Blue Prince suits players who enjoy planning and untangling a mystery one room at a time: each choice reshapes the route through Mt. Holly, and the daily reset makes the next attempt a fresh set of decisions. The search for Room 46 gives exploration a clear aim, while found items can open different approaches. At GAMIVO, ≈ $6.29 matches the site's tracked low. The Steam player rating of 85% from 17,759 reviews offers context, but the real question is whether resetting and replanning appeals to you. It is listed as single-player, so the exploration is your own.At $29.99 from GAMIVO, Blue Prince is at the site's tracked low; ≈ $23.70 below Steam's price makes the comparison especially appealing.
GamesPlanet DE+1·Platform:Steam·~ $33.59-10%~ $30.23Buy now
GamesPlanet FR+1·Platform:Steam·~ $33.59-10%~ $30.23Buy now
GGselBlue Prince PC Steam CD Key Global+1·Platform:Steam·Credit/Debit Cardfrom~ RUB 833.49Buy now
All-time low ~ $15.11across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $8.932026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $26.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+202%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Blue Prince
In Blue Prince, explore mysterious Mt. Holly, a manor whose rooms change each day. Choose what appears behind each door, then use rooms and their items to plan a route deeper into the house and seek the rumored Room 46.Steam player rating: 85% positive from 17,759 reviews.Release date: April 10, 2025.
Credits
Developer
Dogubomb
Publisher
Raw Fury
Steam player reviews
85%positiveVery Positive17,759 Steam reviews
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$8.932026-07-30 · KKinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
English
Yes
Yes
Yes
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-18
02Before you buy
Controls and language
The Steam PC version has full controller support. English is listed for the interface, subtitles, and full audio.
Play mode
Steam PC categories include single-player and Steam Cloud.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the goal?
Explore a shifting manor and search for the rumored Room 46.
How does the manor change?
You choose the room behind each closed door, and the floor plan resets every morning.
What carries over between days?
Items help your exploration; only permanent upgrades to the estate blueprint persist across the daily reset.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
This game is for a very particular type of person - someone who enjoys both puzzles AND rogue-likes. It's an unusual combination, and I think many of the negative reviews are from either puzzle fans who either don't like or aren't familiar with the way one progresses through a rogue-like game, or from rogue-like fans who find the switch to progressing through puzzles vs combat to be obtuse and frustrating. But if you're someone who actually likes both kinds of games, then you'll REALLY enjoy this, especially as a wonderfully novel and unique experience.
The key to really enjoying the game, I think, is to remember that you progress through your own knowledge. Early on, you'll encounter a note suggesting that you might want to take notes. Please follow that advice. There are a huge number of subtle details that can provide a great deal of information and guidance, and which I'm sure the game would be much more frustrating if you either aren't pay enough attention to notice them, or if you're not writing them down so you forget them later when it turns out to be relevant.
In particular, the player needs to learn the patterns of how certain rooms are drawn, and I don't just mean the obvious cases where the game spells out that taking a certain action will add a new room to your list of blueprints. There are patterns such as rooms that only appear on the west-most or east-most sides of the house, or the fact that a room, built for the day, will typically not appear as a blueprint option again. There are a huge number of patterns like this, and you need to learn them and use them to your advantage. Or else, yes, this will be a frustrating game. I think many players are treating the game as if the puzzles only exist INSIDE the rooms, but the truth is that most of the puzzles ARE the rooms - you need to puzzle out how to place the rooms to maximize the chances of getting the draws you need. Of course there are still randomized elements, but, to be quite honest, if you're here to leave a review about how you've been waiting for a particular room to show up for multiple hours, that's probably a sign that you're missing something important about how that blueprint is drawn, and are perhaps sabotaging your own efforts without realizing it.Show moreShow less
12.8 hours at review688 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
First, I frankly LOVED the game and have spent 80 initially lovely hours playing it.
BUT!
The developers failure to include a save & quit feature make it more and more frustrating to have to complete entire runs ("days") - that can stretch in to multiple hours. This is easily the most requested feature in the discussions. A LOT of people have pointed out that this prevent people fitting game sessions into their lives without having to go to ridiculous lengths like leaving their computer running overnight etc. Still the devs fail to comment on this with a word, and that frankly is just disrespectful of paying customers time.
Another thing that similarly rub lots of players the wrong way is the very slow movement pace and many unskippable cutscenes, from forced pop-ups with descriptions of items being the same the thousandth time as the first time one pick it up to completing common actions, not least using in-game computers. This again fails to respect players time and what was initially enjoyable exploration gradually turns into grating grind.
