Herbert Sinclair, the baron of Reddington’s Mount Holly Estate, is dead. In his will, he leaves the estate, its grounds, and his title to you, his grandnephew, Simon. There is one condition: to prove yourself worthy of the gift, you have to find the mysterious 46th room in the 45-room manor, the location of which has never been disclosed.
This is the setup of Dogubomb’s puzzle roguelike Blue Prince, and it’s about as much story as I feel comfortable giving you. Since it launched on PC and PS5 last year, I have been telling almost everyone I know to play it under the guidance of “read nothing about it and go in completely clueless!! Please!“, which doesn’t make for the easiest review now that it’s come to Switch 2.
This really is one of those games where the less you know about it, the better. I’ll try my absolute best to keep details to a minimum, but rest assured, Blue Prince is one of the most accomplished indie puzzlers in recent memory. It’ll worm its way into your head and refuse to let you go until long after you’ve rolled the credits. I spent the best part of 80 hours exploring the hallways of the Mount Holly Estate last year, but this Switch 2 version has sent me down the rabbit hole all over again. What’s more, I’m still adding to my pages of notes with the increasingly cryptic scribbles of a man obsessed.
So, what can I tell you about Blue Prince? To make it to the goal, you’re tasked with navigating the ever-shifting rooms of the mansion, drafting which area you’ll find behind each door via your trusty blueprints. Yes, Blue Prince is a blueprints pun, that is, until it’s not. Like most things in this game, there’s something hidden under the surface that you’ll gradually get to grips with as you come to understand its systems.
You have a set number of steps you can take each day (one ‘step’ corresponding to each room, normally), and once your steps are up, it’s off to bed before the process begins again the next day.
You see, the rooms of Mount Holly aren’t set in stone — quite the opposite, in fact. Bar a very few exceptions, each and every one of them will be shuffled around at the end of the day, and it’s up to you to draft them in whatever order you see fit from the list of three options that appears upon opening each door.
This is a roguelike that I’m talking about here, so of course there are some permanent upgrades that you’ll unlock along the way (extra rooms, steps, money for buying items, etc.), but for the most part, the only thing that you take with you each day is your knowledge about how the estate works.
The gameplay loop won’t be to everyone’s tastes, true. There is a slight frustration that comes with finally putting two and two together, only to find yourself unable to draft the correct rooms in the correct order for days in a row. But that format perfectly suits the game’s depth. You see, you can play Blue Prince solely to uncover the hidden Room 46 and roll credits, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
By jumbling the rooms every run, blocking off possibilities and opening new ones, the game forces you to investigate more avenues than the one which might feel immediately obvious. You might arrive with the straightforward goal of solving the central mystery, but if you really pay attention, you’ll see that there’s a lot more (and I mean a lot more) under the surface. Finding the impossible 46th room is one thing — and learning its rules is a pretty one-and-done deal on the replayability side of things — but this gameplay loop actively encourages you to take in everything else, too.
If it all sounds like a lot to keep track of, that’s because it is. One common room that you’ll likely stumble across in your early runs will specifically nudge you to have a pen and notebook to hand, because you’re going to need to jot things down. In my experience, it’s handy to have several pens and several notebooks nearby, because while every room you come across might not initially appear like an essential step on the way to Room 46, I can guarantee there will be something in there that you’ll want to remember.
My notebook started with mere observations. Early pages say things like “Chess?”, “Angels?” and “Pictures?”, but after a few hours, I was in full conspiracy theory mode. Flicking through now, I’ve got detailed timelines, sigils, family trees, portraits, and more code possibilities than I can possibly keep track of.
It’s the kind of documentation where I was regularly found hunched over in the early hours of the morning, trying to make connections between things I had spotted on the first day, and things that clicked on my 60th. In a similar vein to Outer Wilds, Tunic or Animal Well, this is a game full of moments where you’ll feel like a genius, and even more where you’ll feel stupid for not noticing something sooner. Its secrets go so deep that I couldn’t stop thinking about them for days on end — shout-out to Trigg and Gusset’s subtly jazzy score for keeping the manor’s soundscape in my head at all times — but there’s no rush quite like the “A-HA!” realisation at the end of them all.
For this alone, the Switch 2 version and its portability is a welcome bonus. This is a game I regularly struggled to pull myself away from, and now, I don’t have to!
Despite my best efforts, I still didn’t uncover everything Mount Holly had to offer last year, and part of me had hoped that I’d be able to bring it all across to Switch 2, using my permanent upgrades and room unlocks to mop up some of the deeper puzzles on the go. Unfortunately, all that time spent in the PS5 version remains on the PS5.
Starting back from Day One has been far from a huge inconvenience. The randomness has meant that I’ve still seen some new areas and gathered new clues, and any pre-existing knowledge of the manor’s rules makes navigating its halls far easier the second time around, but some cross-save goodness for the secret digging sickos like me would have been a welcome bonus.
Fortunately, it holds up as well as you’d hope on Nintendo’s hybrid. True, things are capped at 30fps, and I did notice some momentary drops when my mansion halls became particularly stacked with complex rooms, each with its own moving parts, but it wasn’t distracting. The visual style, complete with the kind of block colours and bold outlines that wouldn’t look out of place in a classic Telltale game, looks stunning in both Handheld and Docked, and there’s the added bonus of Mouse Mode here too — something I’m still not convinced is ‘the‘ way to play any Switch 2 game on account of the hand-cramping-ly thin Joy Con, but it’s a nice bonus, all the same.
Some people seem to have uncovered some small bugs in the Switch 2 version which I, try as I might, haven’t managed to stumble across in my playthrough. That said, by its very design, this is a game that no two players are likely to play the same, so there’s every chance that I (and you) may miss something that pops up immediately in another’s early drafts.
Conclusion
If Blue Prince were only about finding Room 46 and nabbing your inheritance, it would be a neat little puzzler with some fun twists along the way. For those who dive in headfirst and keep track of everything else it throws at you, however, it is so much more than that. Rarely has a game made me feel more clever, more lost and more elated the deeper into it I ventured, and still some question marks remain over its deeper mysteries.
Minor technical drops and a lack of cross-save features aside, this remains a superb achievement and one of the finest head scratchers I’ve had the pleasure of playing. If you’ve read this far, you’ve already read too much! Just go and play it already!
