At a time when some people worry they may never be able to afford a home, it seems cruel to make a video game in which a kid gets a free mansion.
But you won’t feel that way after you see what he has to do to get it. In the video game Blue Prince (PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC) a fourteen year old kid has to search his grand uncle’s massive estate for the secret 46th room in a 45 room mansion. But to do so, he has to get through what I can only describe as a cross between a board game, an escape room, and a sadistic puzzle game.
Though why he’d bother is beyond me.
Sure, having your own mansion would be cool, especially if it was free. But even if you set aside the inheritance taxes he’d have to pay, and the property taxes, his Granduncle’s house has a major structural flaw that would make selling it, let alone living in it, a huge hassle: the building is in a constant state of flux.
You see, every time you open a door in Blue Prince, you have to choose what kind of room you’ll find on the other side. Will it be a hallway? A bedroom? A closet? A kitchen? An observatory complete with a really big telescope? The choice is yours…
Well, sort of. At any given time, you’re only given three options. And while there are numerous kinds of rooms — I saw dozens in my many playthroughs — they seem to come up rather randomly.
You also have to be careful when picking what room to enter, as the entire house is on a grid, and it’s entirely possible that you may inadvertently block a door you’ve not yet opened in another room. Or you might make it so you can go no further.
Though you can bring up the grid to make sure you’re not about to box yourself in.
Further complicating matters,
any time you step through a door in Blue Prince — even one you’ve stepped through before — you lose a step. And you only have 50 steps each day.
Thankfully, once you’re in a room, you can move all you like. Which is good since you’re going to want to search every room thoroughly (as I’ll get to in a moment). It’s only when you go from one room to another that you lose a step.
Fifty is also how many steps you have at the start of a day. There are ways to get more, such as eating bananas (which adds 3 steps) or apples (2 steps). Though you don’t bring these snacks with you, you have to find them in the mansion as you search for the missing room.
Good thing some rooms always have certain items, while the screen where you pick the rooms also indicates what, if anything, you might find there. For instance, you always find something to eat in the kitchen, while other rooms may have keys or gems or gold coins.
Though when there are items to be found,
you have to actually find them, they don’t just appear in your inventory. Which is where the whole “you can walk around a room all you want” thing comes into play.
That is, unless you find a room like the Commissary, where you can use any gold coins you find to purchase keys and other helpful items.
In addition, there are also rooms which can alter aspects of the game. There are, for instance, rooms where you’re prevented from bringing up the Floor Plan. There are also ones where you gain two steps every time you enter the room, or lose two of them.
Some doors in Blue Prince also require you to spend one of the aforementioned gems to open, or they might be locked and need a key to open. Though any key will do. Along with being in a state of flux, the house apparently uses the same lock on every lockable door, while the keys are made of an unstable material that causes them to disappear after a single use.
I’m beginning to think this place was made by the people who built Doctor Who’s T.A.R.D.I.S.. And that they’re jerks.
Now, as I mentioned,
you start each day in Blue Prince with 50 steps. But the game doesn’t end when you run out of them. Or if you have nowhere else to go. Instead, you have to leave for the day and start over tomorrow. And I do mean “start over.” Not only does the house reset back to how it was when you opened the first door on the first day, but you also lose all the keys, gems, and other items you’ve found.
Oh, and if all of this wasn’t enough to drive you so crazy that you build a physically impossible house and then leave it to your favorite grandnephew (or maybe it’s his least favorite grandnephew; that would explain a lot), Blue Prince also has moody, atmospheric music that really adds to the tension and the feeling that you’re all alone in this bizarre house.
All of which makes for a really interesting, but also really challenging puzzle game, one that will keep you coming back day after day until you finish it.
But that’s about it. If you’re like me, once you’ve found the secret room, you’ll never want to play this game again. For a while. Like a year. Okay, maybe six months.
The irony being…
that the things in Blue Prince that I could complain about, and are about to, are not things that would make me want to play this more. They just make every playthrough slightly more irritating.
For starters, Blue Prince needs some difficulty options. But just ones that would give you more or fewer steps each day, or an “easy” option in which you wouldn’t lose all your keys and gems when you leave for the day. Y’know, things that make this better for people who want more or less of a challenge.
The option to turn the music down or off would’ve been great, too. Though more the former. Blue Prince‘s soundtrack really does adds to the atmosphere; it was just distractingly loud on occasion.
I also wish your grand uncle’s interior decorator had employed a more varied color palette, as many of the rooms are so drab and dreary that they start to look alike after a while, even when they’re not. Though now that I’ve written that down, I’m wondering if that wasn’t intentional…
Even with these issues, though,
Blue Prince remains a challenging, if sadistic puzzle game that will give your brain a good workout. And your accountant a heart attack.
SCORE: 8.0/10