There are more QoL-features missing, like the lack of a separate music volume or the fact that the game DOES NOT MUTE OR PAUSE IN GAME TIME in menu or EVEN WHEN TABBING OUT! Combine this with the fact that some of the games most tedious puzzles demand waiting for specific times of day and you get the situation where having to prioritize a phone call, child or ANY real-world demand may grant you a "punishment" from the game.
There is also a heavy RNG element. Early on it’s not that much of a problem, since there is so much to discover, and you can always roll with the punches and redirect as appropriate. But the more you have already seen and the more specific and complex outcomes you are trying to achieve the more repetitive and annoying the game becomes.
There are also a instance of the game not warning the player that one of the more powerful meta-progression elements is a limited resource, while otherwise ALWAYS doing so. This mean lots of players will end up realizing that they have squandered it only when it's too late. With restarting the entire game, resetting all progression, the only alternative to just sucking it up. This would be easily fixable but the devs studiously ignore this one to.
Taken together my feeling went from enjoyment and wonder to tedium and irritation. Frankly it's hard not to feel that the devs are so full of themselves that they fail to just show basic respect for the fact that their audience may have an actual lives that are - gasp - MORE important than their fabulous piece of art.
This is a pity since the game has LOTS of good sides. It's certainly not a case of a bad game - that would NOT have prompted me to write my first Steam review ever. It's a very original and in many ways GOOD game with fatal flaws that become apparent with time, once the positives have drawn you in and engaged you.
I will not be playing Blue Prince again before it AT LEAST has a proper save feature and a few other key QoL issues have been addressed. My prediction therefore is that I probably will NEVER play it again, and my recommendation, unfortunately, must be to not get the game.
IF these things were fixed this would change to a STRONG endorsement.Show moreShow less
86.7 hours at review1,094 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
*SPOILERS* I'm mostly making this review because there are some really trite negative reviews. I'm not sure why people are getting mad at the RNG in a puzzle game that... doesn't have RNG. Its like if you played the game long enough you'd figure that out. Almost every negative might as well say "I didnt play enough because puzzle too hard".
Its very fun btw. This is one of those, don't look up anything games. Just play.Show moreShow less
16.5 hours at review492 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I unfortunately cannot recommend this game.
I bought it after seeing some very high praise from acquaintances and some very flattering comparisons to Outer Wilds, which is my favorite game of all time. I really enjoy the 'meta-knowledge puzzle game' genre more generally, which includes games like Lingo, The Witness and to a lesser extent Return of the Obra Dinn - games that you can really only experience once because they're about learning the overarching rules with which you can solve the puzzles moreso than the moment-to-moment puzzles themselves. Blue Prince also belongs to this category; each run is different because you draft a random collection of rooms that fit together in random places, but the real game is about discovering meta-knowledge from one run that you can use to actually progress towards the end goal in the next run.
Where Blue Prince fails compared to its aforementioned genre-colleagues, in my opinion, is in the RNG inherent in the roguelike genre. You will *frequently* learn something new and be unable to use that knowledge for a dozen, two dozen runs because you just don't draft the right combination of rooms. You will discover items, know *exactly* what to do with those items, and then end the run with a tired and frustrated sigh because you never drafted the room you needed to use that item in. You will discover those items again, and fail to draft the right room again. And again. And again. You will have runs end three rooms in because your draft pool consisted exclusively of dead end rooms and gem-cost rooms you can't afford because you failed to draft a gem-providing room. You will have a run that *almost* gets you into the final room and then fails because you got unlucky and only drafted rooms with exits that were turned away from it. You will be on the verge of reaching a long-awaited puzzle solution and get shafted in the last minute because you ran out of "movement points" two rooms too early, or have a promising run die because you ran out of keys, or because you never ran into the (for some reason absurdly rare) keycard that is the only way to open the (for some reason fairly common) keycard doors. [Edit: People have been fixating on this point, so I would like to clarify that I *am* aware of several alternative methods to open keycard doors... probably. I think. I don't actually know if any of those methods work as I think they do because RNGesus has never seen fit to let me test those theories.]
