Blue Prince Review (Nintendo Switch 2) – A House Divided

Blue Prince has a simple premise, but like every hallowed hall of the house you explore, it is so much more complex than it lets on. You play as the nephew of a recently departed man who has willed you his house. What a nice gesture, you might think, but you would be wrong. This house has no layout, no set path; it is a shifting and changing building that you, the player, take an active part in shaping. The goal is to find the mysterious room 46, never explored before, not even by your uncle.

Entering the foyer, there are three doors, each leading into the house further. Approaching a door yields a random draw of three layouts that can be built from the door further into the mansion. This becomes a complex dance of placing rooms. You have a layout to help guide you in your placement, but the random nature can be extremely tricky, often leading to situations where you find all options something defeating that blocks you from progression. At these points, you need to end the day, resetting the house for a new route to build.

Where this gets extremely clever is just how often forward is not the right way. Each room typically offers some benefit, such as a dead-end room offering gems to buy higher-end blueprints or keys to unlock doors that can randomly spawn locked. You might cut yourself off on one path, but open up a completely new path to begin building from. This is where the footstep gauge on the top of the screen comes into play. Not only are you trying to build rooms the most efficient way, but also passing through rooms drains your stamina for the day, forcing you to mind your routes.

You might not even aim to win on some particular day. Certain rooms have hints or tips that apply elsewhere in the house, encouraging the constant trial and error of new types of rooms, just because the knowledge can be applied on your next run. Rooms are inherently divided into types as well, putting some strategy into how you apply them. The church was one of my least favorite tiles to play, as it drains a coin each time you pass through. You will find rooms that just hand you coins, but they are rare, and the commemorative tile allows you to buy beneficial items like a shovel to get hidden items you might not collect during a run.

The church, though, has a few doors on it, so it might be a well-placed risk just to have extended movement. It might prove to be a brilliant move if you already bought what you need and are just passing through, since there is no punishment for not having coins when you traverse. Another blueprint for a weight room drains 10 steps when you pass through, which is incredibly punishing, but this room allows for another build on the other side. Conversely, the bedrooms can often be dead ends, but they always recover steps. You can also buy fruit to replenish stamina, but a move might hedge itself on the idea that you can compensate later. This puts a deep level of strategy one might not fully appreciate until they are eight or nine days into their journey through this mansion.

Of course, like a roguelike, there can be a level of unfairness as one day feels completely stacked against you. I had a few days in a row where I could pull maybe five or six squares before, oops, you are completely done. Some rooms save an item that you can get on the following day, but these can feel less convenient in light of the trade-off. There is no between-run leveling to make life easier moving forward, and no items translate over without help, so a run can yield no good progress but a ton of items that become useless before you even find them.

This is just the base-level puzzle, the simple premise to lure you into the heart of this mystery. As you explore, you can find special rooms that change everything. This is useful, given that when you start, you will notice most of the rooms are typically just a room with the occasional item on a desk. A room, such as the Pump Room, controls all the water to certain other rooms, like the pool room or garden. As such, it raises the flow of water between them if you can solve the mystery of how these pumps control the water. This begins you on a whole other journey, as figuring these out will help eventually.

While one of my favorite games is The Witness, and Blue Prince absolutely rises to that level, they do share a fatal flaw in how obtuse some puzzles can be to solve. Early on, you even recommend having a notepad handy, since many of the tasks you uncover will require the player to go analog. I could live with this, but a few of the puzzles, like a certain dartboard puzzle, have no obvious answers around them, requiring some heavy trial and error to start piecing them together. These distractions were fun, and once I figured it out, it wasn’t a super hard challenge to conquer every time through. Racking your brain for solutions, though, especially when they might be a house away or even an entire run away, is not the most enjoyable time.

Verdict

The further you progress into Blue Prince, the more it sinks its hooks into you. Even when the exploration of a day lasts what feels like an eternity, it is still over in the blink of an eye, and I was ready to go again. I imagine that the worst possible outcome of a game like this is to actually reach the end, the fabled room 46. When you finally achieve this, the mystery is over, the experience is done. The lead character of The Brutalist, László Tóth, was quoted in the final lines of the film as having said, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Blue Prince is a prime example of why I thoroughly disagree.

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