When I get really into a game, I can feel the obsession. The obsession manifests as a kind of light pressure just under my forehead. Nothing else in my life other than video games has generated this reaction in me: not any job, not writing, not movies, not any relationship, and certainly not jogging. My stomach will tell you I don't jog nearly enough, but it does have the shape of a man who has played at least 10,000 hours of video games. This pressure headache is actually not altogether unpleasant. The obsession is a purpose, a task to complete. Most of life is just the space between the things that matter, so a core drive, a direction that I can feel at all times, it isn't bad. This must be why religious people can get so freaky. Only instead of rebuilding the Temple my task is to solve the mysteries of Blue Prince, apparently. Only Blue Prince will not let me solve the puzzles I can literally see the solutions to already and that... that is infuriating. I have a divine will in my skull driving me forward and the game will not play along.
I like these puzzle exploration games to a certain limit. Last year I loved Animal Well a great deal, which was a Metroidvania with very little action, instead using the platforming as a kind of expanding series of locked room puzzles which you can solve outwardly. I devoured that game in a week, making it my whole existence. There is no joy in gaming greater than discovering you can use the Frisbee as a spinning platform and your little guy can ride on it back and forth to gain access to new spaces and things. There's tons of games like this: Fez, The Witness, Zero Escape and Danganronpa to an extent. I really like these opaque mystery realms of shadows and puzzles, all in the long lineage of Myst. And ultimately don't really care what the puzzle means (the answer is irrelevant to me and in the case of The Witness, painful and obnoxious), I just like solving things.
Blue Prince is a uniquely agonizing example of these... I've heard the term 'Metroid-brainia' on a podcast and it made me want to unsubscribe to that feed after hearing the term. Let us never speak of that word again. The twist Blue Prince puts on this subgenre versus say, any Zero Escape game, is that the game is also a RogueLite. I was just talking about my feelings on RogueLites a few weeks ago in when writing about Balatro, but in case you forgot, usually my feeling is "this game is great, shame it's also a RogueLite". In Blue Prince, the Rogue-ish elements are especially painful, especially ruinous. You're trying to solve the puzzle while also fighting against the cruelty of random chance. Rooms are never in the same places, your runs can be scuttled early if you get bad rolls. You can get all the way to the very top of the map, and then get fucked since you roll up two dead ends and a room turning the wrong way. Game Over, start over. I hate this. I have come to truly hate Blue Prince. I came here looking to serve a buzzing in my head and do happy puzzles. Instead I want to burn this house down.
The feeling in my forehead finally died last night, I was broken by this game. I don't care if I solve this house any longer. In fact, I have effectively solved this house. Technically the mystery is solved, I just have not gotten lucky enough to turn the gears the right way to get the "prize". I had four runs in that state, and finally was one square away from the goal, and boom, Dead end. And I say, no more. Sorry, mysterious old uncle guy in the opening cutscene, you can keep this house. My character went home and will live the rest of his life outside of RogueLite mechanics.
The reviews for Blue Prince have been overwhelmingly positive. A flurry of overwhelming praise. It feels like whatever is left of games media in its current remnants have all come together to celebrate this little indie game, and that's great for them. I'm happy any game gets to be a success considering the state of things in 2025. Jason Schreier already has it as his Game of the Year, he's apparently put in hundreds of hours playing this. I'm not here to wag my finger and tell anybody to stop having fun. But I do need to speak my truth because I have not been this angry at a game in a long time.
I actually like the general idea of building a puzzle house as you explore it. Just I had assumed it would be a lot more flexible, not utterly ruthless. You're a first person POV exploring an abandoned house you've inherited, the entire manor being a 5 x 9 grid. The idea is to get across the house to the Antechamber and solve the mystery of the 46th room. You have a pool of walking points (Blue Prince is very board game-y), several items, several keys, several gems, all of which could in theory open a lot of doors later down the line. Odds are you'll end every run without actually exhausting any of theses besides keys and gems, those do go quickly. There's a feeling of panic I got almost immediately when I realized that doors can only open in the cardinal directions and you cannot change the layout once laid down. You get three room options but you'll only get lucky for so long that the game gives you viable routes to continue expanding. Eventually you'll be locked away and get three dead-ends. So you run out of space fast, and the house is only so big, you get boxed in and the run is over. Claustrophobia is a constant companion through this game.
"For the love of God, Blue Prince!" you might call out in horror, but the game will happily just keep laying down the bricks to seal you away forever. It doesn't even give you some rare sherry either. That's rude.
Let's say you're me and you started Blue Prince, happy to play along, to work out its puzzles and experiment. Hey, you might be fine doing the dart board puzzle enough times that the game actually gives a trophy for solving it so often. You're a puzzle solvin' dude. You find a room called the Boiler Room. It has steam pipe puzzles where you redirect steam to various places to open doors. You solve that puzzle and even the extra puzzle where the Boiler is now shooting steam out through the vents into adjacent rooms. However, for the rest of that run, you never found another room that needed that steam power. Now, runs later, you do find several rooms that could used power, but you never find the Boiler Room again. Or later you find both but they're nowhere near each other and the puzzle is unsolved.
I still don't know what the Boiler Room does. I never got all that random chance to align. In any other game of this type, this would have been easy, a trivial puzzle. In Blue Prince, no. I started getting experimental and thinking, "hey maybe the Furnace is also a power room, it cannot possibly be that this game relies entirely on random chance to make any of this stuff go!" And no, that doesn't work. There is no worse feeling than an intuitive interaction being disallowed. It has to be those exact rooms, drawn at random, with random chance making them work, otherwise you get nothing. You lose, good day, sir. The Lab seems to need power, I'll never know what happens. I know what I need to do in the Lab when I get that power, but oh well. I was not given permission by this game to do any of that.
