Blue Prince Review

Written: 29-03-2026

I can't say that I enjoyed most of my time with Blue Prince, but I can say I was compelled to continue playing until I got to room 46 and completed the initial goal of the game. There are some good puzzles hear, but they are locked behind randomness and luck which can be quite frustrating.

The game has you draft rooms for a house. These have doors on varying sides, and often have different effects. As you go along, you learn how to use these rooms to manage the resources you have to get to the antechamber at the other end of the house. Working out how to manage these resources well can be a bit of a task and sometimes you just get stuck with bad luck and can't progress because you draw bad rooms. There are many puzzles that can be solved that allow you to unlock some permanent upgrades between these runs which feel necessary to beat the game by normal means. Once you reach the antechamber you find it locked and then have to find a way to open it, which feels like a bit of a rug pull because you probably weren't managing resources to go and find something else. These situations where you think you have done something, but then actually you need something else happen often and because you weren't expecting it, or couldn't plan for it, you have to start another run. I found the reliance on pulling certain rooms especially earlier on to be very frustrating.

The game opens up a lot more later with some upgrades. These allow you more starting resources, ways to manipulate the rooms you may draw and a few other benefits that make can reduce the randomness. Having so many of these things hard locked behind puzzles that may take a whole run on their own to solve can be slightly annoying though. This results in the early game feeling very slow with the later game speeding up a lot. I feel there are too many unlocks that are needed to make any real progress early on.

My favourite part of the game by far is the puzzles. There are many puzzles that are overarching, I'm glad I took notes throughout because they saved me a good few extra runs I would have needed if I didn't. There are a good mix of logic, deduction, and reasoning puzzles hear that are well done. These mostly span multiple rooms with a few self contained ones. There are even a few that spanned the entire house that were very well done. I have half finished notes for a few and probably won't finish them now since I got to the end. I won't spoil any of the puzzles because they are much more fun to work out on your own, but they are all pretty solvable within the game and there are even some inbuilt hints in other rooms. My main issue here is again that you can't guarantee you will get the rooms together that are need for a puzzle so you may have solved something, but not be able to complete it for multiple runs.

I enjoyed the puzzles here, but the rest was frustrating. I had a similar feeling to this when playing Returnal, where the randomness is so strong and feels like it has such a heavy influence on the results. I think this design uses the same Skinner Box idea that social media uses to get us hooked. You are likelier to keep doing another run when one might be a dud or might not, than if every one succeeds or every one fails, even if you aren't having fun. I don't mind a bit of this, Balatro and Hades are some of my favourite games, but when skill has so little influence on a run it feels like the game is exploiting you. I can't help but feel I would have enjoyed this game more if it was one big house with all the puzzles distributed across it and none of the random elements. The drafting is a fun concept, but at the end of the day it annoyed me more than it added enjoyment to the game. Maybe if there were more ways to manipulate the randomness to make it more skilful from the start that would have worked too, but as it stands this game just doesn't quite work for me.