After seeing the glowing praise it's been getting recently, I decided to give the new indie darling Blue Prince a go. I've been suspicious of sudden indie darlings ever since I absolutely detested my time with Jonathan Blow's Braid, but everything I was hearing about this one made it sound thoroughly interesting. As such, I was more than happy to forego my usual suspicion and give it a go.

For the unfamiliar, Blue Prince positions you in the role of an heir to a rather curious mansion. Said mansion supposedly has 45 rooms… except it doesn't, and there's actually a super-secret hidden 46th room somewhere. Your dead uncle has challenged you from beyond the grave to find said 46th room. Succeed, and you inherit all his stuff; fail, and you're doomed to perpetual roguelike hell.

Yes, Blue Prince is a roguelike of sorts in that it's based around repeated runs of the same thing with a heavily randomised element. But it's not a combat-based game, nor a role-playing game; instead, its focus is purely on exploration. While the roguelike descriptor is apt, Blue Prince is perhaps better thought of as being akin to tabletop games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The way it works is like this: each in-game day, you begin a new run with 50 "steps" of stamina available to you. Each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, whether you're making progress or backtracking, you use up a step. Your initial aim is to make it from the entrance hall in "rank 1" of the mansion to the antechamber in "rank 9"; things get a little more complex later, but I haven't got that far yet, so I can't talk about that side of things with any great authority as yet.

Each time you open a door in the mansion, you pull three room "cards" from the deck you have available and can pick one to draft. This room then attaches to the door you just opened, and you gradually build out the mansion map from there. Rooms are automatically oriented based on the direction the door you opened is facing, and in this way you can plan out your route to a certain extent; as time goes on, you'll familiarise yourself with the "deck" of room cards and know which ones work better where. For example, you might want to find a means of safely ditching "dead end" rooms as soon as possible so they don't come up later in your run, but various rooms have special effects (both positive and negative), too, so you'll need to bear those in mind.

As you progress through the mansion, you'll acquire various resources. Keys are used to open locked doors. Gems are used to draft certain particularly powerful or helpful rooms. Coins are used to purchase items in special "shop" rooms. Dice allow you to redraw three room cards if none of the ones you initially drew tickle your fancy. And then there are a variety of items that show up along the way, too; for example, the metal detector makes it easier for you to locate keys and coins, while the shovel allows you to dig in patches of dirt to find additional resources and items.

You'll run into puzzles of various types in the mansion. These appear to take two basic forms: firstly, there are self-contained puzzles that always show up in specific rooms, and these usually reward you with resources or items if you solve them correctly. Secondly, there's the overall meta-progression puzzles, which involve you figuring out the somewhat convoluted means through which you can actually move forward and, once you reach it, get into the Antechamber.

Blue Prince does have a few things that carry over from run to run, but the main thing is knowledge. Information you learn in one run can be used in the next; there's no not being able to do something because your character hasn't seen a particular piece of info in this particular run. As such, it pays to take notes and/or screenshots as you play, because as you discover new pieces of information, you'll eventually find a use for it. It might not be right away, but you'll get there in the end.

The game also isn't completely randomised. As previously noted, you can learn the deck so you can have a good idea of what rooms you should burn early on in order to draw more helpful ones as you get deeper into the mansion. Certain rooms will only show up in certain positions on the map, or display particular scenery elements if positioned in the right place. A "coat check" room allows you to stash an item in one run and pick it up in the next; under normal circumstances, you lose everything at the start of each new day, aside from the knowledge you, the player, have accumulated.

I've played for about three or four hours tonight and I'm starting to get a feel for it. It's a really interesting game. Some folks claim to have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing this and this intrigues me; the central gameplay mechanic is intriguing and enjoyable, but I am very much under the impression that "winning" the central challenge is just the beginning of what makes Blue Prince so interesting. Right now, everyone is being deliberately obtuse about things — partly at the developer's request, and partly just not to spoil it for everyone else — but I am definitely intrigued to see where things go.

My only concern is that I fear I may be too stupid to figure this game out by myself. But that's what talking about it with friends online is for, right?

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