Blue Prince (2025) - Review

 I've played some good games based on board games, and I've played some bad games based on board games. But I don't think I have ever played a game where I thought "this would probably be better as a board game". But Blue Prince, released in 2025 by Dogubomb, might just be such a game.

The premise immediately caught my interest. As the sole heir of some wealthy, and also slightly crazy bloke, I am about to inherit a huge mansion. The catch however is that in order to inherit the mansion I need to find a secret room within the mansion. The next catch is that I only have a day to do it, otherwise I have to start over. The day is translated into 50 steps, and each room requires a step (by default) to enter. Oh, and the biggest catch is that the rooms don't stay the same from one day to the next. 

Some times all your choices are bad. Just like in life.

So Blue Prince is actually a build-your-own-mansion rogue-like, which is a very cool idea. Each day you start out in the big entrance hall and each door you open lets you draft a room from a pool of three to enter. These rooms can do all kinds of things, some are beneficial and some have drawbacks. To make your way through the mansion you are going to need a couple of things like keys, coins and diamonds, and you are going to be greatly helped by other things like sledge hammers, shovels and oranges. The rooms you draft have doors of their own, except some don't and are dead ends. Some give you buffs that last the day. Some give you debuffs that ruin your day. Blue Prince is a decently funny pun on the word "blueprints", and it makes some sense once you've understood the schtick of the game.

Just like any roguelike worth its salt, Blue Prince can award you permanent buffs. Once you've found the code for a safe, you've got it. Once you've unlocked certain parts of the estate, they stay unlocked. Certain rooms even allow you to move things over from one day to the next. You soon discover a lot of variables to take into account. Some rooms are more common in certain parts of the mansion and other rooms are more common in the later stages of the game. 

In the beginning of the game a lot of enjoyment comes from trying to explore the mansion and trying to uncover as many new rooms as possible, discovering what they do and how they some times can interact with each other to form buffs. As the days go by (because there is no chance you can beat this on the first day), you will manage to get further and further, and unlock weirder and weirder rooms.

This image will haunt my dreams.

Once you've played past your first week however, it can feel a bit like retreading the same old path since the first couple of rooms are usually fairly similar. There is the closet, and the bedroom and the nook. Even the observatory and gym hall quickly become old hat. Another feature of Blue Prince that irked me somewhat was what feels like a fairly high reliance on good RNG to get anywhere. It is a lot about trying to pry luck out of the RNG numbers through good choices, just like any good card game. There is no one to bluff here however, the game is ice cold and will suddenly thrust you into a corner even though you feel like you had a really good run leading up to it. All it takes is a streak of locked doors or drafted rooms with too few doors, and you have to click that dreadful "call it a day" button and start over.

Part of the problem is the walking itself. Walking through the same rooms over and over, and having to backtrack constantly, trying to keep track of the correct turns so you don't waste any precious steps, becomes more tedious than I want it to be. I end up wanting to get past the first third of the game quickly so I can continue building on the later stages, but the early rooms are just as important as the later ones. Rooms you have drafted tens of times are just as important, because each room taken out of the draft pool doesn't return (by default). That influences future draft pools and future choices. So I have to slow down and think about the parts I want to rush. It reminds me of early video games, where dying on the boss sent you all the way back to the beginning of the stage that you had already mastered rather than allowing you to practice more on the boss. It's almost like the game can sense this, because it keeps the pace and interest up by introducing new concepts just when you thought you were just banging your face against the same locked doors.

Every now and then a completely new room will be draftable, maybe even some changes to the mansion that turn out to be permanent and that give you an advantage the next time you get in there. At some point I end up in that weird spot of wanting to /flip desk and thinking I am done with it all but then also thinking that I am not letting this dang game win over me - I am going to beat it!

Some times, diamonds really are a girls' best friend.

The game likes to keep its cards hidden, and after a while I wonder if it even gate keeps some of its secrets. Some are obvious, I can't open a special room unless I have found a special key. But when a new room suddenly is available for drafting, I can't be sure it was always in my draft pool and I have just been unlucky so far, or if the game wants me to fail my way through the house a few times before they bring out the big guns. Learning according to Mr. Miyagi if you will - Blue Prince will have you wax on, wax off for a while before you realize you were actually learning karate all along.

The graphics serve the game well, on the right edge of cartoonish it will make things difficult to find only when it wants to, and never because of bad design. Even though walking through a huge mansion like this would definitely freak me out in real life, I never ever felt threatened in Blue Prince. The threat is also completely inanimate, you'll never get hurt or die, just pride damaged when you build yourself into a dead end for the fourth time in a row. The music manages to find the same level of atmosphere without ever feeling the urge to make me feel stressed or nervous. The experience could've easily veered into a furnitured version of Cube, instead it always feels like nice stroll through a park you walk past on the way to work.

So much about the game works and the core idea is brilliant. So how do you keep the fun of drafting out the mansion, and eliminate the tediousness of having to actually literally walk through the whole thing? A board game of course! I really think Blue Prince would work even better as a card game where you draft your way through the house and build it out in front of you. It would eliminate the annoyance of backtracking and just keep the best parts of the game available. Writing this text I actually thought the connection was so obvious I had to search to see if someone else had had the thought - and of course they have. I've got my money ready for when it happens.