So You Wanna Build A Mansion: Blue Prince

Questions by the millions, answers by the dozen

As I take my first step, I'm confronted by a high-ceilinged entryroom, a note from my late grandfather, and three doors. As I take my thousandth step, I leave in my wake a sprawling manor—full of boudoirs and hallways, boiler rooms, swimming pools, and implacable foundations—and carry with me a thousand questions and a scant handful of answers. I'm not the type to keep notebooks about video games, but I've been keeping an extensive one about Blue Prince. I've been dreaming about Blue Prince. I'm not finished Blue Prince, but for every waking hour over the past week, and 20 plus hours of playtime, I've been thinking of nothing else.

Like the best games in its genre—colloquially a "metroidbrainia"—Blue Prince is a game that will stick with me for years after rolling credits. A game I'll exhibit open envy over when someone says they're about to play it for the first time. I'm not entirely convinced at this point you can finish Blue Prince, if finishing Blue Prince means reaching a point where you're no longer spending any brain cycles thinking about it.

Blue Prince is deceptively simple at first. You load up the game and arrive in the entryway of the quiet, mysterious manor that's been left to you as an inheritance if you can solve its greatest secret. You can read the letter from your grandfather, you can leave the manor to explore the grounds, or you can choose one of three closed doors. Choosing a door presented you with three "blueprints," rooms you can "draft" behind that door. Some are useful for traversal, offering multiple new doors, some are deadends but hold useful items, some offer negative effects, like the Darkroom, where you can't see which rooms you're drafting in its two available doors (unless you solve a puzzle elsewhere in the house, of course), and some, later in the game, offer tantalizing new tools, secrets, and, always, more questions than answers.

The predominant gameplay loop in Blue Prince involves starting each day building out the house in a 5x9 grid, trying to reach a mysterious "antechamber" in the ninth rank, at the top of the map. As you get deeper, you learn through experience that, for instance, you should make sure to build out your lower ranks to gather resources, rather than beelining north for the higher ranks. You'll discover clues scattered across rooms that seem like nonsense at first, until you piece together their significance hours later and unlock a new portion of the manor you never knew existed. You'll build rooms and get closer and closer to the antechamber. When you run out of "steps" (you spend a "step" each time you enter a room) or doors you can open, you can "call it a day," and retire for the evening. The next morning, the house has reverted to its default state and you start over again flush with new knowledge, and, if you're lucky, a permanent change that carries over between days.

But then you realize this rogue-lite element of using traditional deckbuilding tools to construct the manor is only the tip of the iceberg. There's more to this game. So much more. Blue Prince is not a simple rogue-lite like Dead Cells or Slay the Spire, where a combination of experience and luck will get you through to the end. Instead, it uses that framework to craft a labyrinthine story slowly unravelled as the player realizes the game is not what it seems. It's a narrative experience that challenges players to expect more from the unique nature of video games, and the agency they provide players that's unavailable in any other medium.

Later runs in Blue Prince are less about puzzle solving or deckbuilding, and more about excursionary quests into the house to solve certain puzzles ("Can I somehow get the Boiler Room to connect to the Laboratory?") or information gathering sessions as you try to piece together a message obliquely scattered across all but one room in the mansion. It's about unravelling the spooled mystery behind the mansion and its titular blue prince, a fascist nation, and the cost of freedom. It's not so much about solving puzzles as it is about understanding the link between agency, experience, and story. Journey before destination.

Blue Prince is a genreblending experience that earns a spot its place in a tier with modern classic Outer Wilds and Luas Pope's transcendent Return of the Obra Dinn, games of such rarified air I was certain I'd placed them on a pedestal alone. You're going to hear a lot about Blue Prince over the next few weeks and months. You're going to be thinking about Blue Prince a lot over the next few weeks and months. And, with luck and justice, you're going to be hearing a lot about Blue Prince at the end of the year as it deservedly accepts awards for 2025's Game of the Year. It's that good.

Developed by Dogubomb, Blue Prince is available from Raw Fury on April 10, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X and Series S.

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