MINOR SPOILERS WITHIN

Before Blue Prince came out, it was barely on my radar. I saw a trailer for it on YouTube and didn’t think it looked like my thing. Then, a few weeks before the game’s release, I started hearing a lot of buzz about it online and through podcasts. People said it has GOTY potential. They said it’s a first-person puzzle game. It’s a roguelike game. It has layers.

As a fan of Portal, Hades, and Inscryption, I knew I had to check it out. So, when I found out it would launch as part of PlayStation Plus Extra, I was ecstatic because I’m super broke right now.

April 10, Blue Prince launch day finally arrived. I was so quick getting to its PlayStation Store page that the game still had no official star rating (out of five). That first day, I probably played it for 10 hours, only taking a break when I needed to eat or use the restroom. I really really liked it.

Blue Prince, if you don’t know, is a game in which you play as a boy named Simon who recently inherited a manor called “Mt. Holly.” This manor was once owned by your Great Uncle Herbert. Ol’ Herb wrote in his will that for you to lay claim to your inheritance, you must first find the hidden 46th room, a room so hidden that—as you discover over time—many staff members who work and live at the manor don’t think it exists.

When you start the game, you start out on Day 1. You walk into the Entrance Hall (one of very few persistent game elements). In the top, left-hand corner, you see your step counter. This represents the number of steps you can take each day before you get exhausted and have to “call it quits,” as the game phrases it. When you open one of the three doors in the Entrance Hall, a menu pops up with three rooms, “chosen” randomly by the game, from which you draft one. I believe the first room I drafted was a Bedroom. When you enter your drafted room from the Entrance Hall, you lose at least one step (at the beginning of the game, you start with 50 steps). However, different rooms have different properties. Since my first room was a Bedroom, I lost a step upon entering but gained two steps, so I watched my step counter go from 50 to 49 to 51 in a couple seconds.

The Bedroom has two doors: the one through which you enter and the exit, which is always on the wall to the left or right of the entrance (depending on orientation). I opened the exit and got three more rooms to potentially draft. My next choice was a Storeroom. Storerooms are a type of dead end in Blue Prince. This one had a key, a gem, and a coin in it. Picking each of them up made individual counters pop up in the top, right-hand corner, so I now had a little key symbol followed by 1, a gem symbol followed by 1, and a coin symbol followed by 1 directly across from my step counter. Since the Storeroom is a dead end, I couldn’t draft any rooms to connect to it. However, the Entrance Hall still had two more doors to use, so I backtracked.

As you draft rooms, you add onto a “blueprint” of the manor, which starts only with the Entrance Hall in the bottom center square and a mysterious room called the Antechamber in the top center square. You can access this blueprint at any time, and doing so is essential for creating desirable paths and connections. After all, you’ll never reach the Antechamber from the Entrance Hall if you only draft dead ends or create a loop of rooms that only extends into the second row of the blueprint.

It doesn’t take long to learn how to play the game on a basic level. You need to figure out how to reach the Antechamber by connecting the Entrance Hall to it with enough rooms and without running out of steps. Some rooms are simple corridors, creating a straight path from the room you’re exiting to whatever you’ll draft on the other side of the door at the other end. Others have potentially negative properties, such as the Chapel, which deducts one coin when you enter it (shoutout to everyone who’s ever paid a tithe). Others still have tasks to complete within, typically puzzles. Some doors must be unlocked with a key before they’ll open. Some rooms require you to spend at least one gem before you can draft them.

At the end of each in-game day, when you either call it quits or run out of steps, you get a summary of your activity. The game places your creation into one of several categories, like “villa” or “cottage,” shows your final blueprint for that day, and tells you the number of rooms drafted, steps taken, items found, etc. When you start Day 2, and every subsequent day thereafter, the manor resets, leaving you with just the Entrance Hall and Antechamber again. Hopefully, you have an idea of what Blue Prince is all about because this is when I get into what frustrates me about this game.

As with many other roguelikes, much of one’s progress is dependent on RNG, or random number generation. The choices you’re given when drafting are determined entirely at random. Of course, you can affect your drafting pool in various ways, but for the most part, you are at the game’s mercy. This means you can have a run that starts strong. Say, after a couple drafts, you have three keys, four gems, and four coins. At this point, you could draft just about any room, access it, and get through it. But wouldn’t you know it, you end up drafting a circle that makes it nowhere near the Antechamber. Or you end up close to the Antechamber but run out of keys, and every unopened door requires one. Or you’re about to draft a room connecting the one you’re in to the Antechamber, but you’re out of gems, and the only room with the orientation to make the connection requires two gems.

So many runs are cut short due to sheer misfortune. What’s even more frustrating than RNG giving you the middle finger, though, is life itself giving you the middle finger. I was once on the run of a lifetime. I made so many discoveries, drafted a handful of rooms I’d never seen before, made one or two permanent changes (which happen so incredibly rarely), and had more keys, gems, and coins than I knew what to do with. Then the fucking game crashed. I was devastated. Demoralized. Pissed. I complained about it to a friend and a gaming Discord server I recently joined (thank you, VGBees Discord and the Blue Prince channel specifically) and decided to stop for the day. I went to bed that night angry and convinced it’d be days, if not a week or more, before I played Blue Prince again.

Being a girl who likes a little pain every now and then, though, I was right back at it the next morning. Surprisingly, a few in-game days later, I managed to get into and through the Antechamber and to the 46th room, saw the credits and “beat” the game. Remember in the first paragraph when I wrote that people said this game has layers, though? Yeah, getting to the 46th room isn’t the true goal. The puzzles in Blue Prince have puzzles within them and puzzles within those puzzles. There is still a whole lot of game to play after you “beat” it.

So, I continued playing. At this point, the things that used to frustrate me about the game mostly didn’t bother me because there was almost always opportunity to make some kind of progress, even in runs cut short. This is also the point at which the game becomes quite difficult. It wasn’t necessarily easy before, but to achieve many of the overarching goals, you have to be careful and lucky. The specific rooms you draft, their orientation, and their relative positions matter more now.

Eventually—earlier today, in fact—I was on another all-timer run. I finally managed to connect two extremely important rooms in exactly the right way after many hours of attempts. I made a rare permanent change. I was so excited to learn the significance of everything I just accomplished. Then the fucking game crashed.

That was at 10:30 AM CT (don’t ask how I know) today. I immediately closed the game and complained to my internet friends again.

Imagine completing your magnum opus, whatever that looks like to you, and then an elephant comes out of nowhere and stomps all over it, eats it, and runs off before you have a chance to react. That’s how I feel right now. That’s how Blue Prince makes me feel.