I love a good puzzle adventure, whether it’s an escape room, board game, video
game, or puzzle book. My husband purchased and played the video game Blue
Prince for an hour before mentioning the title to me. He compared it to the
game Myst, which is a guaranteed way to get me to give the game a shot.
A Game Like Myst? I’M IN!
Since my computer is a Mac, I had to steal time at my husband’s PC setup in
order to play the game, and after getting a feel for the mechanics, I dragged
him into the gameplay. A few days later, we made it to the end credits
together.
In Blue Prince, you play as a boy named Simon. Your uncle has just passed and
bequeathed his unique estate of Mt. Holly to you. However, wanting you to earn
his title of Baron, he has set up an elaborate puzzle hunt you must solve in
order to find the 46th room and gain ownership of the mansion.
The Mysterious Mt. Holly
Mt. Holly isn’t an ordinary mansion: every morning, the rooms are an unknown
grid, and only as you open doors do you “draft” the room on the other side.
Each time you draft a new room, you choose among three different options,
slowly putting together the blueprint for the mansion for the day. The initial
puzzle is clear: arrange the rooms so you can traverse the length of the
mansion and make it to the location of the hidden 46th room.
Of course, there are other puzzles present throughout the mansion. You need to
find keys to open doors and gems to draft better rooms. Certain tools
scattered around the mansion will help you find more items, and a couple of
the rooms, including the parlor, have unique puzzles to solve every day.
Certain rooms synergize with other rooms, allowing you to crack safes and
draft super-rare rooms.
While struggling early in the game, I did some research on Reddit, and other
players swore that this game is an absolute gem—they discovered new and unique
things about the mansion every day! Meanwhile, the random-number gods were
frowning upon me, making it so that my rooms never lined up nicely, and I had
to keep restarting the day because I met yet another dead end.
You’ll Want to Take Notes
It was particularly frustrating when some of the larger puzzles that required
many rooms and diligent notes over several in-game days to solve produced a
hidden message akin to, “Don’t forget to drink your Ovaltine!” So many times,
I’d uncover a well-hidden clue that revealed the location of a permanent
upgrade—an upgrade that I had already unlocked while stumbling through Mt.
Holly trying to make progress. There ended up being several puzzles like this,
where I had already found the item the solution meant to uncover.
Meanwhile, the random-number gods were frowning upon me...
However, this meant that by the time I had all the permanent upgrades, I could
plow through the mansion and do basically whatever I pleased, finally finding
the last room and completing the game.
Of course, like any good puzzle game, there are more mysteries to solve. I
still haven’t unlocked the entire story of the game, so although some of the
details surrounding Simon’s mother’s disappearance have been revealed, where
she went and what happened to make her flee remain unknown.
A Quick Gripe About Video Games in Particular
This is a big difference I’ve noticed between video games and other media. In
a book or film, all of the information is presented to you, and you simple go
through and experience the whole story. For escape rooms—physical, book, and
board game—you can find the clues and unlock the puzzles in any order, but all
the puzzles must be solved, and the whole room gets unlocked and discovered.
However, in video games, hundreds of similar puzzles can be generated, letting
the player discover only one path through the game to make it to the ending,
leaving much of the story unexplored.
Although I love the thrill of solving the puzzles, I want the full story too!
I wish I had infinite time to go to war with the random-number-generator and
tackle every last little riddle in Blue Prince, but I don’t think that’ll
happen. Thankfully, there’s a big enough community around the game that I
should be able to find a guide that reveals the rest of the story.
I love discovering the mechanics behind an incredibly challenging logic
puzzle, even if I wasn’t able to solve it myself, and I also want to unveil
the entire story without relying on others to figure everything out for me.
That’s why I make sure the Puzzling Escapes books have explanations for all
the puzzles and guide readers when they get stuck, so they can always uncover
the mysteries behind the story.
Learn more about Puzzling Escapes!
This issue—not being able to see the full story behind the game until you
complete every single challenge—is pretty typical for video games, so I won’t
fault Blue Prince for doing it as well.
Overall, Blue Prince is a fabulous game full of wonder and puzzle-solving fun.
Most likely, you won’t have my terrible luck and will progress smoothly
through the game. And if you do have wretched luck like me, always draft the
observatory—that room has some sweet perks!
