Previously in this series I have mostly recommended games that might be described as light on gameplay and heavy on narrative. Most of them are of the genre pejoratively titled “walking simulators.”
My goal is to recommend games that don’t require twitch reflexes or a lot of experience with game systems, interfaces, or particular genres. There is narrative greatness in the world of video games, it just takes some looking to find.
Blue Prince
Blue Prince is a “gamier” game than I would typically recommend in this series—not because it’s frantic or overly-complex, but because it’s less narrative-forward and more mechanical at a surface level.
The story is still there, but it’s a mystery, and you have to search for answers and clues, making inferences. Because this is a mystery, the challenge of the game comes from puzzles, and these work on two levels, which I’ll call “the grid” and “the meta-puzzles.”
The Grid
The grid is the surface puzzle. You’ve inherited a mansion, and every day the rooms reconfigure themselves. The house contains a 5×9 grid, and every time you open a door, you choose from 3 semi-random rooms to occupy that space in the grid. Your goal: to get to the far end of the mansion, find a hidden 46th room, and claim your inheritance.
The grid is a game of resource-management, with a finite number of steps per day, used up with each room. There are keys to unlock doors, coins to buy things, gems to pay for more exciting rooms, and the rooms themselves offering 1-4 exits and other perks. There are also special, unique items to be found, which increase your resources or provide beneficial effects.
The grid offers plenty to keep the player busy, at first. But after a few failed attempts to get through the house, the second part of the game begins to reveal itself: the meta-game.
The Meta Game
Some rooms work in combination with each other. Some rooms have clues for puzzles in other rooms. And there are many, many rooms to discover and unlock. Eventually the player will find ways to go beyond the house and find new revelations on the grounds and beneath the foundations. The game is much larger than it first appears.
Here, Blue Prince introduces “roguelike” elements—new tools and additional resources that persist across days. Meta-puzzles can unlock new areas, but they can also reveal new information. Books in the library, newspaper clippings in the archives, letters hidden in safes and locked diaries all reveal narrow slices of a larger narrative.
I won’t spoil the story, but it involves the aristocratic family to which the player character belongs. A history of the surrounding countries—politics, warfare, and xenophobia—is revealed over the course of the game. The family must navigate these dangerous waters, and it becomes apparent that they did not always manage to pass through unscathed.
The Price of Something New
I think Blue Prince stands as something unique: a roguelike puzzle game that manages to embed an interesting story within a mechanically dense framework. However, it is not entirely without downsides.
I found that the puzzles were well-tuned while I was working toward the “end” of the game—the stated goal of finding the 46th room of the mansion. Each new day I was able to find new clues, solve a puzzle or two, and often experience a room or item or new mechanic that kept things interesting.
Entering the “final” room isn’t the end though. Not really. It’s a revelation, but most players will still have a few dangling story threads and unfinished puzzles to keep them playing after that initial victory. It doesn’t take long to discover that there is plenty more that can only be uncovered after supposedly winning.
The puzzles get harder and more obtuse. The items are all found, and it starts to become more and more rare to discover a new room or a new clue.
The game provides more resources to the player as they solve meta-puzzles, making progress in the daily grid game easier. There are a couple of mechanisms that the player can use to tweak their likelihood of finding specific rooms or items. But eventually, the repetition starts to wear thin, especially when you want to try a puzzle solution or find a specific bit of information and just can’t get the randomness of the house to cooperate. You might only feel like you’ve made progress once every few days. I found myself wishing I could do more to stack the deck in my favor.
There were also at least a couple puzzles that I couldn’t get past without a guide. I don’t begrudge a puzzle game its challenging puzzles, but I am disappointed when the clues don’t point clearly to the actual solution.
The Limits of Narrative through Setting
Blue Prince tells its story through its setting. It relies on the rooms themselves, supplemented with the letters, clippings, emails and books found within. It allows a few concessions to gameyness (nobody is surprised by the magically rearranging house in an otherwise normal world). The story has to fit within the framework of the grid game.
These limits prevent Blue Prince from creating the kind of curated narrative arc that is present in What Remains of Edith Finch or The Beginner’s Guide. That’s okay. It’s a different kind of game and a different kind of story.
Ultimately, it shows that the borders of interactive storytelling continue to expand.
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