Games

Blue Prince: The Endless Frustration of Random Room Drafting

BBG News

The video game “Blue Prince” is likened to a playful, yet slightly painful mosquito bite – enjoyable in its mystery but potentially frustrating when delved into too deeply. On the surface, it’s a puzzle-based game developed by Dogubomb, but it offers much more than that. You assume the role of a young heir, tasked with finding the enigmatic ‘Room 46’ hidden within the walls of Mount Holly manor to inherit the Sinclair family fortune. The twist is that you are responsible for designing the layout of the house’s various rooms, which reset each day. Each morning, you start anew in your quest to find Room 46, moving through a 9×5 blueprint one room at a time. At times, it can indeed be quite perplexing and not as rewarding as anticipated.

Initially, as you start exploring, it becomes apparent that different rooms serve unique purposes. Upon entering each door, you’ll encounter three distinct spaces, each with an entrance, exit, advantages, and disadvantages randomly assigned. Rooms colored blue tend to be beneficial, offering keys to locked doors, coins for purchases, or gems needed to construct more valuable rooms. On the other hand, rooms with a red color come with penalties. For instance, the dark room hides the next room you’ll enter, the chapel deducts a coin each time you pass through, and the weight room reduces the number of steps you have left upon entry.

In the game “Blue Prince,” steps represent your progress, with each step spent every time you move in or out of a room. Restorative purple bedrooms replenish steps, while food found and eaten gives more steps. The number of steps you have determines how much you can explore, as once they’re depleted, you must end the day and start anew. The orientation of the rooms you place matters too, as your goal is typically to move north towards the enticing antechamber located at the map’s top. Unfortunately, the randomly generated rooms may not always be in your favor, leading to dead ends and forcing an earlier-than-desired end to the day.

Rooms resembling a parlor, adorned with three containers marked with progressively complex riddles, and a billiard room featuring math-involved dartboard puzzles (I believed I had bid farewell to mathematics upon earning a ‘C’ grade GCSE in 1998), offer gems and keys upon solving their mysteries. As you journey northward through the manor, you’ll notice that more and more doors are locked. Gems and keys prove vital, and it can be frustrating when your advancement is hindered by a lock or a room inaccessible due to a lack of needed gemstones.

It took me 36 in-game days to discover Room 46 initially, and even longer to return there. This was all after I had obtained permanent upgrades, learned which tools were most beneficial (such as the shovel for unearthing items, the keycard for opening electronic doors, the metal detector for finding hidden coins and keys, among others), and navigated through numerous challenges. In the game “Blue Prince,” it can sometimes feel like you’re persistently hitting your head against a brick wall, waiting for the right combination of events to occur and the game to provide the rooms necessary for significant progress towards the north. However, the small glimmers of encouragement the game offers as each mystery is solved keep me engaged, almost compulsively so, despite the frustration.

In the game titled “Blue Prince”, each room hides its own small mysteries that aren’t always apparent at first glance. However, as you sift through abandoned notes and letters, search books, and piece together clues, you’ll experience the thrill of discovery, or what some might call the ‘eureka’ moment. This is what makes Dogubomb’s intricate puzzle box so intriguing, even though it may seem frustrating at first (and it did for me). Each small success makes the struggle seem worthwhile, and as the layers of mystery are gradually uncovered like a giant onion, it gives you a sense of intelligence. However, solving simple arithmetic problems on those billiard room dartboards made me feel smart too, so maybe I’m just easily impressed. Or then again, perhaps I simply enjoy scratching mosquito bites.

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2025-04-07 17:12

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