Puzzling through Mt. Holly Manor
Video games can give players the opportunity to play out wildly unrealistic fantasies. The power of flight, invulnerability, home ownership under the age of 30.
In Blue Prince you’ve been left a sprawling mansion by your recently deceased great uncle. However, as with all wills left by distant wealthy relatives, there’s a catch. In order to claim your inheritance you must find the secret room 46.
Under normal circumstances this would probably be quite easy, poke at the walls, check the corridors, have a look in the basement. Most houses can be explored fairly easily, however Mt Holly Estate is an unusual property which would be a nightmare for an average estate agent. Other than the initial lobby of the building, every room is drawn anew each day based on which blueprints you ‘draft’ when opening a door.
This means the layout of the house is determined from a random selection of blueprints (hence the pun of the title) and your route through will change every day. Your progress is limited by steps, run out of those and your day will end because you’re too tired to continue. You’ll find money, jewels and keys throughout which will help you with drafting rooms or getting through rarer rooms.
Various items can be found scattered throughout the mansion, like a shovel or magnifying glass, working out what you can do with these will help your progress. Find a workshop and you’ll be able to combine some items for even more uses.
You can even wander around in the grounds of Mt Holly and there are various locked gates which might pique your interest. It’ll soon become quite clear that the eternally shifting internal spatial organisation of rooms is not the only mystery hiding in your new home.
Blue Prince is one of those games where there are layers of depth to it. Sure, you can just get to Room 46 and call it a day, but that’ll be ignoring a wealth of other things that linger under the surface. Each of the rooms you’ve drafted have two pictures in them, wonder what that’s about?
There are coloured notes around the place of various degrees of truthfulness. There’s a dark room, a fuse box, and a whole computer system. All of them beckon you to investigate. But you progress further and uncover more mysteries, and you find more puzzles. There appears to be some political undercurrents hidden in metaphors and books from the library. What country are you in and what did your family do? Why are there chess pieces everywhere? How deep into this are you going to go?
Blue Prince can be a little frustrating due to the random nature of the rooms. You might solve a puzzle mentally, but you need several runs before the fates of RNG align to let you get the right room/item combo and actually put it into practice. There are ways to sway this, you can get a room where you can influence the rarity of specific rooms. You can store an item in a cloakroom so you can get it the next day (or at least the next day you get the cloakroom again). Even so, the randomness is probably the biggest barrier to enjoying the game at times.
But if you can manage that, if you have multiple goals to pursue in each run so there’s less chance randomness will mean zero progress. If you want to bury yourself in the mysteries, unravel the story, hunt for details and nail down secrets. With all those things Blue Prince is spectacular.
Verdict
The Nintendo Switch 2 seems like a natural home for Blue Prince. It lends itself to having a quick run here or there. Pick up and play in-between chores at home, playing handheld with a notepad beside you. The only problem is suddenly realising it’s been three hours and you should probably go to bed instead of trying to get out of the garage on your next run!
If you loved Braid, Fez or Tunic then you’ll adore Blue Prince. It is a compelling, shifting mystery box of puzzles that reveals layer after layer, the further you investigate the more you are rewarded.
Where to Buy
- Amazon UK
- Price: £49.99 (Physical)
- Link: https://amzn.to/46Vcxg1
- Nintendo eShop
#AffiliateLinks – Prices correct at time of publishing.
Credits
Written by John Edwards
Edited by Mark McAllister
Graphic Template by Paul L. Russell
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for this review.