Blue Prince, or, Betrayal at House of Leaves

My obsession of the moment is Blue Prince, the outstanding first1 game from the studio Dogubomb, written, designed, and directed by Tonda Ros. It’s been getting a ton of attention and buzz from video game fans, in addition to several perfect reviews calling it one of the best games ever made, and I think the praise is entirely deserved.

The premise is that you’ve been named in your great uncle’s will to inherit his magnificent estate Mount Holly. As with most fictional wills, there’s one significant stipulation: you have to find the secret 46th room in the 45-room manor. Each night, all of the rooms leading from the entrance hall shift position, and the house never has the same layout twice. As an additional complication, you have to start each day’s attempt fresh, keeping nothing from your previous days apart from the things you’ve learned in your exploration.2

My first couple of hours of playing, I wasn’t going for an optimal strategy so much as I was marveling at how many different types of game they’d managed to blend together. What if Myst and Riven were roguelikes? What if Betrayal at House on the Hill created a real 3D environment that you could move around, picking up pieces of environmental storytelling? What if a traditional inventory-based adventure game added the layer of making you responsible for placing the rooms containing puzzles and the rooms containing their solutions?

The initial experience is the best kind of overwhelming. Rooms are filled with enigmatic photographs and drawings that suggest every single detail might be a necessary clue for later on. I happily pulled out a notebook — which I never do in games, insisting “that’s what computers are for!” — and began furiously documenting everything. The photo library on my phone is now overflowing with screenshots of book pages and other documents found in the game. Some are probably useful for a puzzle later on, many are probably only there to establish the game’s lore and world-building.

In fact, that feeling of drowning in clues is the only criticism I have of the game so far.3 The game is very good at communicating its clues for puzzles, but not as good at communicating when or where the clues can be applied. And because the available rooms are semi-randomized, and the layout is up to the player’s discretion, there’s a disorienting sense that you’re missing opportunities to solve puzzles, or you’re wasting time going around in circles.

For me, the most anxiety-inducing case of this was with the pairs of related drawings that appear in most rooms. It was obvious that they had some significance, and it was straightforward enough to figure out how to decipher them. The game has copious hints to help you decipher them, but I was left at a loss trying to figure out how and where to apply them. I spent multiple rooms through the house trying out the permutations to find a connection, convinced that I was losing progress each time I had to reset. My husband, who’s usually better at puzzles than I am, figured it out quickly, and he gave me exactly the nudge I needed without spoiling it for me outright. (In case you’re in the same boat I was: notice that the rooms can change based on their placement in the house itself, not just based on their placement in relation to each other).

And as it turns out, if I’d been patient, I would’ve eventually encountered the room that explains how to solve the puzzle. I was thankful that I’d gotten a hint that let me feel like I’d figured it out mostly by myself, instead of the outright explanation given by the game. But the larger lesson was clear: even though the game’s premise can make it feel like overwhelming chaos, there’s a very thoughtful and carefully-designed curve of progression through it.

I reached the end credits of the game last night, after 20 in-game days and, according to Steam, around 20 hours of real-time play. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there is still a ton left to explore, puzzles I still haven’t solved, areas of the estate I haven’t yet opened, blueprints I haven’t yet placed in the house, and parts of the story I haven’t yet uncovered. Considering how I’ve never been a completionist, even before I got old and more precious with my free time, it’s a testament to how well the game is made that I’m still eager to dive back in and see everything.4

But even if the game had ended on its end credits, it was extremely satisfying. Not just a cleverly-constructed game, but a surprisingly engaging story, with an ending that felt moving because I’d been allowed to make all the necessary connections myself. It really is a masterpiece.

Here are some high-level, non-spoiler ideas to keep in mind if you’re planning to play the game or are still early in it, things that I wish I’d known that would’ve calmed my tendency to meta-game it:

Be patient and trust that the game will keep revealing new things.

When placing rooms, try to build out as much of the lower “ranks” as possible in the south of the house to build up your resources, before working your way up to the goal at the north end.

Whenever it’s possible without building yourself into a dead end, always favor placing a blueprint that you’ve never seen before.

Don’t forget to go outside! (Useful for both in game and out of game).

I’ve got more thoughts about the game that might veer into mild spoiler territory, so I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if you haven’t yet reached the end credits of the game and want to discover everything completely fresh.

Back when I was working at Telltale in preproduction on the Sam & Max games that would become The Devil’s Playhouse, I got fixated on the idea of how to apply repeatable game mechanics to narrative-driven games. The style of game that the studio was making at the time was deliberately based on the Monkey Island model, which at its most abstract level is a bunch of single-purpose keys that each fits a single door that leads to the next part of the story. Over time, it became the explicit goal of these games to hide the “game-ness” as much as possible; eventually, you’d reach the platonic ideal of an interactive story in which the game mechanics are the story, and vice versa.5

Meanwhile, I was playing a lot of board games, which consist entirely of explicit, repeatable mechanics that can still sometimes convey a strong sense of theme.6 Even more than that, I was playing independent video games — and more notably, the big-budget games that were either inspired by indie games or directly based on them — that often consisted of taking a single game mechanic and then spending hours riffing on all the various ways that that mechanic could be used. (That might also be why Day of the Tentacle is my favorite of the SCUMM games: because almost all of the puzzles are variations on the theme of time travel, Looney Toons cartoon logic, or both).

In Sam & Max, those ideas turned into the toys that give Max his psychic powers, with the plan that each episode would mainly focus on puzzles that depended on one of Max’s abilities. Kind of like Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun or the Portal gun, you’d be thinking less about how to find a specific item to solve a specific puzzle, and more about how to use the same tool in different ways to solve different problems.

