Imagine a piece of complex origami. You want to understand how it works, so you start looking for a place to begin unfolding it. With each corner of the paper you peel back, you notice an even more intricate structure underneath. So you unfold that too, and find even more fine detail underneath yet again. You start to wonder how many layers it can have, and marvel at the intricacy. You remember at the start, when you already thought it was complex, but you had no idea how elaborate it really was. That is the experience of playing Blue Prince.
It can be difficult to describe a game like this, in which so much of the design is about curiosity and discovery. But at its most basic level, Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game built around exploring a shapeshifting manor house. The executor of the Mount Holly estate has left it to you, but it will only become yours if you reach the mysterious Room 46. You cannot spend the night inside the house, so you set up camp just outside the grounds. After each day, the rooms reset and all of the doors close again. The exact layout of the manor is never the same twice. It takes place in first-person, making it an unfolding puzzle box that you live inside.
You start each day at the entrance, the bottom-center square of a 5×9 grid, faced with three doors. Each time you interact with a door, you’re faced with three choices of which room to “draft” on the other side. Some rooms are dead ends, others are straight pathways, others only bend, and so on. You have a limited number of steps, and crossing the threshold into a new room ticks down one of them. From the start, you understand the objective to be that carving a pathway using these interlocking pieces, without expending too many steps, will successfully lead to the top of the 5×9 grid, to the Antechamber where there sits the entrance to Room 46. At this point, Blue Prince feels very much like a prestige board game, complete with a grid and tiles to place.
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