Blue Prince Review

Each day you enter a manor with forty five rooms to place and a limited number of steps, choosing one of three room cards at every doorway, and the layout you build determines what you can reach. Almost nothing persists. What persists is knowledge, and the game is built so that a note you scribbled on day four about a discoloured tile becomes the key to something on day thirty. That structure means the puzzles can be genuinely obscure without being unfair, because you are never solving them in one sitting.

The layers underneath the obvious goal go much further than the opening suggests, and the discovery that certain rooms interact with each other across a whole floor reorganises how you draft. The randomness is the honest complaint: a run can hand you dead ends and corridors and end before it starts, and while later unlocks reduce that, the first ten hours include days that simply waste your time. The written material is also dense enough to become homework.