I wanted to love Blue Prince, really I did. Everything about it was basically catnip to me – I adore intricate puzzles and roguelikes that drain away days of my life, and a mansion of mystery is a wonderful hook to pull me in. I should have been in blissful reverie.t promised a cerebral experience that rewards keen observation and deduction in harmony with strategy, with every puzzle solved being a minor triumph leading to a grand ending.
Instead, I spent most of my time essentially playing slot machines as the game refused to give me what I needed. Believe me when I say I solved the puzzles; I figured quite a few out myself and worked with friends to come to a shared, exciting conclusion for others, but the trial and error combined with the RNG, was a frustration that stopped me from putting those solutions into action and left me feeling utterly flat.
Game Of The Year 2025 – Editor’s Pick, Ryan Thompson-Bamsey
Obvious picks and left-field surprises with nothing in-between.
It’s December now, and looking back at 2025, Blue Prince stands out to me. It’s quite the revered game – with many saying it deserved a shot at GOTY – yet I just feel despondent that it didn’t hit me with the same force.
Everything Works…
When Blue Prince worked, it really worked. The puzzle design is exceptional, evoking the best of point-and-clicks, escape rooms, and pure logic challenges. I started out with a notebook for recording clues and thoughts, but quickly moved to Google Sheets when everything got messy (which was very quick), and this was something I truly adored about the experience.
The gimmick of the shuffling rooms and how it fits into the groanworthy pun of the game’s title is also a fantastic way to blend roguelike mechanics into the format. Mt. Holly is atmospheric, the rooms are distinct and presented well, and the gradual unravelling of the story hooked me brilliantly – first by drips, then in spades.
Until It Doesn’t
Blue Prince, for me, crumbled when the roguelike drafting system became the prime obstacle. Not the puzzles and my ability to solve them, but my luck. When you’ve solved a puzzle in your head and spend day after day simply hoping to draft the correct rooms or arrangement of items just to test a theory or make progress, things get frustrating and the game becomes a chore.
I’ve read the discussions of so many others with the same feelings, and they get put down with repeated admonishments. Yes, there are lots of other puzzles to pursue and make progress in. Yes, the game hands you lots of ways to reduce the influence of luck. Yes, luck is central to the experience; it’s even canon – the mansion really does shuffle about in real time, in some weird techno-wizard way I didn’t fully uncover because I couldn’t get that far. That doesn’t make the experience fun enough, though, and for me, it was enough to sour the whole game.
Blue Prince gets compared to Outer Wilds a lot, and with good reason. It’s a mystery with repetition-based elements, and it’s very highly regarded; the comparisons are obvious. 2025 was also the year I first gave Outer Wilds a go, and gosh, I had the polar opposite experience with this one – being able to solve puzzles when I figured them out was such a breath of fresh air. To me, this is how puzzlers should be; when you figure something out, the next step should be completion, not hope in the face of relentless RNG.
What stings about this whole deal is not having wasted time on something I didn’t enjoy, but that I feel like I’m missing something. Blue Prince, as mentioned, got rave reviews. I am sincerely happy that it found its audience: seeing a weird, ambitious indie succeed is always heartening, and clearly the roguelike variance works for many people in ways it simply didn’t for me. But this creates the odd feeling of being on the outside looking in. Everyone’s having a party of chance and puzzles, and I’m stuck outside with the bouncer telling me I didn’t get lucky enough to get in.
I wonder every few weeks if I should pull the trigger and redownload, start again, and just push on through. Was I being impatient? Did I just not get it? But no, dozens of hours of frustration aren’t invalidated just because others had luckier journeys or more patience.
Blue Prince is a game with exceptional ideas undermined, for me, by a design choice that transforms puzzle-solving into dice-rolling. It’s not a bad game – the ambition, the clever mysteries, the innovative blend of genres all deserve recognition. As 2025 comes to an end, though, it remains a frustrating monument to an inconvenient truth: Sometimes a game can have all the right pieces and still not solve the puzzle for you. Blue Prince built my expectations high with brilliant foundations, then asked me to roll dice to see if I could actually explore what it built.
- Released
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April 10, 2025
- ESRB
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Everyone 10+ / Alcohol Reference, Simulated Gambling
- Developer(s)
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Dogubomb
- Publisher(s)
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Raw Fury
