Name of game: The Blue Prince
Creator: Hato Moa and Denis Mikan
Platform: PC (I played on Mac with a controller)
Target audience: Fans of surreal storytelling, puzzle/mystery games, walking sims
When I picked up this game, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t put it down. There was a moment in my early playing where I said, out loud to myself, I’m going to get a refund for this. I am a huge fan of escape room games, puzzle adventure-type games where you solve mysteries across a map and other traditional mystery games (text-based adventures, point-and-click, etc.), but I’ve never seen a mystery game like this, as someone who is usually part of the target audience for this type of game. The biggest element that was unique to this game for me was the roguelike mechanic, and this is what turned me off of the game at first. The player begins with an inherited mansion where they must open doors and unlock rooms. The catch is, every time a door is opened, the player chooses which room to add onto the house, and these choices impact your playthrough. Each of the rooms has the option to contain hallways, puzzles, items, and other types of twists and turns that help you unlock more rooms and piece together the embedded mystery.
Keys in one room unlock doors in other rooms, hints from pages of a diary in a bedroom might help you get into the basement, that is if you find the basement first. The other catch is, as soon as you no longer have doors to open (either you run out of keys, or you simply have organized your rooms in a loop), you’re meant to end the day, lose all your items, and start again tomorrow, by building new rooms. That roguelike structure initially felt like a betrayal of the mystery genre that I know and love so dearly—how can you solve a space that keeps changing? But that’s exactly the point:
The mystery isn’t hidden in the rooms. The mystery is the architecture. Your choices about what room to add next are the plot. And as you unlock more, you’re not getting a linear whodunnit, or solving an escape room—but a story about control, inheritance, and your own compulsion to “solve” what might not want to be solved.
The currency between days, especially in the early game, is information. The game gives so little in the way of instructions, any long-term strategy guide, or any kind of help at all that you’re immediately encouraged just to explore as fast and wide-reaching as you can. The player is encouraged early on to keep a notebook (physical notes recommended) to write down what’s necessary to remember for future rooms. It’s this kind of multimodal storytelling that allows the player to create a quasi-enacted narrative on top of a “true” one. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly the story is—there are many clues embedded amongst the different rooms, all pointing in some specific narrative direction, but it requires the player to use their noggin to figure those things out.
This embedded narrative approach places The Blue Prince in conversation with games like The Stanley Parable, which also uses architecture as narrative—but not as a direct mystery. In Stanley, the branching hallways are a meta-narrative, invoking questions about free will and player control—each path you take is a choice the game is already anticipating. But Stanley is overtly self-aware and ver
bal. The Blue Prince is quieter. Though it might be expecting you to make certain choices, it whispers instead of mocks. The game lets the consequences speak through structure.
One moment that pulled me out of the experience was a puzzle I just couldn’t solve. I circled back multiple times, assuming I had missed a logic step—until I finally had to Google it. Turns out, it was color-based. And as a colorblind player, I literally couldn’t see the distinction the game was asking me to make.
I went to the menu, hoping there might be a filter or toggle to help. Instead, I found a greyed-out accessibility panel labeled something like “Coming Soon!”—which might as well have said Good luck, buddy.
The problem here isn’t just that a puzzle wasn’t accessible. It’s that the game deliberately withholds explanation, guidance, and even basic UI support in the name of surrealism and mystery. That aesthetic choice may heighten immersion for some players (including myself in many aspects of the game)—but it actively locks others out. When architecture is the interface, visual clarity is accessibility. And The Blue Prince, for all its creativity, hasn’t built a way in for everyone.
The Blue Prince isn’t a cut-and-dry linear mystery. Its feel is sometimes more like a deck-builder than a narrative puzzle game, but as someone who is a huge puzzle game fanatic, I was still hooked. The story exists as you create it, and I hope to keep playing to find out more. The Blue Prince may not want to be solved, but it dares you to try anyway. And if you’re the kind of player who finds joy in mapping out a strange mysterious dream, room by room, you just might find yourself hooked too.
