I’m never more excited than when I’m playing games where I’m not even sure the main mechanic is fundamentally interesting. Despite hours playing Blue Prince and still thinking about it when I’m doing anything else, somehow, delightfully, I can’t 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.
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.
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’re 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’re 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’s most beneficial for that moment. Often enough, it’s actually just the least worst.
A decent handful of these rooms are complete dead-ends. Maybe they’ll 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’re lucky, you’re facing the right direction, and there aren’t any other rooms already blocking the potential exits, a hallway or such with multiple additional doors will appear and you’ll be able to create even more options for how to proceed.
Certain techniques for making proper progress are beginning to occur to me after more than five hours playing the surprisingly generous demo. I’m deliberately drafting dead-end rooms without much clear need to return in the same area of the map so that I don’t 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.
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’re actually picking for your next move, unless you’ve managed to find the mansion’s 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’d be great to put the bedroom walkway that replenishes some of your energy in a spot you’re 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.
Strategy in Blue Prince is, then, all about location and timing. Picking bad rooms feels great when there’s a lot of options for where to move on to next, and it’s agonizingly tense when the only three options available, on the last free door of the run, are all glorified closets.
But I couldn’t 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’s the limited input. I’m not against a walking sim, but I’m 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’s 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.
Something strange happened in this place and you’re forced to both know that and still be there. I’ve been thinking about it in contrast with 2021’s 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’s mystery hasn’t hooked me, though the presentation – with gorgeous cutscenes that have far greater investment than you might expect – is really noteworthy.
Blue Prince isn’t a scary game. There are sparse musical cues in key moments of discovery that help build the atmosphere, but it’s un-scary in the same way Gone Home is un-scary. Nothing’s going to jump out and chase you, but something strange happened in this place and you’re forced to both know that and still be there.
Blue Prince’s demo is currently available on Steam. I wonder if you’ll end up any clearer than me on what you think about it.
