“Blue Prince” Review – A Brilliant Puzzle Box of Mystery, Madness, and RNG Mayhem

By Lucas Luna | Thanks For Playing Podcast

This week on Thanks For Playing, I (Lucas!) went solo to dive deep into one of 2025’s most fascinating games—Blue Prince—a roguelite puzzle-adventure dripping with mystery, systems thinking, and absolutely brutal RNG. Developed by Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, Blue Prince has quietly become one of the highest-rated games of the year, scoring 92 on Metacritic and receiving near-universal acclaim from outlets like IGN, GameSpot, and The Guardian.

And after nearly 50 hours of gameplay, I get it.

A Puzzle Game for the Obsessed

If The Witness, Myst, and Return of the Obra Dinn are your kind of games, Blue Prince might just be your new favorite obsession. The game tasks you—playing as a man named Simon—with uncovering the mysterious 46th room of a massive estate left to you by your great uncle.

The catch? The mansion is procedurally generated with each run, and every room you enter is a puzzle waiting to be solved. It’s a deeply systemic game—one that demands a notebook, patience, and a willingness to think in non-linguistic patterns. The game doesn’t tell you how anything works. You figure it out by doing—a hallmark of great puzzle design.

The Roguelite Twist

Unlike traditional puzzle games, Blue Prince is also a roguelite, where you “draft” rooms and build the mansion on each run. You get 50 steps per day (which increases unlockable items), choosing from left, center, or right doors—each hiding one of three possible rooms. Think billiard rooms, parlors, gyms, and even a sauna. The mansion is massive and intricately detailed.

Your daily runs build toward bigger discoveries: new rooms, new mechanics, and new mysteries—like draining fountains, decoding secret musical compositions, or combining classroom test scores to learn the political history of the fictional kingdom. It’s often brilliant. Sometimes it’s a lot.

A Dense, Twisting Narrative

What begins as a hunt for a secret room blooms into a political thriller, complete with missing mothers, crown jewel heists, terrorist plots, and underground ruins steeped in magical realism. The red vs. blue political metaphor is woven smartly into the architecture of the game’s puzzles and story, and it’s all delivered through found notes, red envelopes, and environmental clues.

Is it convoluted? A little. Is it fascinating? Absolutely.

My issue here is that this narrative definitely takes its time to come out. I didn't even start to see a clear picture of what was happening until about 40 hours into the game. And none of this was clear leading up to the credits screen ending. Dense, yes. But maybe too dense.

Art & Music: Nostalgic and Cold, Yet Warm

Set in a slightly-off version of the 1980s, Blue Prince leans heavily on mildly vintage aesthetics: old-school computers, worn-down billiard rooms, childhood bedrooms. It feels cold yet comforting—like an old blanket in a haunted house.

The music, composed by Dutch ambient jazz group Trigg & Gusset, is an absolute standout. Think dark jazz for deep thinking. It’s sparse, reactive, and hauntingly beautiful. I’ve been listening to it outside the game ever since. It's honestly some of the coolest ambient jazz you can find currently. Do yourself a favor and check it out below!

Systems Literacy & Puzzle Obsession

A standout moment for me came when my girlfriend Katie walked in and asked what I was doing. I couldn’t explain it. I was trying to find the pump room, but first I needed the pool, but to get the pool I needed gems, and to get those I needed to build a parlor...

That’s systems literacy in action—learning and internalizing a set of mechanics that are impossible to explain linearly. And Blue Prince thrives in this space.

It's hard to communicate what this game is doing via language because I did not learn this game via language. In that sense this game is as brilliant as they come.

The RNG Elephant in the Room

For all its brilliance, Blue Prince has one major flaw: randomness. Because the rooms you need to progress are randomly offered each run, entire puzzle threads can be gated behind sheer luck. Want to complete the pump/fountain puzzle? Better hope the pump room shows up. Missed it? Better luck next run.

At best, this keeps each session fresh. At worst, it makes solving deep puzzles feel like a chore, especially in the late-game when you're chasing 100% completion. I was 45–50 hours in when I had to step away. Not because I was bored—but because I felt like I had to rip myself away for my own sanity.

Companion Piece: Upstream Color

For fellow movie nerds: If Blue Prince had a cinematic twin, it might be Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color—a dreamlike, non-linear narrative puzzle in its own right. It’s cold, strange, beautiful, and unforgettable – and puzzling. Much like this game.

Final Rating: 9/10

A near-masterpiece. Blue Prince is one of the smartest, most deeply engaging puzzle games I’ve played in years. Its dense narrative, ambient atmosphere, and mind-bending systems offer a rich feast for anyone ready to obsess. The RNG-based progression and occasional redundancy in puzzle rewards keep it just shy of perfection.

But if you're into The Witness or Obra Dinn, this is mandatory.

Would I play the next game from Tonda Ros? Absolutely. And I hope he takes another eight years to make it.

💬 Thanks for reading. Want to argue with me about puzzle games, red envelopes, or jazz music? Join the conversation on our Discord and check out the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Until next time, Lucas - Thanks For Playing 🎮