Blue Prince has been making the rounds at physical and virtual conventions like EGX, Gamescom and the PC Gaming Show, and it’s already high on the puzzle community’s figurative list of most anticipated titles for 2025. It was just featured in the Day of the Devs showcase before The Game Awards, one of its highest-profile debuts yet. So, if you’re getting excited about Blue Prince for the first time, hello and welcome to the club. There are snacks in the parlor — but in order to eat them, first you’ll have to build the parlor.
In Blue Prince, you are the literal architect of your own future. It’s 1993 and you’ve inherited the expansive estate of Mount Holly from your uncle, but the bequest comes with a catch. There are 45 rooms in the manor, and you have to find the mysterious 46th room in order to collect your inheritance. If you don’t discover the impossible space, you lose everything. It’s not just a matter of exploring a mazelike mansion, either: The estate changes shape every day and the layout of its rooms is up to you.
Every time you approach a door, you get to select what lies behind it from three options, which include areas like a den, dining room, kitchen, billiards room, patio, bedroom, cathedral, pool, and observatory, to name just a few. Connecting the doorways of these spaces in logical ways is crucial to progression, as it seems you’ll have to touch every available square on your blueprints (get it?) to unlock the 46th room. Each area comes with its own riddle, item dump or unique function that resets at dawn. Entering a room costs one step and you’ll start each day with just 50 steps, so strategizing is key, especially considering all the backtracking you’ll likely do.
The demo, which is live on Steam right now, gives you four days to explore Mount Holly and it’s a solid introduction to the game’s House of Leaves loop. The entryway has three doors, and you start by choosing one and manifesting the room beyond. Bedrooms grant you two steps every time you enter; the storage room offers keys, gems and coins; the cathedral costs one coin per entry; a meal is served in the dining hall only after reaching rank eight; the parlor has a three-box puzzle that changes every day; the observatory’s telescope triggers a specific event based on the constellation in view; the coat check can hold an item for a future run — and so on.
You’ll find objects like a sledgehammer, keycard, magnifying glass, compass, metal detector and shovel in various places, and you can carry these around to help solve puzzles in adjoining spaces. The billiards room is one of my favorites because it has a straightforward but satisfying dartboard riddle, and I can feel in my bones that there are oodles of secrets and room types that I haven’t discovered.
The environments of Blue Prince are dotted with symbols, paintings and statues that I’m sure will be relevant in later mysteries, and the game’s art style and execution welcomes close scrutiny. It inhabits a cel-shaded 3D world with hand-drawn touches and heavy blue shadows, where interactable objects can truly stand out. Each room is crisply rendered, even down to the fine details. Using the magnifying glass to zoom in on the signature at the bottom of a letter, for instance, doesn’t uncover jagged edges in the ink. Blue Prince is supremely compelling to look at and it has smooth, intuitive first-person controls — excellent traits for an exploration game.
The puzzles come in a variety of difficulty levels and mechanical flavors, from deduction riddles and engineering logic to esoteric math problems, and that’s just what’s included in the four-day demo. Pieces of lore scattered around the estate lay the foundation for a broader family mystery, and much like the mechanics of the game itself, the narrative tension builds smoothly throughout the early stages. There’s more to uncover here than spare rooms and heirlooms.
Blue Prince feels like a build-your-own escape room wrapped up in a strategy game and tied together with home-renovation sim twine. Even though it supports a broad mix of unrelated concepts, Blue Prince feels a lot like home. And it will be, once I find that 46th room.
Blue Prince is due to hit Steam in spring 2025. It’s developed by Los Angeles film and game studio Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/blue-prince-preview-build-your-own-escape-room-and-then-live-there-173816152.html?src=rss