I\u2019m never more excited than when I\u2019m playing games where I\u2019m not even sure the main mechanic is fundamentally interesting. Despite hours playing Blue Prince and still thinking about it when I\u2019m doing anything else, somehow, delightfully, I can\u2019t figure it out. This clawing madness – trying to get a sense of whether this is all a waste of time, while happily wasting that time – is a feeling few things have been able to evoke within me.<\/p>\n
With Blue Prince, the first release from up-until-now film studio Dogubomb, that metagaming sense of not quite having the full picture in mind perfectly mirrors the in-game activity of exploring a procedurally generated mansion in search of its answers and rarely finding any.<\/p>\n
Hurrying through the grand estate of Mt. Holly to ensure the retrieval of some inheritance from a departed family member, every time you open a door you\u2019re presented with a choice of three additional rooms. Whichever one gets picked is instantly bolted on ahead, as if it was always there. Each room is carefully authored by the development team, but the order that they\u2019re offered up is procedurally chosen from a pool that grows in size over the course of a run. Ideally every choice is the one that\u2019s most beneficial for that moment. Often enough, it\u2019s actually just the least worst. <\/p>\n
A decent handful of these rooms are complete dead-ends. Maybe they\u2019ll contain a useful item like a key or a gem, which will need to be spent to place more complicated structures. Some of the rooms have additional doors which lead on to other rooms. If you\u2019re lucky, you\u2019re facing the right direction, and there aren\u2019t any other rooms already blocking the potential exits, a hallway or such with multiple additional doors will appear and you\u2019ll be able to create even more options for how to proceed.\n<\/p>\n
Certain techniques for making proper progress are beginning to occur to me after more than five hours playing the surprisingly generous demo. I\u2019m deliberately drafting dead-end rooms without much clear need to return in the same area of the map so that I don\u2019t waste time heading back to them. Each in-game day limits your exploration to entering just 50 rooms before having to start a new run, with the ability to gain more energy earned through making good room choices. Ideally, every room is placed with all the important stuff together to limit any back-tracking, but Man Plans, God Laughs.<\/p>\n
Some of these rooms offer unique features and challenges. Drafting the Security Room gives access to a terminal showing all the items that have been missed during exploration. A photography Dark Room will completely obscure which of the three selections you\u2019re actually picking for your next move, unless you\u2019ve managed to find the mansion\u2019s breaker box and manually turned the lights back on. Placing a chapel – which demands an immediate tithe of 1 gold coin every time you walk through it – would be terrible in a busy intersection, but it\u2019d be great to put the bedroom walkway that replenishes some of your energy in a spot you\u2019re likely to return to often. Certain rooms only seem to appear on the edges of the 9×5 grid, of which many are expensive green rooms which regularly need multiple gems to unlock, though that cost can be mitigated by getting lucky enough to select an early room that voids the expense toward any future green rooms entirely. <\/p>\n
Strategy in Blue Prince is, then, all about location and timing. Picking bad rooms feels great when there\u2019s a lot of options for where to move on to next, and it\u2019s agonizingly tense when the only three options available, on the last free door of the run, are all glorified closets.<\/p>\n
But I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if it even works. I don’t know if continually seeing the same environments in different orders is compelling, in and of itself. Maybe it\u2019s the limited input. I\u2019m not against a walking sim, but I\u2019m hesitant to play a walking sim that asks me to continue to see the same things over and over. Blue Prince occasionally injects puzzles and surprise features – the Parlor Room, which appears with a unique guessing-game each time it\u2019s drafted – is a fun reprieve every time, but the Billiards Room, which offers different takes on the same rudimentary math problem of addition, subtraction and multiplication, gets pretty dull after the second appearance.<\/p>\n
Something strange happened in this place and you\u2019re forced to both know that and still be there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about it in contrast with 2021\u2019s Phantom Abyss, another game about revisiting the same procedurally generated environments under different contexts, where the purpose was for you to make the perfect execution of movement to avoid danger and be quicker than everyone else that came before. Blue Prince\u2019s mystery hasn\u2019t hooked me, though the presentation \u2013 with gorgeous cutscenes that have far greater investment than you might expect \u2013 is really noteworthy.<\/p>\n
Blue Prince isn\u2019t a scary game. There are sparse musical cues in key moments of discovery that help build the atmosphere, but it\u2019s un-scary in the same way Gone Home is un-scary. Nothing\u2019s going to jump out and chase you, but something strange happened in this place and you\u2019re forced to both know that and still be there. <\/p>\n