Latest news with #GoneHome
Forbes
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Here Are All The Answers To Blue Prince's Puzzles
Blue Prince Blue Prince is a surefire GOTY contender for 2025, racking up the highest critic scores of this first third of the year. As such, I thought you might want the answer to every puzzle to blast your way through it. But no, I'm not doing that. Get out of here. No answers for you. While I know there are going to be a dozens of guides out there unlocking the seemingly countless mysteries of the Blue Prince mansion, I would without question advise that you not look at any of them. At least not for a long, long time. If you want to play this game at all, there is really nothing useful about looking up puzzle answers, as that's more or less the entire game. All the answers are found within the mansion itself, as sometimes they will literally be spelled out if you find certain things, or they are solved in your own mind perhaps before even the game gives you many clues. I've described Blue Prince as a combination of Myst and Gone Home, where Myst has its endless array of island puzzles you need to solve, and Gone Home tells the story of a family inside a mystery mansion which…you did not need a guide for. Blue Prince I am not ready to declare Blue Prince GOTY or even Game of the Generation like I've seen some critics rave, but it's stellar. One reason is that solving one of the bigger puzzles in Blue Prince creates a sense of euphoria that is hard to replicate in other games. I seems basic. A door in a cliff finally opens, and it elicited an audible cheer as I sat in my room by myself playing it. As a compromise here, Blue Price can actually be a kind of fun co-op game, but not in the traditional sense. If other friends are playing, you can share a Google Doc or hop in discord to share clues and puzzle them out between you. In my case, I started out doing this, but now we've stuck to small hints rather than the big answers we really do want to solve for ourselves, much less looking up internet guides to figure them out. I mean ultimately, do what you want. I'm not the puzzle cheating police here. But I will say there's little point to play Blue Prince at all if you're not going to try to solve the house by yourself, even if at times it can be extremely frustrating. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Bluesky Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Blue Prince review – exploring this game may become your new obsession
My first day with Blue Prince, I told myself I'd just have a little taste before turning to my usual evening K-drama. Before I knew it the sun had long since set and my lounge was lit only by my Steam Deck and a game that had fast become my new obsession. It is the sort of game that feels as though it were made just for you – and the elements that make it truly special are best discovered without forewarning, so forgive any vagueness in what follows. In a similar style to What Remains of Edith Finch or Gone Home, Blue Prince has you exploring your character's atmospherically uninhabited family home. But as in Outer Wilds, your exploration is limited: you are frequently forced to start afresh with little more than the snippets of knowledge you've gained. Each expedition is further complicated by Rogue-like randomisation: the house's shapeshifting floor plan is a five-by-nine grid to be filled anew each day with tiles drafted by you, a feature that some players may recognise from the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. But in this case there's a random choice of three options whenever you open a door. Different rooms serve different functions. Some provide resources such as keys, money, energy or gems (required to draft more interesting rooms), and these are occasionally locked behind relatively simple standalone puzzles. Others deplete your stocks, like the gymnasium that wearies you each time you enter. A few, such as the boiler room or utility closet, offer special features that affect the rest of the house, occasionally even beyond just that day. On every in-game day, you enter the house, draft rooms, and explore until you run out of energy or openable doors. Rinse and repeat. The point? Ostensibly, to fulfil the stipulation laid out in a deceased great uncle's will to find an elusive 46th room and thereby inherit the estate. But like a parfait dessert, this game is deliciously layered. At first the sprawling house can feel sparse, with its lifeless rooms and the game's calming cel-shaded art style and succinct sound design and music. You'll focus on the draft, learning as you go that the further you get from the entrance, the more likely you are to draw rarer rooms; that most rooms can only be drafted once per run; and that it's always worth trying a room you haven't seen before even if it doesn't seem useful in the moment. Before too long, you'll start to find objects that hint at future discoveries: car keys when you've yet to see a car (or even considered venturing outside); notes written by different hands; larger puzzles you have no idea how or why to solve. You'll scribble down hints and set goals for future runs, or – as I did – take copious screenshots of the letters, photographs and other artefacts found throughout. As the rooms become more familiar, you'll notice more details and wonder if they're background art, environmental storytelling, or clues. In another game such repetition could feel tedious, but Blue Prince sets a gently rewarding pace, the randomisation nudging you to try new things and make new discoveries each day. Thoughtful design details smooth your way: most locked doors only require any generic key, the more convoluted puzzles remain solved even when the house resets, the use of discrete energy units consumed when you enter a room – rather than a ticking clock – means you can always take your time. I never felt in danger of not being able to solve a problem, and multiple puzzles ended up having easier solutions than I initially suspected. And then there's the fact that Blue Prince has the best titular homophone in video games (sorry Fortnite). It's a game about the blueprints of the Mount Holly Estate, and naturally a magical mansion like this has a story; it's this, the family behind it, and the fantastical wider world in which they live, that will draw you to the 46th room and far, far beyond. