated game for 2025 based on Metacritic averages.

In Eurogamer's five star review, Christian Donlan singled out the game keeping its secrets hidden and releasing them slowly as the most impressive aspect. "It's the pleasure of finding hidden aspects to things you thought you understood in full, the pleasure of coming back to something you thought was simple and finding that it's not simple at all."

External links

• Official website