GAMES WE LOVE

Draft Your Destiny in Blue Prince

Investigate a mysterious mansion by building it on the fly.

To explore the scrambled rooms and shifting hallways of Blue Prince, you’ll need the mind of a sleuth and the eye of an architect. As 14-year-old Simon, you’re set to inherit your great-uncle’s sprawling estate, but only if you can find and enter the 46th room...in a house that’s supposed to have 45.

Here’s what waits behind the front door:

Design decisions

Each visit to Mount Holly Estate starts the same: Stroll into the grand entryway, pick a door, and decide what’s on the other side before you open it. A parlor? A pantry? A patio? Choose from a handful of room types (with more unlocked as you progress) to design the sprawling mansion as you go—and hopefully forge a path to the elusive missing room. Sound easy? There’s a catch.

Pick your rooms wisely! A closet might have valuable items, but it also creates a dead end—forcing you to backtrack.

Watch your step

There are no timers or health bars in Blue Prince. Your most precious resource is movement: You start each day with 50 steps and use one each time you move between rooms (even if you’re backtracking). Run out of steps and the day ends, resetting the home’s layout. You’ll have to begin anew the next morning—a wickedly clever twist that makes you think carefully about every move. (What doesn’t get erased is your ever-expanding knowledge of Mount Holly’s secrets and inner workings, so take lots of notes!)

Is that a tunnel? If you can’t go through a room, maybe you can find a way to go under it.

Exquisite enigmas

A billiards-room dartboard hides color-coded math equations. Scattered sheets of music feature curiously bolded words. Three locked boxes boast (or lie) about their contents, daring you to deduce which one holds treasure. These and many more brain-bending challenges await in Blue Prince—and sometimes the trickiest part of a puzzle is simply realizing it is a puzzle.

Some rooms have useful items, like a magnifying glass you can use to reveal hidden details in documents.

Slow-burn storytelling

The estate is full of notes, paintings, and interactive antiques that all feed into the game’s larger backstory. What’s the deal with the security room and its many monitors? Why are there two versions of a children’s storybook called The Red Prince? Each new day is another opportunity to tug at a plot thread and see what unravels.

You’ll likely encounter the security room early in the game—but decoding its true purpose will take some time.

A wider world

Finding Room 46 isn’t your only goal. As you explore, you’ll get glimpses of an even deeper mystery involving distant realms and royal bloodlines. Inheriting this strange old house was just the beginning; the true reward is excavating its foundation of secrets and learning what lies beneath.

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Blue Prince

Draft your own adventure