OPEN HOUSE

Unravel the mysteries of a mansion, room by room, in BLUE PRINCE

- Christopher Livingston

I love Blue Prince so much I’m going to spend this entire review telling you as little about it as possible. Unravelling its many mysteries and solving its multitude of puzzles—several of which I’m still working on even after finishing the game—is best done if you go in with nearly no information. Don’t watch videos. Don’t Google solutions. Don’t even finish reading this review. Just go play it, and you'll discover one of the best puzzle games in years.

Still reading? Fine. In this first-person strategy roguelike puzzler, you've inherited a sprawling mansion from an eccentric relative, but to prove you're worthy of such a gift, you have to complete a simple task: explore the 45-room manor, then find and enter its hidden 46th room. The tricky bit? You're building the mansion yourself as you explore it. Click on a door handle and you're presented with a choice of three room cards: you might see a kitchen, a den and a bedroom, or perhaps more exotically, a cloister, an observatory and an aquarium. Whichever room of the three choices you pick (or draft, as I'll call it from here on), that’s the room you'll find when you open the door.