Blue Prince is the first title from Dogubomb, and it’s a deep deep deep dark hole of a first-person exploratory puzzle game.

Note: It’s going to be hard to talk about because basically everything about this thing is a spoiler, but here goes.

The premise is that you’re a kid named Simon who just inherited the expansive and mysterious Mt. Holly estate from your great uncle. The inheritance comes with one condition: you must locate and enter the 46th room of this seemingly 45 room mansion. Oh, and the layout of the house resets every night after you get too tired from wandering around.

So yes, it’s technically a roguelite, but it’s not really roguelite-forward. This thing is a capital-P Puzzle Game. It’s like Myst but you have to build the world from scratch room-by-room every day. The game starts you off by handing over a blueprint of the manor, it’s a 5x9 grid of empty slots, with the entrance at the bottom-center and THE ANTECHAMBER at the top-center. Each room has 4 possible exits in cardinal directions, and opening a door presents you with a selection of 3 new rooms from your unseen “deck” of rooms that could be on the other side of that door. Pick one to lock it in, explore, repeat, and try to build a chain up to THE ANTECHAMBER.

That is, obviously, easier said than done. The game is DENSE with puzzles. Rooms, unless explicitly stated, are unique per run. So like a Nook is always going to have the same internal layout and you’re only ever going to put it one place in the mansion per day. It might have random items to pick up off the floor or a table, but it’s always going to have a chair, pile of books, bookshelves, a table, and have a single exit on the left. Oh, and the Nook also has a very helpful note in it that explicitly tells you “hey, uhhh, you should probably get a notebook and start keeping some notes because you will NOT be able to keep all this stuff in your head”.

Most rooms in the game have one obvious surface-level puzzle, clue or use. For instance: the Commissary has a random selection of things to buy, the Bedroom restores 2 steps when you walk through it, the Nook has a key in addition to that note I mentioned. However, most rooms actually have like six or seven of these aspects in various combinations. Some puzzles are contained within a single room, like the Parlor which has a “3 boxes” logic puzzle, where at least one box has a true statement, at least one box has a false statement, and based on that you have to sort out which box contains a reward of gems. Many puzzles, however, span multiple rooms, and often require them to be connected in specific ways. Several puzzles span the whole damn mansion. All of this is surfaced naturally in the game, sometimes through explicit clues, sometimes through implicit clues, but most of the time just by existing.

The scope and depth of some of these puzzles is really astounding, like I can think of one clue in particular which – based on what I’ve seen – appears to be one very specific hint to start with. If you investigate it closer, you may realize it actually also has a second clue within it. Hours and hours of exploration later, you may revisit it and discover that actually it has a THIRD level of clue in it that was always there, you just didn’t know what to look for. Does it go deeper? I honestly don’t know, it probably does, because every time I think I understand something fully I inevitably realize there’s another layer in there while I’m taking a shower or driving.

I also greatly appreciate the immense variety of puzzles the game offers, it’s not just all logic puzzles. You’ve got the big surface-level puzzle of spatial arrangement and navigation of the maze of a house you’re building. Then there’s some logic puzzles like the aforementioned Parlor puzzle. There are some that are just based on interpreting clues, or finding hidden messages. There are others that are word-based, or linguistic, or that rely on homonyms or homophones, or the general vagueness of the English language. There are some that I’d consider are strategic puzzles, where you’re making intentional decisions based on the world-state to increase your chances of success. There are math puzzles! Geography puzzles! Literary puzzles?? There are some puzzles in there that I’m not even sure how to categorize them.

The lore of the game, which I absolutely will not go into because I barely understand what exactly is going on, is all provided in-game through books, notes, letters, environmental storytelling, fortune-telling robots, textbooks, maps, classroom decorations, etc. The lore of this game is as deep and complex – if not deeper and more complex – than the puzzles they’re related to, and as you progress further and further into the mansion the line between puzzle and lore becomes progressively blurrier. It’s also all surprisingly good.

I have exactly one criticism of the game, and it’s the most common I’ve seen in the discourse: the randomness of rooms can feel a little excessive, and can end up feeling really bad when your run ends because you just didn’t get offered good rooms. It’s very easy to draft yourself into a corner, or run out of keys, or fail to get a way to deal with Security Doors, or simply run out of steps, or any number of other exciting ways you can screw yourself.

It can similarly feel really crappy when you have finally figured out a puzzle (or think you have finally figured out a puzzle), but it depends on being given a specific room, or a specific set of rooms, or a specific set of rooms in a specific configuration. The more you want to try to control what you’re doing in the game the more it feels like the game pushes back and says “No, sorry, you’re doing this today”.

I kept exhaustive notes over my play-through, and always had a list of unresolved threads that I could opportunistically tug at if I encountered one, so I wasn’t starting a run with exactly one puzzle in mind that I wanted to work on, but that too has some significant downsides. A lot of important rooms have costs associated, like locked doors or gems. On multiple occasions I’d draft something associated with one specific unresolved puzzle, and whoops that eats up resources. But then later I might finally get drafted an important room for some other completely unrelated puzzle, so sure I’d go chase that too. Then I’d finally get offered an incredibly important room that I’d been waiting multiple runs to finally rig up properly only to realize that running in all these different directions has left me tapped out of all my resources. Time to call it a day.

I like roguelikes / roguelites where even if I don’t “win” the run, I at least make forward progress through learning something or discovering something or unlocking some sort of permanent upgrade. I like them more if I have direct influence or control over what I’m making progress towards. There are several kinds of “permanent upgrades” in Blue Prince beyond just knowledge, but very few of these are something you can set out to try to do. You really just have to roll with the punches and figure out what the game is giving you, and then focus on that.

I’m not sure how you fix this, though. As it stands, it’s real easy to have long stretches of drought where you might have some really short runs, or runs where you feel like you didn’t accomplish anything, and your failure was largely out of your control. But then you might get a run where the game just dumps resources on you and everything’s coming together and you get a bunch of brand new rooms and the combo you’ve been looking for is handed to you right off the rip. I’ve got some ideas of how it could be better, but I’m not sure if they would break the game outright. I’m also not sure if these do exist as upgrades and I just haven’t figured them out yet.

I got my first “clear” in 30 in-game days and 20 some hours. I’m not sure how much of that is actually game time vs time spent paused, because I spent SO MUCH time “in game” but actually over at my whiteboard, or consulting notes in my Obsidian notebook, or just sitting. I still have a LOT of game to unravel, but I also have a ton of other games I want to get to. I might just go full-spoiler or watch some videos at this point. It’s good. You have to be ready for a dense game full of some hard puzzles and punishing randomness, but if you’re the kind of sicko that craves that kind of content it is an amazing experience. Highly Recommended.