Full House

On the beguiling mansion puzzler 'Blue Prince'

One of the many memorable images in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is of a wintry estate: The camera slowly pushes up the driveway, beckoning us closer as ominous music hums.

Its main character, a disgraced journalist, is diving headlong into detective work for a wealthy older man. It’s a saga of family secrets, murder, and unsolved disappearances… and the deliberate zoom up to the man’s mansion lays an unshakable, portentous tone.

I thought of this image frequently during Blue Prince, a beguiling and utterly transfixing roguelike puzzle game. Sixty-seven times, to be exact… at least as of the writing of this piece.

Each in-game day of Blue Prince begins with a similarly framed zoom into a gargantuan estate: Up the driveway, over a fountain, and through the front door, where you assume the first-person perspective of the main character. You are Simon P. Jones, a young man who has been willed this mansion by your great-uncle, Herbert Sinclair.

It’s all yours… if you can solve a serpentine mystery. The house consists of 45 rooms whose secrets hold the key to a secret room: Room 46. Find it, and the Mt. Holly estate is yours.

The catch? No, it’s not haunted… at least not by anything but secrets. Mt. Holly is a fluid mansion; it never stays the same, and its layout often defies logic. Which rooms are accessible, and where they’re located, change every day. You, Simon, are in charge of designing an estate that will allow you to find Room 46.

You begin each day with 50 steps, and every time you cross a threshold into a new room, you lose a step. Each time you open one of the mansion’s doors, you are given three room options to choose from.

Will you draft a multi-door hallway? A bedroom that provides you with additional steps? A storeroom that gives you valuable supplies, but is a dead end?

These are just three of many room types you’ll encounter, and you must mix and match them to reach Room 46.

When you run out of steps, the day is over, and you begin a new one with a blank blueprint and empty pockets. You are not allowed to keep any items that you find from the previous day. The rooms are the same, but everything is different.

The game’s setup seems rigid at first; the basic rules and story are explained briskly, and then you’re free to roam. My first couple of layouts were almost comically unuseful; I learned about dead ends and the importance of keys and gems the hard way.

Once I got the hang of Blue Prince’s overarching strategy, the real game began. But the closer I looked at its deceptively simple surfaces- courtyards, staff quarters, office spaces - the more intricate it became.

What do the dueling paintings scattered across the estate mean? Do the photos in the Dark Room mean anything? And why are there random chess pieces popping up in certain rooms?

Blue Prince is a nearly decade-long endeavor for Tonda Ros, its creator and the head of indie game studio Dogubomb. Nearly everything about the final result feels neurotic and seamless: Simple gameplay mechanics, clean yet distinct cel-shaded animation, elaborate lore, and labyrinthine hallways and riddles. It instilled a kind of manic fixation in me that I haven’t really felt while playing a video game before.

For each time I felt a sense of accomplishment at solving one of its mysteries, there were 3 more that left me baffled. The sheer number of puzzles spread across the mansion is daunting. A notecard I found in a room early on advised me to grab a notebook and start writing things down.

This was an absolute necessity: While some of the puzzles are contained in the room you find them in, many are not. You also may not be able to solve them the day you discover them, as they require drafting a room that you don’t always have access to.

Here’s an early example compiled from my Blue Prince journal:

Day 3- Safe in Boudoir…combo?

Day 8- Newspaper articles in Archive: 02-22-87, 08-22-85, 01-27-86… Safe combos?

Day 10- Opened Boudoir safe.

“Beneath every history, another history.”- Wolf Hall¹

You don’t see anyone else roaming the halls of Mt. Holly, which gives Blue Prince an incredibly isolating feeling. It is just you, the rooms you draft, your notes, and, occasionally, some small animals.

The servants are allegedly milling about, leaving out dinner for you if you make it deep enough into the manor on a given day, or tidying up stray items you may have missed in certain rooms. The sparseness of Mt. Holly is crucial to the game’s effectiveness; I often felt adrift in a Sisyphean maze, solving puzzles for the amusement of a dead man while also excavating his past.

Entire histories are hidden within Mt. Holly’s many mind games: personal, familial, regional, even astrological. Its West Wing houses the secrets of a long-dead woman, while the library contains several books that provide valuable drafting tips, puzzle hints, and lore dumps.

And as you press on, the game rewards obsessive curiosity. You can discover ways to smuggle useful items like shovels or keycards from one day to the next, unearth permanent bonuses that allow you to increase your step count, solve puzzles that provide you with a daily coin or gem allowance, and much, much more.

It took me a little over 50 in-game days to reach Room 46. The day I did this, I had a bigger victory, though: For the first time, I created a floor plan that filled every single square on the game’s 9x5 layout.

I had become so obsessed with this grid that finding the secret room became an unattainable afterthought… until it wasn’t. Things I’d done weeks ago in the game suddenly came together; puzzles had hidden dimensions I hadn’t explored, the mansion and its surrounding grounds² had even more hallways weaving up, down, and sideways.

And I am still exploring. Finding Room 46 rolls the end credits, but you’re still free to keep drafting and solving. Hidden tunnels shift around each day, and there are secret chambers whose doors remain sealed until I figure out which room or rooms hold the answers to unlocking them.

I will never fully complete this game, but that spurs admiration more than frustration. Do I care about the royal legacy and endless mythology of Mt. Holly? Not really! Do I feel a profound sense of discovery and accomplishment every time I find something new in this fucking house? You bet!

Blue Prince is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

1. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I used this quote in my review of Avowed earlier this year. It’s a good quote!

2. Yes, you can go outside.