BLUE PRINCE

How Hollywood dreams and boardgames led to 2025's most fascinating puzzle box

- JON BAILES

While Tonda Ros hasn't yet achieved his dream of making movies, his story already has a Hollywood ending.

Ros moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to break into the film industry, and found work as a cinematographer on "very low budget films", and then commercials, which led to the foundation of Dogubomb, his own studio, where he directed ads and music videos. It was a solid living, but not the entanglement with feature films that he'd envisaged. What this tale needed was a plot twist. It came in 2016 when, "on a whim", he decided to explore game development.

Ros initially assumed that the hurdles to learning a game engine would be much higher: "I felt like I really needed to have gone to school for this, or to have devoted the last ten years [to it] to even have a chance." But when he started playing with Unity, the possibility of teaching himself seemed all the more real. "Within a week of learning the platform, it became apparent to me that this is much easier than I had anticipated," he says. "And within that week I had fallen in love with development. It was an incredible first foray into this world."

What Ros couldn't have known then was that his love affair would take some eight years to bear the fruit of an actual game release. Not until this year did Blue Prince arrive - instantly taking its place among the greats of the open-plan mystery genre, as well as that breed of indie game that really does emerge from a single visionary. Now that we've soaked in its delights, however, deploying observation skills and great patience to reveal its depths, it makes sense that it's the product of eight years of work, and an individual whose story exposes a willingness to grow a design for as long as it takes.