Blue Prince Review (Switch)

It’s unusual for us to come across something unique, we’ve been around a while and played a lot of games. Blue Prince, combines a number of different elements to achieve that, mixing parts from visual novels, rogue likes, puzzle games and a good helping of a big old mystery.

The story goes that you have inherited the estate of your uncle. Or at least you will do if you can do something that no one else has – find the elusive room 46. But far from being a simple mystery you need to do this with the knowledge that at the end of every day all the rooms in the mansion will reset. There is a lot of lore in here as well about the games setting and why everything is so mysterious, but we’ll let players figure that out as it is drip fed through the various books and letters that you find along the way.

There are a lot of different elements to balance as you go about your investigation. The most pressing of these is the number of steps you have. Each room you enter knocks one step off your total of fifty. Once you run out the day ends and the rooms reset. As well as these you need to manage gems, keys and coins. Keys open locked doors and chests, gems are needed to draft certain rooms and coins can be used to purchase various things along the way. All these need to be found in the various rooms along with other items such as a magnifying glass, hammer or shovel.

Players have a blueprint which acts as a grid with which to draft their rooms. The initial sort of goal is to reach the ante chamber which is nine squares up at the top. It’s not a simple of that of course as you will soon find out. When you open a door, you are presented with three rooms which you can draw. Some may require gems to draft, and all will have different exit doors or other special features. You’ll soon learn as well that there are different colours for the rooms which denote different things.

Red rooms for instance, normally have some kind of negative effect such reducing your steps or removing your ability to see what you are drafting. Green rooms in contrast normally contain dig spot or other goodies. There are also bedrooms to help you restore some of your steps, hallways and shops of various kinds where you can get items, keys or food.

Away from these rooms there are rooms with specific puzzles or special qualities. The security room allow for the manipulation of cameras and security doors, while working out the boiler puzzle will then allow you to pump power through the house. There are also rooms like the lab and the observatory which can give you permanent upgrades. Gradually, as you progress, you’ll learn what it the most important to you and unlock a few permanent upgrades and areas along the way.

For what is effectively a game where you wander around and solve the occasional puzzles it’s remarkable how engaging the game is. The balancing of all the elements and trying not to put yourself into a dead end with you Tetris style rooms works very well. Add in the uncovering of the law and the gradual realisation of how different rooms work means you always feel like something new is happening each playthrough.

There are a few issues to think about though. The most pressing of these is the constant reliance on colour with the puzzles. If you have any form of colour blindness you are going to really struggle with this. There’s several puzzles which use six or seven colours of similar shades and sometime we had no idea what we were even looking at. We did get round it with a guide but otherwise we would have had no idea what was going on.

Also, you can get a number of runs were not that much seems to progress. The game could do with giving you a bit more in terms of keeping the progression loop going and give a bit more in terms of rewards when you solve a puzzle you’ve been working on for days. The biggest issue though is that a lot comes down to luck. You can stack the deck in your favour but sometimes you simply won’t get the room you need drafted for what you are trying to do in that run. All that said, we did keep going back again and again to it.

Overall, Blue Prince is a refreshing, interesting and original game. All the individual elements may be small, but when they are brought together it has created a high quality adventure game that will keep you curious and wanting to venture back in for one more go. It’s not perfect but its about as close to as we have seen for a fair while.

Overall 8/10