I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
The beauty of games like these is in making discoveries, and then testing what you've learned to make progress. Blue Prince will happily let you discover things, but testing your discoveries is firmly in the hands of RNGesus, and sometimes he just says "No. No you do not get to make any progress. Go do another six runs of nothing but repeat dead ends, the same puzzles and the same notes, and *maybe* on run 7 you can have a tiny crumb of forward progress." And maybe in run 7 you'll learn that your theory was wrong and you don't get to make any progress after all.
My time with Blue Prince has been dull, repetitive and deeply frustrating, and while I don't plan to give up quite yet, I don't think I'll ever be able to recommend this to my friends.Show moreShow less
6 hours at review863 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game was sold to me as "Outer Wilds mixed with Slay the Spire".
This is both a good elevator pitch, but also kind of the root of my issues with the game.
Blue Prince is, undoubtedly, a really good game. It is meticulously crafted, and overflows with attention to detail, great game design, and really immersive atmosphere.
Like Tunic, Outer Wilds, and Animal Well, the game has layers to uncover, puzzles within puzzles, and you should 100% start taking notes the second you start playing, because every detail matters.
However, the biggest thing that holds Blue Prince back from being as good as those other titles is that the rogue-like aspects clash with the puzzle aspects.
"Outer Wilds mixed with Slay the Spire" is an apt description because it feels like there are two games within Blue Prince. Sometimes, they work well together, and this makes for an incredible experience.
Sometimes though, they actively work against each other, and the result is frustrating. Without going into spoilers, the "endgame" of Blue Prince is a grindy mess, where the rogue-like elements fight you at every turn and you wish you could just turn them off.
If you are hunting for a specific puzzle piece but you get unlucky, you can spend hours grinding runs without results.
I still recommend the game, and I will still try to finish it because the puzzle elements are genuinely some of the best in that genre of knowledge-based games, I just wish there was a way to reduce all of the grinding that stands between the player and the puzzles.
EDIT : Now on 100+ hours of play
I still have a lot of mixed feelings about the game, and it has some weird game design decisions imo
However, I cannot argue the objective fact that this is the best crafted and most intricate puzzle game I have ever played.
I simply do not think I am ever going to play a puzzle with as much depth, thought, creativity and effort put into it in my lifetime
There is a lot of care put into making sure that a single person can access and solve all of the puzzles on their own. The game gives a ton of redundancy and clues to help players figure out even some of the deepest secrets.
There are some missteps, yes (the Gallery puzzle is a farce), but overall the game does an incredible job of giving players all of the tools and almost no leaps of logic.Show moreShow less
125.4 hours at review476 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really think I would have enjoyed this. The interesting art style, the atmosphere it evokes in the beginning. Very good first impression... for about ten minutes.
Refunded due to lack of save on quit. I have to control my game time and stop when I need to. Being forced to abandon a run I'm enjoying because there's no save feature is just not something I'm interested in.
Save on quit is an accessibility feature for many of us. I'd love to give this another try if such a feature were implemented, even as an option to toggle on in the accessibility settings.Show moreShow less
0.2 hours at review803 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
For context, I have almost 50 hours in this game playing it on GamePass, and I legit only bought the game on Steam because the reviews were tilting me a little (plus, I am more than happy to directly support this dev!). I’ll be as vague as possible to avoid spoilers.
This game is ONE OF A KIND. I think the bulk of the negative reviews I have read seem to have missed the point of the game—whether by not grasping its rogue-like mechanics or the puzzle mechanics. I don't mean to invalidate their opinions; ultimately, it is up to a game to convey its key elements. However, I believe that had the devs gone any deeper, the game would not have achieved its unique complexity and story depth.
So many of the negative reviews cite a lack of puzzles and complain that the puzzles present are simple and explained for you. To me, that indicates they didn’t get far enough into the game or played with tunnel vision. There have been points during my playthrough where I was trying to keep track of my progress in 4 or 5 separate puzzles, ranging from small side stories to meta-puzzles that eventually turned out to have been right in front of you all along. Finding and solving these re-occurring safe puzzles unveils a tragic story involving family tragedy and blackmail that ultimately contributes to a poignant and emotional "conclusion" to your main goal. The sheer number of puzzles is staggering, and they span a healthy range of difficulty. I also can’t emphasize enough how awesome it is to play a game that has you taking physical notes as you play. I might stumble upon the initial threads of a puzzle, note things that I think may be important (both from inference and from cues the game teaches you to watch for), and then hours later find myself in a room I’ve never been in—suddenly, those seemingly inconsequential notes come together to solve a puzzle that leads to a massive story reveal or an upgrade to your resource capacity.
