In first-person puzzle strategy game Blue Prince you've inherited a sprawling mansion from a dead relative, but as there often is when an eccentric wealthy person writes their last will and testament, there's a catch. To take ownership of the ornate mansion you first have to complete an unusual challenge: Explore its 45 rooms, and find some way to enter the mysterious Room 46.

In addition to the catch, there's a twist: you're building this mansion as you explore it, one room at a time.

I first played Blue Prince at GDC back in March for about an hour, and days later I was still thinking about one of its puzzles, which I hadn't had enough time to solve. Four months after that demo, developer Dogubomb offered me the chance to play a nearly-complete build, and I jumped at the opportunity to pick up where I'd left off. After 30 more hours in the mansion, I finally did solve the big elusive puzzle that had haunted me for so long, but it turns out that was just one puzzle among  many, many more. Some of them, I'm still trying to figure out.

Don't worry, I won't spoil a single one of Blue Prince's puzzles in this article—but I do need to explain the mansion itself. Starting in the foyer on day one, you're presented with doors to the north, east, and west. Click on a door and you draw three room cards. The cards can represent a bedroom, kitchen, closet, library, garage, observatory, art gallery… really, any room you could imagine in a rich old dude's mansion. 

Pick a card, and that's what you'll find when the door opens. The mansion is laid out in a grid, five rooms wide and nine rooms long, giving you space to build those 45 rooms. To reach Room 46, you need to keep drawing room cards and build your way deeper and deeper into the mansion—and that gets quite tricky.

House of cards

There's strategy in both how you build the house with your room cards, and how you move through it. You begin each day with a total of 50 steps to use, and each time you walk through a doorway you spend one step. 50 steps in a 45-room mansion doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room, but you can add steps during your journey—a restful bedroom will refund a handful of steps, for example, or you can build a kitchen to find a step-replenishing snack inside. 

Managing your step count is critical and leads to a lot of tough decisions: if you ran into a locked door 10 rooms ago, but then find a key… should you burn through 10 more steps to backtrack and open that door, or keep moving forward? When you run out of steps, the mansion resets and a new day begins with you standing in the foyer pondering those first three closed doors again.

Keys aren't the only things you'll find while building the mansion. Gems can be collected and spent to build uncommon rooms, gold coins can be used here and there to buy food or items, and there are a handful of useful objects to collect and carry around with you: a sledgehammer will let you break open chests that normally require keys, a magnifying glass can reveal clues in documents and photos, a security keycard can open electronically-sealed doors. But again, when you run out of steps and the day ends, everything resets, including all the goodies you've found that day.

Then there are the puzzles. A few are self-contained within single rooms, but most of the puzzles in Blue Prince are just as sprawling as the mansion itself. It took me quite a while to realize just how much is going on in this bizarre house—I slowly collected clues, hints, and little scraps of information that often didn't make sense until I'd built other rooms, sometimes days later. I now have pages and pages of scribbled notes and diagrams and clues and numbers and codes in the notebook on my desk. There were so many times I found myself studying a new clue, then realizing it fit with something I'd already discovered, making me flip excitedly back through my notebook to piece it together. 

I know I'm being annoyingly vague about all this, but that's because the experience I had playing Blue Prince—being unable to look up guides or search for puzzle solutions or ask other players for hints—was incredibly satisfying, and I want anyone reading this to be able to have the same experience I did. So when I say things like the game is much bigger than I realized when I started—and it's also much bigger than I realized when I finished—well, I'm not even gonna explain what I mean by that. You'll thank me for being vague, I promise. Even 30 hours in, having finally reached that elusive Room 46 of Blue Prince, I still have plenty of unsolved mysteries that I eventually hope to unravel.

Home improvement

With the drafting of rooms each time you open a door, plus collecting keys, gems, and coins as you explore, there's a real board game-like feel to Blue Prince. Its puzzles and secrets also give a heavy escape room vibe—even though you're not trying to flee the mansion but travel deeper into it. And it's got roguelike elements since you start over from scratch at the end of each day—though there are ways to make permanent changes to the mansion. There's one special room, once you've found it for the first time, that will always appear in the same place every time you play. There are also some aspects of the house you can adjust and fiddle with if you build certain rooms, and those changes will be persistent until you build that room and fiddle around with it again. 

Similarly, there are ways to improve your chances of a good run. The most important room in the house, to me, was one in which I could leave an item from my inventory and then retrieve it on a subsequent run, providing protection against the roguelike reset. There are also ways to increase the amount of steps you begin the day with, and even ways to start off a new day with a few coins instead of empty pockets. 

The longer I played, the more I learned and the more tools I had to shape the mansion as I built it. Occasionally a run made me feel like I was at the cruel whims of RNG, but as the days passed I became more in control, shaping the mansion to fit my needs instead of just hoping for lucky draws. Just like my benefactor wanted, I was becoming worthy of inheriting the mansion by proving I could conquer it.

Though I mastered the mystery mansion, I haven't been able to extract a release date from developer Dogubomb, or even a release window. I don't know if Blue Prince is coming out in 2024, but if it does, I'm confidently calling it my GOTY even though we're not even in September yet. If it doesn't come out in 2024? I don't care: I'm still calling it my GOTY, honestly, because it's the best game I've played this year. And even though I got to the “end” of Blue Prince, I'm still far from finished.

If you happen to be at Gamescom this week, there's a demo available to try for yourself. Just be careful. Once you start exploring, it might be hard to stop.