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I've lived in some strange buildings in my time as a renter, but I have to admit I've never come across anything quite like the mansion Mt. Holly in Blue Prince. A huge building, it's nominally made up of 45 rooms, though when your relative passes away and names you in their will, it's on the condition that you find a 46th room that's rumored to exist. Oh, and also – the mansion changes its layout every single day, and you must begin exploration anew the next morning.
From developer Dogubomb (and published by Raw Fury), this rather generous Steam Next Fest roguelike demo gives me four days to attempt to track down this room. Reader, I fail. I don't even manage to enter the antechamber at the back of the house, which is implied to be the first step towards figuring out the location of that final room. But I do get tantalizing close. I'm tempted to boot up the demo again and start four days from scratch with a fresh save.
Room with a view
Perhaps I'm getting a head of myself. Blue Prince isn't a laborious game, but it's one you have to take one room at a time. Played in first-person, you start out in an entrance hall each day with three doors leading away. With a blueprint map in hand, you know that the building is nine rows of five deep. What's behind these three doors? To a point, that's up to you. Approach, click to open, and you're presented with three possible rooms that you can enter. Where will you explore next?
Each room is different, and is a named, designed space. Each fits within certain categories of room, and both the contents within and the doors leading out may differ. A storeroom, for example, may be great for filling your pockets with coins, keys, and gems used to reach more difficult spots in the Mt Holly, but with no door leading out you're just creating a dead end for yourself. Of course, sometimes you can engineer a sequence of rooms where that dead end isn't just not going to a problem, but fits perfectly (a tucked away corner, for instance).
Some even contain documents to read that contain hints for how to progress further, special items that allow you to reach even more items, or puzzles that'll net you even more pick-ups. Going one room at a time means that anything you can nab to keep your run going is going to be extremely important. Even your energy is a factor, having to scarf down food to keep your footsteps counter high enough. It goes down by one with each you step foot in, though some can also restore it.
Each placed room tightens the noose a little on possible rooms, running down your options. Simply keeping enough paths forward while avoiding dead ends is tricky enough. It's not just that you exhaust your rooms the deeper you get, but you can come across more roadblocks too. Locked doors require keys or even keycards to progress, and certain rooms require gems to spent in order to construct them too – creating a balance between both entering and exiting rooms, dictated by how you decide to operate in between those two limits.
The challenge comes from weighing up rooms that might allow you to move through space relatively unimpeded but might box you into a dead end without the resources to move forward, with stopping off to hoover stuff up on the way. It's made all the more vital as some rooms pave the path towards actually unlocking the antechamber at all. If you just rock up, you'll find the room sealed.
Hidden puzzles, special keys, and side-paths unravel even more layers to Blue Prince that you might expect from the simple premise. Figuring out how to both unlock the antechamber, and then reach it, forms the bulk of my runs, where I manage to do either one or the other but not quite both. Even just four runs in – and some elements aren't present in the demo too, I'm told – things have already gotten more complex. I'm eager to jump back in. I'm certain now I know more about these rooms, I can nudge them together just a bit better the next time around. But then, where will I go next?
Blue Prince releases on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on April 10, 2025
There's more neat twists on the genre to explore too! This roguelike alt-WW2 Steam Next Fest RTS, Grit and Valor - 1946, put me in charge of a dieselpunk mech squad, and is wonderfully snack-sized
