The recently released Blue Prince, published by “indie” giant Raw Fury, is not only on Game Pass, but also the PS Plus Extra subscription. On both major consoles, and PC, everyone can access this thing.

On the face of it it’s a puzzle game, but the way it allows free-form thought and intuition to be stars of the show place Blue Prince as more than a collection of puzzles like The Witness, and more of a genre I’m calling the “Perpetual Puzzler” which includes the best puzzle game ever made: Outer Wilds.

Please note there are minor early-game spoilers relating to an item that exists and a room that exists. I deliberately avoid giving any real solutions, or context.

Blue Prince At a Glance

Pros

• Easy to start, hard to finish
• There are multiple different sources of clues, which will resonate with different players, making sure no-one is left out
• It’s more similar to Outer Wilds than any other game I’ve played

Cons

• Can be repetitive if progress is not made in a few runs
• Can be too easy to softlock a run if you are unlucky
• The “scaling” puzzle rooms are an unfortunate design choice

If you want a puzzle game that doesn’t hold your hand, but uses plenty of opportunities to help you wrestle with its hidden secrets by yourself, then Blue Prince is for you.

If you want something that’s more like a “Book of Puzzles” but digital, Blue Prince will be a bit too sprawling and deep for you. This isn’t a game you sit down with and do the next few puzzles out of the 200 available, it’s a perpetual campaign of learning and exploring.

How Do You Progress in Blue Prince?

The crux of what makes Blue Prince so great is also what might turn some players away if they fail to grasp the game quick enough: Most progression is of the player, not in the game.

Like all Roguelikes (Which as this game resets progress each run, it could be considered) progression is split into two pools:

• Meta-Progression. These are permanent unlocks you find in runs that affect all future runs with no input needed on that run. For example, starting with extra coins or with a new entrance unlocked.
  
  
• Player Progression. Also called “Skill”. How good you are at the basic gameplay builds over time in roguelikes. Normally in Gunfire Reborn, or Hades, it’s to do with movement and attacks and things like that. In Blue Prince it’s more your observation skills, notetaking skills, and your drafting skills.

Accessing Meta-Progression in Blue Prince

Meta-Progression in Blue Prince is rare at the start, and only unveils itself once you put your head to it and really try to aim for specific goals.

For example, there’s a Garage you might see when drafting in one run. There’s also a Car Key item you might see when looting in a different run. So, now you know this item, and that room, exist.

It’s up to you to create a Manor in a future run that gives you access to both those components at once, and you’re rewarded with a permanent upgrade item that I won’t spoil.

This makes observing game components, uncovering new rooms and increasing your drafting skill vital to even accessing the meta-progression in the first place.

Some players might think they should start earning meta-progression simply by starting new runs, and it might be shock that there’s no meta-progression that doesn’t need to be properly earnt.

Increasing your Drafting Skill in Blue Prince

With all these progression elements based on player knowledge (which builds up as you do runs, find new rooms and take notes) and drafting, it’s vital you learn how to draft.

Drafting in Blue Prince is the act of drawing 3 rooms from the room pool when you open a door. You can choose one room per door.

However, to stand the best chance of achieving multiple goals in a run, you’ll need to be careful what you draft where.

If you place a 3-way room in a way that only 1 door is usable, you are much more likely to softlock the run later when you only have 1-door rooms left and need to turn a corner!

The main elements you should consider when drafting are:

• Number of doors that will be available to you after building the room. (if you’d “lose” a door to a wall, reconsider)
  
• Number of doors currently leading to the space you are drafting for. (If a room has multiple doors already facing it, some are likely to be blocked. Consider which one is worth drafting from)
  
• If you have Gems. (Gems are used to buy the majority of helpful rooms, and once you start drafting you cannot back out, so check you have gems before you draft.)
  
• Your current Rank. (Rank is the “depth” of the house, and rooms are more likely to be locked, have security doors and other effects as Rank changes.)
  
• Your current goals. (If you could draft a Garage and you have Car Keys, do it. Even if it soft-locks the run, you will get the permanent upgrade and not have to worry about that combo in future!)

Pen and Paper? In 2025?

One of the first pieces of advice the game does deign to give you, is to use your own Notebook and pen (that’s IRL, not in-game) to mark clues and jot down important information.

At first I wasn’t sure, why not just have an in-game log?

Well, there’s a very good reason: Bias.

See, when you make a puzzle game, you made the puzzles. Just like a Dungeon Master in D&D making a puzzle way too hard but thinking his player should get it from the clues. If you wrote the answer, and the clues, then of course you would be able to work it out.

The Blue Prince team allowed complete, coherent world and game design by shifting the onus of notetaking on to the player. Not only does this allow them to have some obvious clues and some very not obvious ones, but it also allows players to be themselves.

Some of you would be drawing out the symbols and clues you see, some might use shorthand, some might log it like a diary of each day spent exploring the house (Much like those fantastic Elden Ring journals from Reddit a while back.)

This makes progression and puzzles feel like real, actual challenges made for you, as a person. Not just as a player, but as a human being. The things you notice first, the routes you choose to make, the notes you choose to take all affect what pieces of the grand puzzle you’ll uncover first, and that’s a brilliant bit of game design.

All the Cons

It’s clear I really recommend the game, but let’s give you a fair rundown of the 3 biggest cons for fairness.

The game can feel repetitive. You quite literally enter the same house everyday. Thing is, for someone paying enough attention to really enjoy the game in the first place, the variety of puzzles and goals to fulfil should be enough.

However, even for me, there have been a few runs where I kinda “gave up” from just being a bit burnt-out on running room to room so much with nothing new. But, I learnt later, that is generally my own fault for poor drafting or for prioritising specific goals too hard.

Out of all those times I did finish a run “early” i.e before feeling like I’d uncovered enough new clues, only 3 or 4 have been due to straight up bad luck. Sometimes you get stuck in a corner on Rank 3 and that’s that. It’s unfortunate, and can kill the pace of the game with tedium, but by virtue of the unique progression system you at least don’t “lose” anything (Except a few minutes of your time).

By far the biggest problem, that outweighs all of these, is the “scaling” puzzle rooms. There are two rooms in the game, the Parlour and the Billiards Room, which contain specific puzzle games you can earn gems and keys from.

The Parlour game has 3 boxes, each with a statement. One is true, one is false, one can be either. Your job is to open the right box.

The Billiards game has a dart board. The rules of darts are irrelevant, and you learn in a couple minutes how to do the maths correctly for the game’s requirements.

That sounds okay, but here’s the thing: these puzzles get harder and harder each time you complete them. It took me clicking answers on the Darts puzzle and reverse-engineering the equation to actually work out what [spoiler] meant. That was after I’d already worked out 2 extra mechanics added over the runs! I’d love to justify my confusion so you don’t think I’m just bad at maths, but I don’t want to spoil the puzzle and its extra twists, so just please believe me that it gets ridiculous after 30+ successful solves.

The problem is, the difficulty scaling just makes accessing the exact same rewards from those rooms far harder than it used to be, slowing the game down drastically and distracting you from the larger picture.

This is especially true as both the Parlour and Billiards room are early in the Ranks, meaning you could spend a good while doing the puzzles just to soft-lock the run to dead-ends if you draft poorly.

Give Blue Prince 3 More Runs

My general advice is to try Blue Prince, and the run you think “Okay I’m done, not for me”, do 3 more. Just 3 more runs. Take notes, inspect everything in every room. See if anything clicks.

It might not, but I reckon a lot of player give up just that little bit too soon, and that’s a shame, because 35 hours later and Blue Prince is well up there will Outer Wilds for me.