At one point, while exploring a new area that truly opened up the game, I found 2 pieces of a ripped-up map. I copied the pieces down and then continued exploring, drawing in the rest of the map as I went. I used that hand-drawn map for hours, and it actually helped me progress through the game in substantial ways. How cool is that? The developers trust that their players are smart enough to follow the breadcrumbs and use the tools they are given. Later in my playthrough, I found the completed map, and I was stunned at how closely my drawing matched it. Experiences like that are so few and far between these days.
The rogue-like mechanics may at first seem like handicaps or artificial roadblocks, but as you learn the best ways to draft rooms and approach certain runs, the upgrade system gradually reveals its depth. Some people don't have the time or patience to play for a few hours without the full picture coming together, and that is completely fair. However, to disparage the game simply because it doesn't conform to the entertainment industry's standard of instant gratification is unfair to the masterful work the devs put into it. You might have three runs where you end early because you hit too many dead-ends or run out of keys/gems, but you will also experience three runs in a row where you make massive progress in the story and upgrade your ability to draft more rooms and acquire additional tools and resources. I also believe that despite what some say about the RNG ruining runs, the game gives ample opportunity for success on every run—if players aren’t so fixated on pressing 'w' (both figuratively and literally) that they end up trapping themselves and then blame the game for not giving them exactly the room they need every time.
If you like puzzles and rogue-likes—or even just one of the two—you should at least give this game a few hours of your time. It’s on GamePass and PS+, so you could get a trial for one of those services and try it out for cheaper than buying it here on Steam. I love rogue-likes, and I do not consider myself a puzzle gamer, but I have fallen in love with this game. The art and music are beautiful, the story is moving, and the gameplay is revolutionary.Show moreShow less
0.4 hours at review432 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really can't recommend this game. I enjoyed the first half of the game, finding new things, learning how the mansion functions, solving some puzzles and putting together clues to solve more puzzles.
Then the space between puzzles grew larger and larger as the game went on. The puzzles were there, I just couldn't get to solve them. Not without luck and RNG on my side.
The way the rooms work, you only have a certain chance of encountering a room during a run. Some rooms are extremely rare, some are more common. Some rooms require other rooms to work or navigate around. There is one puzzle in the game that I've never had the opportunity to solve because in 16 hours, both rooms I need to even start the puzzle never spawned in the same run. This is not just frustrating, it's defeating and draining. More often than not, runs don't end with a satisfying "Can't wait to try this the next day" and instead end with limp "Oh and it's a dead end and it's over."
And you might say "The exploration is the point! Find new things and new threads to pull!" Cool, I still have to explore to get that to happen and if my fifth run in a row ended with nothing new, there's nothing to explore. Once the swell of novel rooms, story exposition, and clues turns to a trickle, the urge to and reward for exploration dwindles in kind.
RNG is fine in games, but here it feels extremely limiting with the extreme swings that rarely align to give you a genuinely good run. For every run where it ended in a satisfying way, with many rooms uncovered, a half dozen items found, and every gem and key used to the maximum, I have a dozen where I have multiple keys but no gems, many rooms but no items, or they end prematurely at Rank 3.
There's a good game somewhere in here and it was fun for a while, but it's just not very fun. A game I was excited for turned into a disappointment the more I played it.Show moreShow less
16.7 hours at review764 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
The Short Review:
This is a game for absolute puzzle degenerates. When you are considering whether you want to buy Blue Prince, you really need to look within and determine if, deep within your soul, you yearn for obsessive note-taking, screenshotting, and putting up a corkboard with a lot of red yarn and crazed theories. If the answer is yes, Blue Prince is here to sate your hunger like nothing has for years, and you're going to be raving about your GOTY. If not... you can still learn to love that, but it's not a sure thing.
The Long Review:
I have made it to room 46 and seen the credits. I have, in collaboration with a group of friends who also picked up the game at the same time, done a lot more than that. (Incidentally, I think this is best played collaboratively. There is so, so much here that it will take incredibly long to find it all yourself. But that's personal taste). So I'm going to be breaking this into sections: Pre-46 and Post-46.
Pre-46
Pre-46 is where Blue Prince is at its most roguelike. You have your goal of getting deep into the house, even if it's not *entirely* clear how you're going to get there. You will quickly realize that this is not a puzzle game in the way that , say, The WItness is a puzzle game. It's much more about exploration and learning. There are smaller metapuzzles in this period, giving you access to some permanent upgrades to make your house-delving easier. Every run you're encountering rooms you haven't seen before, uncovering mechanics you haven't run into yet. It's exciting!