Blue Prince is the kind of game where you find car keys seven times but never find a keyhole for them. Or you do find said keyhole ten times, but not the car keys! (I won't spoiler what kind of keyhole works for car keys, but don't worry, it isn't hard to solve that one.) Then finally everything aligns correctly, you have the key, you lucked into the room that takes that key, and all you get is a floppy disk and some lore. And guess what? This run you never got a computer so the floppy disk is totally wasted. I cannot tell you how many floppy disks I've wasted due to terrible luck. This is why I want to lay down trails of gasoline and burn this place down.
In theory this should be fine. Blue Prince is about the journey not the destination, somebody will say. You just play again the next in-game day, refreshed, reloaded, ready to explore and discover something new. There's plenty of advice littered around the house, such as "prioritize making rooms you haven't been to yet". The idea is to be free stylin' and experimental, man. This is video game jazz, maaaaan. Go with the flow, duuuude. Don't worry that your run was destroyed completely because you could not find a security key and every door left is sealed shut needing a key card you don't have. Maybe I should go with the flow and attempt to solve the mysteries in front of me. Or maybe I can be allowed to make my own flow and in fact: fuck you, Blue Prince. I want to play with the work bench that combines items. Except I haven't seen that room in nearly thirty runs. Why is this so absurdly rare when there's dozens and dozens of places I see that need said item combinations to progress?
I am 45 runs into Blue Prince. That is long enough for the charm of the pun in the title to wear thin. That is a lot to not be able to get even one win. I actually do know exactly what needs to happen to get a "win". I've been to the Antechamber twice and could not get a W because turns out you need to do something even more obscure first. That was really heartbreaking, by the way, to get so far, so far, and find a puzzle at the very end of the road that turns out I could not solve. That's the kind of thing that makes me want to set my charges and pull down the plunger and watch this mansion be annihilated into a mushroom cloud.
Well, I finally did that really obscure thing and was all set up to win. I have most of the expansions, I feel like I've been everywhere, I have dozens and dozens of star points, not sure what they do. Every morning I start with bonus money and bonus steps and bonus gems. There is nothing left that intrigues me, except getting this done. And I still can't. I get all the way across the house, getting the random luck of the random key that opens the random room that might open the Antechamber, and still, one square away, ONE SQUARE AWAY, the game doesn't give me the right room shape, the rooms I generated were all left turns when I needed a right turn, and GAME OVER.
I am turned into the Angry Video Game Nerd here. I don't want to be this guy. Why are you making me this guy, Blue Prince?
And that loss was not on me. Maybe I shouldn't be taking this personally but I've had it up to here with this. I cannot believe that no matter how far you get and how many mysteries you solve, it still depends on this stupid raw chance. Everything in this game feels like that. You get 90% of the way there and boom, unlucky, too bad, so sad. There's a chess puzzle in this game I found. I very nearly solved it, it isn't very hard. But turns out I cannot solve that puzzle because I never found a Queen. Run after run, no Queens. Maidenless. My Blue Prince life is failure on top of failure. A Blue Ruin.
Here's the thing: I guess I could be just in the moment, feeling the vibes of this house and the lore. But nothing in the lore has ever been interesting to me. Usually the lore of the puzzle isn't that important to me anyway, but it's extra bad here. There's no murder or dark secret I've uncovered. There's a fantasy kingdom and vague notions of government repression against socialism - a lot of color metaphors for politics. I see there's genealogies and histories. You can buy a history book for 40 coins, a goddamn mountain of money that I rarely acquire and on the runs I do, never get the room that let's you buy books, of course! (Of course! Blue Prince is always like that for me, at every turn!) I could spend hours in Paradise Killer enjoying the island and the characters. I never cared much for the metapuzzles and deeper mysteries of Tunic or Fez, I never solved any of that, but I greatly enjoyed the experience of just being there.
And Blue Prince is not a terribly good-looking game. There's not much music. There's no characters. Maybe there's some really exciting thing if you complete a run and get the last cutscene. Half the time I don't even care enough to do more than merely skim the lore documents left behind. Wow, this one servant got fired, why do I care? I'm tired of this and not here for it.
You know, I could see all this working. Even with random chance, you could have a deck of rooms and find new rooms to add to your deck. Maybe it a RogueLike deck builder card game that's also a mystery box. Maybe make it more of a construction minigame than just following the whims of chance into spiraling directions to nowhere. Maybe eventually unlock a power to rotate rooms already placed or get diagonal doors so you're not easily hemmed in by bullshit. If this were a hex grid, Blue Prince would be ten times more friendly than what it is. There could be a whole extra layer of puzzle made from sliding squares to reformat the house you're in, giving all kinds of flexibility. Instead of this, the cruel finality of this. I could imagine a million better ways of doing a RogueLite house builder mystery. The fundamental structure does not work for me. I do not want to play an RNG-heavy puzzle game like Blue Prince - never again. You did something new, a unique game this is. Uniquely antagonizing, and that's special.
I actually deleted this game from my SteamDeck and feel no compulsion what-so-ever to finish it. The obsession is gone. This was a real bad relationship with a video game, one of the worst I've had in years. A sage once said: "Watch out, you might get what you're after, cool babies".
I'm an ordinary guy, burnin' down the house.
skill issue
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