Developed/Published by: Dogubomb / Raw Fury
Released: 10/04/2025
Completed: 22/04/2025
Completion: Entered room 46.

I have great respect for the craft and effort put into Blue Prince.

But I don’t think Blue Prince respects me.

…

Before I dig into that, let’s actually explain what Blue Prince is. At a high level, it’s a puzzle adventure deck-building rogue-like-like (phew)  in that it takes design cues from things like Myst or the 7th Guest. So you wander a mysterious location–in this case, a stately home–solving logic puzzles and pulling levers in the hope they do something you can at least vaguely understand, all in an attempt to get to the “antechamber” room you can see at the other end of the map.  

However, in this mysterious location, every time you enter a new room, you place that room on the map from a “hand” of locations drawn from an (unseen, but slightly manipulatable) deck. Rooms feature up to four exits (though may be dead ends) and can contain puzzles, objects or actively negative effects, and can influence other rooms. So, for example, you can draft a utility closet and turn on the power for the garage, whether or not you’ve drafted it already–so you might prioritise drafting it if you haven’t. 

You place these rooms, moving through them until you either are stuck placing only dead ends or run out of steps. Each day you’ve got a limited amount of rooms you can move through (including backtracking) and once that ends, your day is immediately over and you must restart with everything reset–other than any permanent upgrades you’ve managed to unlock or bonuses for the next day, which include new areas, upgraded rooms, and things like daily allowances of the game’s currency (gems and coins) or even extra steps.

If this sounds like a great piece of design–it is! Blue Prince has taken a format–the rogue-like-like deckbuilder–which isn’t always a slam dunk, and tied it logically to 3D exploration in a way that feels both surprising and exciting. The simple puzzle of putting the home together–trying to use dead ends in a way that doesn’t cut you off from the antechamber, placing rooms you haven’t seen before, hoping for the rooms you know you need–is “one more go” par excellence: you want to place another room, and each room leads to another. And if you fail? Dead ends, out of steps? Well, if you start again you’ll already get to place more rooms. So start again!

But here’s where respect comes in. Where, for me, the cracks begin to show. Because Blue Prince isn’t a “fair” Rogue-like-like. You can quibble the concept of fairness in games in the lineage of Rogue–after all, the original game is doubtlessly impossible to complete on the majority of runs–so let me state first that I believe that Rogue derivatives should aspire to every run being winnable. Doesn’t mean that the player wouldn’t have to play perfectly but it should be possible.

Why does this matter? I’m certain that a lot of people already disagree with me on this as a starting position–and if they’re already primed to defend Blue Prince, note that the game actually has an achievement for finishing it on a single run from a clean save, which I’ll get to. It matters because I’ve got an addictive personality. It matters because Blue Prince, more than any other game I’ve played, made me wonder why we love Rogue derivatives but hate loot boxes.

Yes, ok, loot boxes cost money. But Rogue-like-likes cost time. A game with loot boxes, sure, a whale can spend thousands–they miss a hit? That dopamine rush is just another spin away. A Rogue-like-like?  You died, you made a bad decision, you didn’t get to the end? That dopamine rush isn’t just promised by completing the game. It’s soaked into the entire thing. You get a hit on every draw, every placement. Every tiny success is a tiny loot box being opened, chipping away at one big one offering success or failure. 

But the trick is you fail on one, and that entire loot box is taken away. And in an “unfair” rogue-like-like, sometimes that bit loot box just contains “failure”. Nothing you could have done about it.

The game cost you an hour, maybe more, of your life, and said “give me more of your life. You’ll enjoy it. This time you might win! Think how good that would feel.”

Call this moralising if you like, but I know myself, and I find that promise very, very hard to walk away from even when you know the game is rigged. I’m good with money. I’m not good with time. I’m the king of time as a sunk cost–but I also know when I’m having my time wasted.

And Blue Prince wastes your time. 

Look, there are many times in the game that you’ll make a mistake that will end a run. But I also had many runs where it either became obvious I couldn’t win–I never saw the object I needed for a room, or I never saw a room I needed full stop–or that the game just gave me a clear fail state: hands of dead-ends, or most egregiously, only rooms that would block off the antechamber (after I’d unlocked it!)

In these cases, the expectation is, I suppose, that you’re doing something else to help “build” your ability to win on the next run–a classic Rogue-like-like move. Setting aside that I had many (many!) runs where I was able to give myself nothing on the next run–many rooms that give you a “next run” benefit being dead ends or otherwise frustrating if you’re trying to “win” on each run–such design gives the game away that your time is being wasted. You weren’t going to win. Give Blue Prince an hour, it’ll give you a wee bonus next hour. Just one more hit. Aren’t you having fun?

The most egregious thing, however, is that in all of these cases I was trying to “win” the game by doing what it told me the “win” state was–entering the antechamber. I was aware there was a further “room 46” and that Blue Prince is a game of cascading mysteries, but I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a “fuck you” as blatant as the experience of reaching the antechamber for the first time. I won’t detail it, but Blue Prince does nothing to celebrate or reward you for this, or really any wins. It’s not even justifiable as a critique of the Rogue-like-like loot box: it’s more like being told you’ve been given a present, and being given an near-endless Matryoshka gift box where when you get to the end there’s just a note that says “This isn’t the present.”