As time goes on, you're going to start getting annoyed with the "roguelike" portion of the game. It's going to feel like it's getting in the way of what you're trying to do. You can see so *clearly* what you're trying to accomplish, but the game isn't letting you just *do* it. Maybe it's running into one too many locked doors when you've almost reached the antechamber, maybe it's the specific room you're trying to find just. not. spawning. Maybe it's a string of drafts where your only non-dead-ends are gem rooms, and your reserve runs dry. Maybe you run out of steps just short of your goal. And it's frustrating. Why does the game need these mechanics anyways? Couldn't it just be like Myst or Riven?
And then things start to open up again. This is more post-46 than pre-46, but eventually you've piled up enough permanent advantages that they start to snowball. And yes, the game is getting more... exacting with some of its asks, but you've got the resources to make this... not trivial, but tolerable. And without the pressure of that Obvious Goal, a day that doesn't accomplish anything--and that's actually rarer than you'd think--is easier to shrug and move on from. And more than that, as you start to get this more zoomed out view, it starts to become clear: no, the game really is built around this--both mechanically and narratively. And it is woven very, very densely. This game is clever.
Post-46
Most likely, you've got more than a few loose-threads from your pre-46 days. And now you have all the time in the world to follow up on them. And you'll do that, and then you're going to reach the end of those threads. But it's clear that you're not done. And so begins the Scouring.
Blue Prince does not trade in red herrings. If something stands out to you, it is probably part of something, even if you don't know what. Somewhere in here you probably transcribe your notes into a new, more organized format, because you're tired of trying to search through your notes for that one thing you noted earlier that this new thing reminds you of. You start trying goofy stuff with your drafts, and it turns out that uncovers new stuff, too. If a run in here doesn't pan out for one particular goal, it probably works for another, or at the very least, you can work on setting up future runs.
And the story and world are going to slowly come together, and time and time again you are going to be impressed by just how well everything fits together. And you're going to hit a point in a metapuzzle where you get some new big reveal, and everything will feel worth it. And "metapuzzle" is an important word here. There's more metapuzzle in this game than non-meta puzzle, I'm pretty sure.
I won't say that you won't still sometimes get annoyed by a draft--I do wish that rerolls were just little bit more available than they are--but... it's core to the game. There's a reason that it's there, even when it's frustrating. And that's not to say that you're wrong if you dislike it! That's a valid view! Blue Prince is not for everybody! It is a game for Puzzle Degenerates specifically! Those guys who have been scraping puzzle resin off of the depths of Steam have just been given a solid brick of pure uncut Metapuzzle. That's why you see some people reviewing it so highly--they've been waiting for this for ages, even if they haven't known that.
In Conclusion
Blue Prince is an absolute paragon of its underserved niche. But it is niche, and... kind of got mislabeled a bit, honestly. Not that I begrudge it any success--it absolutely deserves success. But it's important to know what you're getting into when you start, I think, and I hope this review can help with that. (Also, sincerely--I do think it's better with friends so you're bouncing ideas off of someone else).Show moreShow less
103.7 hours at review378 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game is... frustrating. I put 90 hours into it and finished the entire thing but I can't tell you how many of those I actually enjoyed at the end. I decided to give a thumbs down even though this is certainly an important entry in the exploration-puzzle genre, so that people who look for negative reviews can get an idea what they're getting into.
First of all, make sure you understand that this is a Roguelike. You will keep starting the same game over and over again, playing through the same mechanics that get boring after the first 5-10 times again and again, getting screwed over by the same random number generator again and again, just to try to make a little extra dent in the overall puzzle. For those first 10-15 times it will feel like a fun exploration where you keep finding more new things, keep stumbling upon more new puzzles and finding new areas, until you eventually beat the first "stage" of the game (and see the credits roll). But that's not where it ends, of course. It only ends after another 50 to a couple of hundred runs (depending on how much you're willing to give up on and look up in the Wiki) where there are maybe ~10 more areas total to find among the same old same old same that you constantly have to grind through to try to make some very unique conditions happen. Ever played one of those Roguelikes with tail-end achievements for the extra eager achievement hunters where it takes you dozens of attempts to get conditions right just to fulfill one of them? This game feels like that, all the time, for every puzzle in the later stages.