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Blue Prince is out now, £25
New York Times
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
With Secrets in Every Room, This Manor Mystery Enthralls
The mystery house, in which players explore a sprawling residence in search of secrets, is one of the richest themes in video games. Standouts across several genres include Resident Evil, Gone Home, Castlevania and What Remains of Edith Finch. It is an approach that began in 1980 with a game titled Mystery House, the debut of the influential designer Roberta Williams as well as the first adventure game with graphics. And it gets an ingenious entry this week in Blue Prince, which is enthralling critics with its layers of interlocking puzzles: logic riddles, word games, math problems and many codes and passwords. The puzzles in Blue Prince start with its title, a play on words that takes on increasing significance as you unravel its story, a timely parable of the price of dissent under autocratic rule. Even when the credits roll — like in last year's indie hit Animal Well — you realize you are just getting started. There are many more secrets left within its walls. Mystery house games captivate players because they are about 'the enchantment of an everyday home space,' said Melissa Kagen, who wrote the book 'Wandering Games.' 'What if the kitchen were not just a kitchen?' she said. 'What if there were secret passageways out of the kitchen into some other world that only you were going to be able to find?' In Blue Prince, which is available on the PC PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S and PC, you are poised to inherit an eccentric 45-room manor from your great-uncle, the Baron Sinclair, if you can prove yourself by locating its rumored 46th room. Complicating the assignment is that the manor's layout changes each day, but some is within your control: Each time you open a door, you may choose one of three rooms it leads into. At first you find ordinary chambers like the hallway or the den; deeper inside you begin to uncover tantalizing rarities like the clock tower and the secret garden. Keys, of course, are essential for further progress, as are a variety of other tools and mechanisms that layer more complexity and mystery into each attempt. (Some of the game's brainteasers were inspired by the works of the mathematician-magician-philosophers Martin Gardner and Raymond Smullyan.) 'The game is pretty deceptive about its size,' admits its creator, Tonda Ros. He added, 'We're letting the player discover, which is really my favorite type of thing.' Blue Prince is so fully realized and tightly constructed that it is surprising to learn that it is Ros's first video game. 'When I started, I didn't even intend to make a game,' he said. 'I just wanted to explore the technology.' But within 24 hours, he had started making Blue Prince. Three months later he had a full prototype. 'I thought, 'OK, another six months to polish and I'll be done.'' That was in 2016. Ros had been working as a commercial director but dropped everything to focus on the ever-expanding Blue Prince. He mostly worked solo, although important collaborators such as the visual artist Davide Pellino and the jazz duo Trigg & Gusset helped create the game's distinct atmosphere. Ros's immediate mastery of the form makes a bit more sense when you learn that he has long had a hobby of designing puzzles for his friends, for whom he hosts a semiregular gaming getaway. Inspired by the 1992 board game Jewels in the Attic, which is designed to be played across an entire house, Ros has spent months concocting an elaborate, site-specific multiroom experience for whichever Airbnb he had booked. But Blue Prince's biggest inspiration, Ros said, is a different kind of domestic game, a genre of illustrated book known as the 'armchair treasure hunt' that asks readers to solve a maddeningly cryptic puzzle to win a real-world prize. The first, in 1979, was 'Masquerade,' by Kit Williams, but the main influence on Blue Prince was 'Maze,' by Christopher Manson, whom Ros commissioned to create a special puzzle hidden deep within the manor. In a complex game like Blue Prince, Kagen said, it is tempting to identify actions that actually alter the game space, like selecting the next room, as the central mechanics. But in mystery houses, the most important mechanic is comprehension. Blue Prince, she said, reminds her of the House of Eternal Return, a permanent installation in Santa Fe, N.M., by the art collective Meow Wolf. 'It's a big old Victorian mansion, and it seems just like a house,' she said. 'But then you open the refrigerator door, and there's a sliding passageway into an alien planet.' When you start to understand, doors will open to rooms that were never before possible.
