16-04-2025
Blue Prince is the wrong kind of frustrating
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We'll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you're playing this weekend, and what theories it's got you kicking around.
I showed the notes I've been keeping while playing Blue Prince to my wife recently, because I like giving her periodic reminders that she's married to a definitively unwell person. I won't replicate them here—spoilers, and all—but suffice it to say that they resemble nothing so much as a rudimentary version of classic internet mainstay Time Cube, full of half-scrawled ideas, snippets of code, rough descriptions of images, and hastily crafted maps. The product of a cheerfully disordered mind.
I like this kind of stuff. The last game that caused me to fill pages with these kinds of rantings (in a physical journal, although my Prince stuff is just in an email draft) was Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, which Dogubomb's first-person exploration game resembles in many ways. Blue Prince—say it out loud, if the pun eludes you at first, as it did me—can't match Simogo's 2024 puzzler on things like style and tone, for all that it comes in an appealing package. But as a giant puzzle box, masquerading as a house? It might have the edge—when it lets you get to the good stuff, at least.
Here's where I'm forced to make my terrible confession: Not only have I not finished Blue Prince, despite having had weeks to do so, but I also find myself woefully out of step with my peers in the gaming press when it comes to what it does right. I like the game—bordering on a mild obsession. But its dedication to randomness, to making me play a game I don't like very much in order to get to the one that's burning its way through my brain, was ultimately too much for me. I had to set it aside, for my tattered sanity if nothing else.
It's like this: Blue Prince puts you in the shoes of the young inheritor of a vast mansion called Mt. Holly, tasked with discovering its mysterious '46th room.' (Tricky, given that the house is clearly laid out on a 5 x 9 grid.) Mt. Holly is no ordinary manse, though: Every day, starting from its entrance hall, you draft a new floorplan for it, picking rooms from a set of possibilities every time you approach a new door. The day progresses until you either run out of stamina, or somehow block yourself from forward progress—either flummoxed by increasingly stringent security measures that pop up the deeper you get into the house, or just because you were an idiot who always loses at Carcassone, and blocked off all possible exits from all your available rooms. Within the various bedrooms, pantries, hallways, and more, you'll find clues, puzzles, and lore notes, helping you to figure out the game's intriguing story, or just how to open some door you've accidentally dropped halfway across the damn house. Through a blend of deliberate building and random discovery, you slowly build up your options, and your understanding, making Mt. Holly feel like it's truly yours.
I don't like it.
I get it, mind you. I understand the ways the game deploys randomness to break up its basic puzzle-solving rhythms; the ways it deliberately courts feelings of triumph and frustration as you try to work your way toward one particular map point that you know has something pivotal lurking within it, only to be stymied because you've been presented with nothing but fucking left-turning rooms for the fifth goddamn time in a row. Building the house is a game, and a mildly interesting one: You slowly unlock new resources that give you more options, better ways to predict paths or overcome locked doors. Cracking a big secret that gets you better access to resources, tools, or new routes feels exultant—as does drafting a room you've never used before because you desperately need it to fit in on your map, only to realize it holds the secret to some other mystery. It's all cool, in theory.
In practice, half the time I feel like I'm doing a fascinating escape room, only to be suddenly forced to switch over to a Sudoku, or maybe some jumping jacks, in order to get back to the thing that's actually got me excited to play. Randomness has value in game design—I'm a person who can count his playtime in The Binding Of Isaac in terms of weeks, so I'm well aware of that. But Blue Prince's random layer, and its more thoughtful one, don't gel for me in the way I think they're supposed to. Sometimes, navigating around that randomness becomes a game in itself, forcing a different kind of lateral thinking than the work of cracking codes or navigating combinations. But I'll be 100 percent honest and say that it's not a game I'm especially jazzed to play. (And while I'm drawing parallels, I'll note that Lorelei had this same irritation baked into it: Intrusions meant to break up the puzzles, except I really like the puzzles, guys, I swear.) The key breaking point came the last time I stumbled onto some clue that gave context to a different puzzle in a different room of the house—and the broken sigh I let out when I realized the game would force me to jump through its various hoops before letting me test that newfound knowledge out. I know I'll revisit the game at some point, crack back open that insane and rambling email draft, and start teasing out new mysteries again. But I also know I won't be able to stop myself from asking: Dang, what if this was just the parts of the video game that I liked?
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