And the thing about the puzzles is, they are *HARD*. And not just "oh, you're gonna love the challenge if you enjoy puzzle games" hard, but painfully hard. And random. You'll basically just be throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks most of the time, except that every throw takes another 4-8 hours of playing the game over and over again until the RNG allows you to set up the thing you're trying to test. There is usually no indication that you're on the right track, no hint that you're interpreting the clue correctly (or even that what you're looking at is a clue and not just random fluff), etc. For example, (very mild spoiler on general puzzle type)there are a lot of hints about waiting for the day to end or general time-based solutions later on, but in actuality there are only two time-based puzzles in the game, and the magic time for those is earlier in the day. Until you've actually played this you can't imagine just how many hours you'll waste waiting for stuff to happen based on time in various areas of the game that will never be fruitful. And many of the puzzles are also very boring and not really video-game-appropriate, like the kind of stuff you would find in a puzzle magazine next to the Sudoku: word association puzzles, ciphers, odd math puzzles, labyrinths, etc. It feels less like you're exploring a world and more like you're a kid whose parents bought him some random bottom-shelf puzzle book at the airport store to keep him occupied for a while.
Ultimately, in the final "stage" of the game the puzzles become so hard that it took an entire Discord channel months to figure it all out (and even today they're not quite sure if they've found everything there is to find). That may sound exciting at first, but believe me, it's not. The puzzles aren't hard because you're not smart enough, they're just hard because the clues are badly written, the associations are random, it's never clear what belongs to what, and because every new idea you want to try takes many hours to put into effect due to fighting the boring old base-game mechanics/RNG. You're not going to solve this on your own, both because you probably can't crack everything alone but also because you're gonna smash your controller in frustration long before you even get to that point.
And finally, one thing that really annoys me about this game is the lack of effort the designers put into convenience features and "polish" to make sure their game would actually be enjoyable. They seemed to have thought that a puzzle game always becomes better the longer it takes for a player to solve it, no matter what they're spending the extra time on. Let's contrast this with Outer Wilds, a great (if you ask me basically perfect) game that's also in the exploration-puzzle genre, even though there are of course notable differences (e.g. Outer Wilds has a much much lower difficulty ceiling, and also isn't really a Roguelike in the same sense). In Outer Wilds, there's a ship log that automatically keeps track of every important discovery for you and connects that with the places you still need to explore, allowing you to just focus on the discovery part and later go back to those notes when you want to remember the clue you found earlier. In Blue Prince, there's just one little letter that tells you to take your own notes, and that's it. That's all the assistance you get. But you better take the most detailed notes ever, because every little piece of background info you read somewhere, every date, every small event in some fictional country's history may become important to solve some contrived puzzle later. And since it's a Roguelike, you can't simply go back and check what it was later without spending potentially hours to try to get to the same place again. There's one case where you basically regularly need high-resolution scans of a texture that's only placed in a single, hard-to-reach room to cross-reference certain information for some of the later puzzles, and in another one, (very vague spoiler on one puzzle's mechanic)you need to find certain words on certain pages (like those old video game copy protection tests) in every book you've ever read, when you can only read one book every two playthroughs. Nobody sane would actually play this out "fairly", so this game clearly seems to have been intended to be played with the third-party solution Wiki opened on a second monitor (to be able to look the stuff back up that you've already seen, carefully trying to not get spoiled on other things that you haven't), which is just bad design. They could've at least bothered to implement an in-game screenshot manager to help you out with that. Another example (general mention of same puzzle type as above)are the time-based solutions, which exist in both Outer Wilds and Blue Prince: Outer Wilds gives you the clever "doze at campfire" mechanic which just allows you to spool forward the in-game clock to the time you're interested in, while Blue Prince just requires you to sit there and twiddle your thumbs for 7.5 minutes every in-game hour, multiplied by every different puzzle or room where you want to test whether there's a time-based change. Outer Wilds is also geniusly designed so that whenever you find a "deep" secret, a hard-to-reach area, there's a little shortcut that you can only discover from the inside but that allows you to quickly get back to there on the next run. No place in Outer Wilds is ever more than 1-2 minutes away from the restart point once you have discovered it, whereas Blue Prince makes you spend 80% of your entire play time trying to get back to places you've already been. There is a difference between making puzzles hard and just making them cumbersome, and Outer Wilds perfectly understands this difference while Blue Prince absolutely does not. It seems to enjoy wasting your time just for the heck of it.Show moreShow less
89.8 hours at review759 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
