Welcome to Mt Holly Estate. Here is a huge mansion with large open grounds and at least 45 rooms. The mansion is yours now, your late, great-uncle left it to you. Oh, what’s that? Do you need a place to stay tonight? Well, you can’t stay at the house right now; you have to camp in a tiny tent on the grounds. Your great-uncle wants you to solve a little puzzle for him first, to prove that you are truly worthy of the mansion. Don’t worry, you’ve got this — we’re all rooting for you!
Old man Herbert Sinclaire’s request is simple. All he wants is for you to get to the 46th room in the house and unlock it. Unfortunately, the only way you can do so is by finding an elusive room called the “antechamber”. I’ll explain.
Blue Prince is a puzzle game where a large mansion mocks you. It opens up its grand front doors to an entry hall, but everything that happens past that hall is pure devilish trickery. You see, every time you open a door from the hall, a different room manifests. To be fair, you do get to pick from a draft of three different rooms on what you’d like to make appear next. Be warned — the choices you make will dictate the number of paths that you can carve through the house’s fixed grid of 9x5 rooms. Picking something small but useful, like a storeroom or a closet, might box you in, cutting access to other spaces. Other choices present more difficult trade-offs. Do you take the Den, which grants you an extra gem you can spend on unlocking higher-quality rooms? No? So you pick the Nook instead, which is also an excellent choice. It contains a key that might open a locked room level you’ve been circling for days. Unfortunately, getting to the antechamber is not simple. You might exhaust yourself completely before you reach it. Or, you might have just hit upon multiple dead ends. So, every night, when the house “resets” itself, you rest at the tent. And then come back and try a different route the next day... and maybe the next... and the next.
Before you know it, you are 25 days into a camping trip, neck deep in a very weird mystery shrouding the entire family, and a newfound hatred for Herbert Sinclaire. This old man seems incredibly shady. He definitely has some secret hidden away somewhere, and everything in the house seems to point towards something sinister. I always suspected him of something terrible. The idea of this whole labyrinth house can only come from a buffoon who wanted to terrorise his poor employees who helped maintain the house.
Regardless, what he has left you is an addictive puzzle to solve. Your end goal is constantly in view — the antechamber is ever present on the map. And knowing that you just need another parlour, another gemstone, another key card, or access to a secret garden — to get in there, is just so tantalising and wonderful. I think this is how my cat feels when I hold a treat out for him, and keep it just, ever so slightly, out of reach.
The drafting mechanic is what kind of holds the game together. When I open a room, it provides a bunch of different options. You name it — gymnasium, parlor, office, conference hall, boudoirs, bedrooms, guest rooms, servant quarters. Obviously, some rooms offer better benefits than others. But they are all linked together by something bigger. A small clue in a painting, or a letter, every single one of which you must note down. The developers kind of hope that you pick up the breadcrumbs all the way. Keep a folder of screenshots handy. It’s all going to make sense at some point.
As it is a simple walking simulator, I cannot recommend this enough to anyone who likes solving a good puzzle. This game isn’t just for gamers. It’s currently available on Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation 5.