It really does feel to me like Blue Prince goes out of its way to waste your time. Much has been made of the “pay attention to everything” puzzles, which can have a cryptic crossword-esque trick to them, but the issue with them as with everything else in this game is that they’re a one-trick pony–and in a Rogue-like-like, you have to see the pony do that trick over and over again! I can see absolutely no reason why after I unlock a safe once I have to go to it and tediously type the code in again every run, but the nadir are the puzzle rooms, where you do things which are barely puzzles. I mean just weeks ago I was trying to find some good in Donkey Kong Jr. Math, where you just do simple math puzzles, but in Blue Prince there’s a room where you literally just do Donkey Kong Jr. Math-level puzzles over and over again! Even if you love Blue Prince’s core and don’t consider multiple runs a waste of time why would you ever want to do any of these puzzles more than once? It’s not like you’re doing something entertaining in itself, like a Picross or something. It’s just… do some maths!

Never mind that if you even want to understand a lot of the early game, you want the Magnifying Glass item, which I didn’t see on like my first… three or four runs (so hours into the game.) Meaning that in maybe my second go I’d unlocked a room, solved the puzzle that would allow me to look at things in that room, and then… gained nothing from it, because I didn’t have another item. I literally solved a puzzle and got nothing. Nothing!!! Too bad, RNG said no.

(To be completely fair to Blue Prince, what persists and what doesn’t is strangely inconsistent. A few rooms do keep things set between runs–probably because they involve such a huge amount of running between levers.)

This fucking thing.

Here’s my take, ultimately. A video game lives or dies on its mechanics. I’ve written previously on the transition between games as pure mechanics–you play them for the joy of play–and narrative–you play them to see the end. A Rogue-like-like is one of the purest attempts to split the difference, and the requirement, in my own framework, is that the game doesn’t misplace the “reward” (i.e. “I beat a run”) in the timescale of “I have seen either all the content or enough content to understand the systems so completely I am no longer surprised.”

Players who love the systems, get, with Rogue-like-like, the ability to play the game as long as they want–like an old school arcade game, almost. Players who want the experience, the reward, can move on feeling good rather than feeling beholden to it. A game like Slay The Spire or Balatro is successful–a winning run is possible from the start, and doesn’t individually take too long, but there’s far more depth if you want it. You can stop whenever you want, because there are no carrots to dangle. Just your own enjoyment.

The joy in Blue Prince’s mechanics becomes short-lived, and I don’t think so much because placing and exploring rooms isn’t fun–it’s because everything around it becomes such a pain. By my last runs, I was literally running full speed through the mansion, and every action I’d done a million times already felt like a punishment. But the insidious promise of success–that my luck would come around, that the RNG would release me–kept me there, like a drunk down bad at the blackjack table. You can say I should know how to walk away. I say: they’re done everything in their power to keep me there, and they aren’t even playing fair. Who’s really to blame?

Blue Prince didn’t respect me, so I stopped respecting it. It has all the worst impulses of Rogue-like-like design all wrapped up into a deceivingly attractive package, and I’ve left it with a completely oppositional viewpoint. I think this game tries to flatter you that you’re a genius while really it’s turned you into a rat mindlessly pushing a button hoping for treats, a donkey endlessly chasing a carrot that’ll never come.

Logic and reasoning are the reason we’re human, don’t waste them on this.

Will I ever play it again? No, and frankly, it did a lot to make video games feel like a completely waste of my time in general. A truly empty experience.

Final Thought: Above I mentioned that you can beat Blue Prince on a fresh save file. But obviously, no one could beat it first time and I believe, at this point, that RNG would make it impossible to beat the game every time even with full knowledge of the game first (though I’m willing to be proven wrong–it doesn’t change much.) 

*Spoilers follow*

If you’re wondering when I explicitly lost respect for Blue Prince, it actually wasn’t when the Antechamber had a key and a note in it and not even like, an achievement for reaching it (a weak reward, but at least something.) It was when I discovered that the route I’d found to the underground (the fountain) using that key led to… an area where all I could do was move a minecart, and if I tried to change the lake height to get to the actual “endgame” I could no longer use that door. Which led to the realisation I could complete the game without ever actually going to the antechamber first. 

I will give Blue Prince one point here–the game does feature a lot of different routes for solutions–but it’s really there I discovered Matryoshka gift boxes weren’t empty: they were a cascading collection of “fuck you”s.

For example–and this is likely to surprise anyone who has played this–I beat the game without ever placing the “foundation” room. Blue Prince’s RNG is so weirdly punitive I think I only saw it once, or twice, and didn’t place it as I needed other rooms (for real though, why is it a rare room. Why doesn’t it just always come up after the first few runs?) In the end I beat the game by using only the tomb and pump room, which requires an annoying amount of the game’s already annoying RNG and doesn’t even need the key, which made everything I’d spent so much time doing feel like even more a complete waste of time. 

But I’m free now. And I’m never going back.