I can’t objectively say how well that idea came across in the final games, but I think it’s a fascinating branch of game design, especially narrative game design. And it’s especially applicable to Blue Prince, because I’ve been marveling that not only does it make no attempt to hide its “game-ness,” it leans into it. It initially presents itself as essentially a tile-laying board game, and yet by the time end credits rolled, I felt as if I’d explored a real place and been told a genuinely compelling story about a family and the world they lived in, with their love stories, their allegiances, and their betrayals.

Possibly the one thing that’s most impressed me about the game is that it takes what seems to be a chaotic system completely at the whim of a random number generator, and somehow gets a steady, manageable progression curve out of it.

At first, it seemed like an overwhelming amount of stuff, rooms packed full of details and every detail feeling significant. But it gradually became clear that there was an order to all of it. It’s about exploration first and foremost, and its core driving mechanic encourages you to explore and experiment. What will I discover if I place this new room? What will happen if I place this room in this location? And as you’re explicitly making connections between rooms, you’re implicitly forming connections between ideas.

As I started, I was completely focused on optimizing rooms with the number of exits, so I could make the most progress through the house. Then I started to pick up on hints that the game was responding to where I placed the rooms in the house, not just how I placed them in relation to each other. It took me a while to pick up on it, but the game was giving hints the whole time that it was paying attention, which I’d originally just taken as thoughtful design flourishes. Some rooms only show up on the east wing or west wing of the house, for instance, and they’re named accordingly. Some rooms will have solid walls if placed in the interior of the house, or windows if they’re placed on an edge. Sometimes those windows show parts of the exterior grounds.

Meanwhile, placing those rooms would give me the chance to explore them and pick up details of environmental storytelling. Is this a clue for a puzzle? Probably, better take a picture of it. Who is the person in this picture? Who wrote this note or email? Oh, I recognize them from earlier.

It meant that I was constantly mode-switching. Not in the jarring sense, but in the sense that different parts of my brain were firing off simultaneously. Now I’m playing a strategic tile-laying game, now I’m playing a Myst-like puzzle game trying to figure out how to operate a device, now I’m in an exploration game filling out more of the details about the people who lived here.

And I understand the frustration with the roguelike aspect of the design, and the feeling that your progress in the game is entirely dependent on a random number generator. But I genuinely believe that Blue Prince has managed to flip the script on the traditional roguelike, somewhat.

I tend to think of roguelikes as a steadily rising line of repeatedly interrupted progress. I go into a dungeon, I get wiped out, I start over again, each time getting a little bit farther. Blue Prince does often feel like that, where you’ve got a good run going, somehow finding exactly the keys and other items you need, and you get so close to the final room before you’re blocked into a dead end and have to call it a day. And you’ve lost all that progress, and have to start over from scratch!

The thing that I’d barely noticed until the end credits rolled, though, was that I wasn’t actually losing my progress. Almost none of the runs through the house felt wasted, since even when I didn’t discover a new room or solve a new puzzle, I still learned something. (I say “almost none” because I did have a couple runs of extremely bad luck, where I almost immediately bricked myself into a corner. It happens). And it began to feel like the resets weren’t wiping out my progress, but wiping out my mistakes.

This is largely made possible by that overwhelming number of details that you’re hit with at the start of the game. There are always multiple things that you can be thinking of, multiple puzzles you’re trying to solve, multiple places you’re trying to get to.

I started run hoping that I’d get all the right combination of rooms and items that would help me unlock an area on the grounds. Instead, I found a set of car keys. That meant a change of plans, in which this run would be focused on getting me back into the garage. It still gives the satisfaction of setting a goal and then working towards achieving it, but it does require starting each new day with the zen of letting the random number generator decide what your goal is for the day.

Maybe that does become impossibly frustrating when you’re trying to 100% the game, and you spend day after day just hoping for the lucky roll of the dice that will get you the one thing left that you need. But that’s a problem for future Chuck. Currently I’m excited at the chance to dive back in and unlock entire sections of the house that I still have yet to see.

There are tons of other examples of how Blue Prince confounded my expectations and accomplished things I’d always thought you just couldn’t do without tight, linear control over the player’s experience. And it does them confidently and seemingly effortlessly7, with a sense of “What, like it’s hard?” It’s definitely one that I’m going to keep going back to over and over again, not just to play, but to try and pick apart to figure out how it works.

1
In that it’s the first release of their own original concept, as opposed to making work for other studios

2
With several exceptions that are all, like everything else in this game, thoughtfully designed.

3
Apart from some issues that I’ve heard affect colorblind players, most of which seem like they could be addressed in a future patch.

4
Although I was feeling very proud and smart and accomplished for reaching the end goal last night, and then on my first subsequent day, almost immediately built myself into a corner and had to end the run embarrassingly early.

5
And getting closer to that goal is a huge part of why The Walking Dead series was such a success.

6
An excellent recent example is Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which makes arithmetic feel like a car race.

7
Seemingly being the key word, since I don’t even want to think about the complexity of spreadsheets required to make this game work

1 In that it’s the first release of their own original concept, as opposed to making work for other studios

2 With several exceptions that are all, like everything else in this game, thoughtfully designed.

3 Apart from some issues that I’ve heard affect colorblind players, most of which seem like they could be addressed in a future patch.

4 Although I was feeling very proud and smart and accomplished for reaching the end goal last night, and then on my first subsequent day, almost immediately built myself into a corner and had to end the run embarrassingly early.

5 And getting closer to that goal is a huge part of why The Walking Dead series was such a success.

6 An excellent recent example is Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which makes arithmetic feel like a car race.

7 Seemingly being the key word, since I don’t even want to think about the complexity of spreadsheets required to make this game work