"Blue Prince": A game like a never-ending escape room

Simon Balissat

16.4.2025

Translation: machine translated

Pictures: Simon Balissat

"Blue Prince" is the first big game surprise of 2025 and earns top score after top score. And rightly so! The roguelike puzzle game is so fascinating that I can hardly think of anything else.

In the meantime, my Photoshop file blueprince.psd has grown to an impressive 60 megabytes. Twenty megapixel screenshot snippets, text fragments, lines and lots of question marks. All valuable notes that I need to solve the puzzles in «Blue Prince». I have long since achieved the actual goal of the game. Nevertheless, I keep returning to Mount Holly Mansion to solve the many puzzles in the house.

But right from the start. I take on the role of Simon P. Jones and have inherited the keys to his 45-room mansion from my late uncle. The house is mine, but only on one condition. I have to find the mysterious 46th room within one day. The crux of the matter is that the mansion changes every day. No stone is left unturned. No room stays in the same place.

And the groundhog greets us daily

On a blueprint (in English «Blueprint», which also explains the title) of five fields wide and nine fields high, I have to arrange the rooms in such a way that I somehow reach my goal. If I don't succeed, I start all over again. The first room is always the entrance, from where three doors open to the west, north and east. There is also the mysterious «Antichamber» on the opposite side. If I open a door, I get a random selection of three possible rooms that can be located behind it. I have to choose one of these three possible rooms. This could be a corridor, a bedroom, a lounge or a garden, for example. The principle reminds me a little of the board game «The Crazy Labyrinth» from my childhood. If I go the wrong way, I build dead ends and block my ability to add more rooms.

In the rooms themselves, I solve puzzles, collect objects or open more doors. This creates a new villa during each day of the game. But I can't wander around the villa forever. When I enter a room, my pedometer ticks down from 50. If I take zero steps, I am forced to start a new day and build a new villa.

Create, create, build houses

Day after day, I enter new rooms, find new combinations that make survival easier and invent new strategies to delve as deeply as possible into the history of the house and ultimately find the mysterious room 46. I can't take notes, maps or pictures with me or save them in any way, which is why notes outside the game are essential. When I couldn't open my Photoshop file after a crash, I had an existential crisis - luckily I was able to restore it.

At the same time, «Blue Prince» is actually a very leisurely game. Apart from the steps already mentioned, there is no time limit in the rooms. I can explore at will and restart as often as I like. This is my only criticism: at the beginning of the game, it took a little too long for me to feel any real progress. A lot depends on chance. I have to move the right rooms in the right order, otherwise I'm back on square one. Until I realised that this failure is a basic principle of the game and that I should also place spaces that don't give me any advantages, everything felt a bit repetitive. But then it clicked «» . Since then, I've always wanted to go back to Mount Holly Mansion.

The blue pill leads down the rabbit hole

What makes «Blue Prince» so fascinating is the sheer endless variety. Every day, I discover new connections and details in the game, learn new information about other rooms or even discover completely new rooms that present me with new puzzles.

This makes «Blue Prince» fundamentally different from other puzzle games, which are usually very linear. «Chants of Senaar» or «Loreley and the Laser Eye» thrilled me last year with their mysterious worlds, but the constant running back and forth was tiring in the long run. This is remedied by «Blue Prince», as I have to organise my rooms strategically and always keep an eye on the scarce resources. In addition to the steps, there are also keys that I can use to unlock rooms and diamonds that unlock particularly valuable or rare rooms. I can also use gold coins to buy things like a shovel, a metal detector or trainers, which I in turn need to solve puzzles. What certainly never happens is that I have enough of all the resources. That makes every room exciting again and again, even if I've already entered it dozens of times.

This combination of strategy and puzzles is unique. If I'm not in the mood for logic puzzles, I try to reach my goal with skilful tactics and a bit of luck. Most of the time, the journey is the reward anyway. And whenever «Blue Prince» is particularly challenging or even overwhelming, I find a new trail to follow. Luckily, I've made screenshots and notes about the previous trail in my file. Bet I'll need this information soon?

«Blue Prince» is available for PC, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series and playable in Gamepass. The game was provided to me by Raw Fury for testing purposes on PC.

Simon Balissat

Teamleader Editorial

Simon.Balissat@digitecgalaxus.ch

When I flew the family nest over 15 years ago, I suddenly had to cook for myself. But it wasn’t long until this necessity became a virtue. Today, rattling those pots and pans is a fundamental part of my life. I’m a true foodie and devour everything from junk food to star-awarded cuisine. Literally. I eat way too fast. more

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