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The inverted pyramid of Blue Prince

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In this post I’ll talk about my experience with Blue Prince (opens in new tab), one of the most beguiling adventure puzzle games I’ve seen in a while. I’m not a domain expert, but I do have some genre experience, from the still-excellent Museum Madness (opens in new tab) to Myst, Riven, and The Witness. So I have a few things to say about the strengths and weaknesses of Blue Prince, what makes it fun, and the inverted pyramid by which I think it ultimately falls short.

Early-game

Your goal in Blue Prince is to find a mysterious room that doesn’t exist, at least not officially. You do so by drafting rooms onto a 5 by 9 grid representing the Mt. Holly estate. These rooms present both features and drawbacks: some contain items that improve your runs or features that help you accomplish tasks, while others cost you resources to draft. Every room you enter costs you steps; once they run out, you must start drafting from scratch. But as you iterate, you’ll find that things occasionally persist across runs, allowing you to accumulate an edge.

Blue Prince plays a dual role as both roguelike and as adventure puzzle game. This makes it an unusual vehicle with which to approach the core abductive reasoning challenge that puzzle games typically offer: sketching the bounds of the game universe’s internal consistency; taking scrupulous notes; running tests and following inferential chains down rabbit-holes; and making surprising connections and working backwards to reason out why they exist. The roguelike elements also encourage iteration, making it a great way to solidify your mental model for learning.

If puzzle games are about learning, what do we learn in a roguelike virtual escape room? Turns out, very little about estate architecture, but a surprising amount about synergy. Aside from a few dedicated rooms containing literal puzzles, and the usual Myst-style “object here opens door there” exploration puzzles, much of the fun in the first part of Blue Prince is in hunting for and cracking meta-puzzles. What appears to be the core iterative gameplay loop of drafting and resource management actually primes you to discover the second-order loop of synergistic room and item combinations. For example, when you learn how the boiler room works, you reveal an entirely new set of interaction effects: what rooms could I draft next to this? what happens if I route power to this weird red box? is there another use for this room that I haven’t yet considered? The game’s open-ended drafting scheme encourages you to identify and internalize the control levers that govern the game’s structural synergy. And this underscores the importance of RNG too; while it’s true that there’s plenty of randomness in Blue Prince, most of it turns out to be both pretty tractable and a clever cover for the kind of emergent gameplay that makes puzzle games fun.

The value of synergy amid randomness reminds me of good deckbuilders like Dominion, where the replay value comes mostly from working out engine-friendly kingdom combinations, or from looking for clever ways to Groom-rush (opens in new tab) your way to a 3-pile. The key is that emergence is driven by breadth of possibility: the more things you can do, the more options you can explore in any given run, the higher the likelihood that you’ll combine them in unusual or unexpected ways. And Blue Prince is teeming with possibility in the early stages, with 45 cells in which to draft rooms in different configurations, and plenty of interaction effects that typify the game’s meta-puzzles. Even if you think the game isn’t strictly speaking emergent so much as combinatorially explosive, the design clearly rewards discovery. Starting every day in the same place might seem repetitive, but there’s so much to explore that by day 20, you’re probably unlocking entirely new ways to play the game.

This thinking also differentiates the game from its puzzling predecessors, of which Myst and Riven are probably the biggest cultural touchstones. Riven in particular is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s got an immersive puzzle world with a highly original and consistent design philosophy, plenty of lore and mystery, excellent puzzle design, and a willingness to really challenge the audience — think of how well lore and numeracy are woven together in the wahrk hangman puzzle, or how the core puzzle in Riven arches expansively across the game’s five islands. But at the end of the day you are limited in your options, as underscored by recent free-roam remakes that still limit how much of the environment you can actually interact with.1 You can’t click on all that much in Blue Prince either, but when you can, it has far more combinatorial implications.

This makes the first half of Blue Prince a great experience. You’ve got an challenging immediate goal, enough leads in any given run to prevent the RNG from detracting from the fun, and plenty of lore to keep you engaged in searching for the world underneath the puzzles. You’ll find yourself either taking hundreds of screenshots and writing pages of cryptic notes, or wishing you had.

Late-game

But all good things come to an end. The fun of early-game Blue Prince runs into a wall after the credits roll; for me this moment came at the Aries Court, although others might have felt the game’s tenor change elsewhere. Past that point, the emergent gameplay mostly gets winnowed out with progression. In this sense, the game is an inverted pyramid; alive with possibility at the start, but narrowed into increasingly specific pathways that strip away the essence of the game with time. This puts Blue Prince back into familiar puzzling territory, which isn’t an inherently bad thing, but it does mean that the magic of the first half is gone.

