It's a perk of my job that sometimes I get to play a game earlier than most people. It's usually just a few days, sometimes a week, and very occasionally I'll get to preview a game a month or more before it's released.
Only once has this ever happened, though: I got to play an entire build, start to finish, of mystery mansion puzzle game Blue Prince—and this was way back in August, before developer Dogubomb even knew when the game was coming out.
Today on The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted we finally got a release window: Blue Prince is coming in the spring of 2025.
That's a bit weird for me, not just because I've already played it but because the 30 hours I spent in Blue Prince was the best gaming experience I had all year. I was all set to declare it my GOTY for 2024, but I suppose I'll have to save my vote for next year's ceremony.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that even though I played the whole game, and it felt perfectly polished to me, it might still not be done. When the idea for Blue Prince came to developer Tonda Ros and he sat down to start making it, "I had a complete build of the game done in three months," he told me back in August. "Start to finish, it was there. I had calculated it would take six more months to finish up, but that first three months went so well that my ambitions grew."
That was eight years ago. Obviously, Ros' ambitions weren't the only thing that grew. That first build only contained half as many rooms as Blue Prince does now, and was "entirely stock assets at that point," but after hiring a team, the game and the mansion within it got much bigger.
The short teaser shown during The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today isn't really enough to explain the game, so I'll give it a shot. In Blue Prince you've inherited a mysterious mansion from a family member, but to claim it you first have to explore its 45 rooms in search of a secret 46th room. You build the mansion yourself as you explore it: come to a door, choose one of three potential rooms that could be behind it, and when you open that door, the room you chose is what you'll find: it feels a lot like a board game in that respect. You have a limited number of steps you can take, so as you choose more rooms it also becomes a strategy game: what's the best way to build the mansion based on how many steps you have left? When you run out of steps, the mansion resets and you start building it all over again, so it's also a bit of a roguelike.
"When I started the game, I had never heard of a roguelike," Ros told me. "I wasn't even familiar with that concept. And then the first deckbuilders came, I was like, 'Oh, they're bringing over board gaming elements.' And there's definitely some similarities. And then when Escape Rooms started getting popular, I was like, 'oh, this is cool, this is kind of bringing back the first person point-and click-adventures into a sort of more simplified, streamlined, more dense package.'"
Blue Prince is filled with puzzles, some contained to individual rooms and others that are spread throughout the mansion, and I have a dozen pages in my notebook filled with diagrams, clues, numbers, and sketches I created as I played to help me decode and decipher the mysteries of the mansion. This is a great one to play co-op with a partner sitting beside you, because while some puzzles can be solved pretty quickly, others will take ages as you build and rebuild the mansion over the course of days or weeks.
Even though it's not coming out in 2024, I'm still calling it my honorary GOTY, because even in a year with stellar indie games like Balatro, The Rise of the Golden Idol, and UFO 50, Blue Prince is the best game I've played. I can't wait for everyone else to play it, too.