This happens for two reasons. First, as you approach the endgame, there are fewer unsolved puzzles, meaning there’s less to do on any given run, and therefore a higher chance of being foiled by RNG. Second, the puzzles become more arcane in the late-game; like the Aries Court puzzle I mentioned earlier or the Throne Room puzzle, they tend to require a confluence of highly specific events that aren’t always so natural to assemble. To its credit, the game does a better job of clue redundancy than many other puzzlers; if you miss a key piece of information in one place, you might well encounter it elsewhere. But even so, as puzzles compound into third-order meta-puzzles, you’ll have a lot less to do but a lot more busywork to achieve it. Finally, the game’s progression turns drafting into a rote exercise that can feel like it’s getting in the way of the puzzles themselves. The game’s attempt to refocus your attention by hiding late-game Blue Tent clues within these rooms reads more like a struggle to maintain relevancy than anything else. What made early runs exciting collapses into tedium at the nadir of the inverted pyramid.

To illustrate the problem, I’d like to compare it to another important puzzle precursor to Blue Prince that’s also heavy on post-game content and that adopts a prickly philosophical stance on such problems. Jonathan Blow’s 2016 game The Witness borrows from Myst’s puzzling DNA too, but it’s eager to carve its own thematic path, what with its cryptic audio logs and environmental mysteries. Thematically, the game is denser and murkier than Riven. It embodies the spirit of learning in design — consider the cleverly crafted tutorial areas near the apple orchard — and in narrative; this is another game where it’s possible to “win” without even figuring out what it’s about. Getting a proper handle on the story requires considering the perspectives of the audio logs, especially the endgame logs, and asking why the game is twisting the knife with its increasingly difficult underground puzzles and environmental errands. How badly do you want to fill up that obsidian obelisk? And the challenge caps this learning journey fittingly, by requiring that you have internalized all the knowledge the game has imparted. No way to win by skimming a strategy guide, you’ve got to master the puzzle mechanics yourself. And if you beat the challenge,2 the game offers you the wry pleasure of… watching an hour-long video interrogating humanity’s obsession with synchronicity. One view of The Witness’ payoff is that there is no payoff, a disheartening Picardy third (opens in new tab) if there ever was one.

The Witness is an incredible game and the references I’ve seen to Blue Prince as “Witness-like” are surely meant as a compliment. But I’m not sure that the comparison holds water. It’s true that both operate in a world weirdly devoid of human activity, both share some obvious design cues, both traffic in environmental secrets and feature substantial amounts of post-game content that’s critical to understanding the narrative, and so on. But there are major3 differences between the two.

In The Witness, once you power up the elevator, you find yourself slowly returning to the start of the game, the puzzles undoing themselves and the skeleton of the cab gradually fading into nothingness. And at the moment of zen, when you’re placed back at the game’s starting point, you immediately notice the environmental puzzle you didn’t see when you first started the game. Your learning journey has led you to see the world from a more nuanced perspective.4 Blue Prince chooses a completely different thematic path here, going for puzzle depth instead of intellectual depth. Indeed, the puzzles are so heavily layered that the endgame objectives require techniques that a newcomer would never stumble across in their first few runs. You can learn the lingo if you play long enough, but despite starting in the same place every time, you never really restart the game. It’s the antithesis of The Witness’ philosophy.5 So yes, you’re learning as you sharpen your problem-solving abilities over time, but you’re never asked to turn the knife back on itself or question why you’re so obsessed about finding the estate’s secrets in the first place. It is just assumed that you’ll keep playing until you complete all the challenges and discover all the secrets. This is precisely the kind of thinking that The Witness critiques.

And that’s the game’s core problem. Eventually the game’s artifice swallows the estate whole. It becomes a fake place full of metamysteries that stretch credulity, and that’s hard to reconcile with the portrait of the estate-owner whom you saw as mere bequestor at the start. The Witness is full of artifice too — many facets of the island are never made explicitly clear to us — but this is deliberately so, in service of a specific philosophical point. You might find it edgy or unnecessarily cryptic, but it’s consistently articulated. I can advance no such defence for Blue Prince; it boasts substantial depth, but ultimately the game has nothing substantive to say. A frustrating ending to what’s otherwise a great puzzle game.

Footnotes

  1. Although I didn’t play the 2024 reimagining of Riven, I watched a Let’s Play and was disappointed to see that several puzzles had been simplified considerably. I can appreciate wanting to give longtime fans the experience of playing it as if for the first time, but the easier puzzles in the 2024 version reflect poorly on the modern audience’s critical thinking skills. ↩

  2. I couldn’t, although I like to pretend it’s because I was using a controller and wasn’t a skill issue. ↩

  3. Blue Prince’s obsession with corny puns and wordplay is one of its worst points. You might have expected it from the game’s title, but they pepper the gameplay too, frequently veering into dad-joke territory. ↩

  4. That’s one thing that annoys me about many implementations of NG+; you start again with some increased or faster-levelling power set, but there’s nothing fundamentally new or different about your experience. The Witness’ hotel ending pokes fun at this by showing you the Tetris-like “I can see it in my sleep” tricks that such experiences can play on you. ↩

  5. The most anti-Witness part of Blue Prince is probably the mechanism that lets you import trophies from other runs into your one “true” run. ↩