It’s not every day that you turn on a game and realize you can’t even describe its genre. Blue Prince – arriving on April 10 for Xbox Series X|S, PC and Game Pass – is a beautifully confounding thing. It’s part first-person puzzle, part-strategy deckbuilder, part-roguelite, part-narrative mystery box – and yet none of these quite communicate exactly what developer Dogubomb has managed to create here.

You play as Simon, who’s just inherited a 45-room estate called Mount Holly – or he will inherit it, if he can find its secret, seemingly impossible 46^th room. There’s also the small matter of Mount Holly being, well, magical. Every day, its floor plan changes, asking you to piece it back together again – making each journey to discover that secret room an entirely new challenge.

If that sounds a bit confusing, that’s entirely the point. Blue Prince is remarkably light on traditional tutorials, instead dropping hints and tips in its shifting rooms along the way.

Initially, you’ll need to throw yourself into the core process of drafting rooms – upon opening each door you come across, you’ll draw three possible rooms that could be behind it, drawn from a pool of potentials. Some rooms are rarer than others, while others will only appear in specific place, but almost every one includes something to collect, a puzzle to solve, or a wider effect on your current run.

You’ll find keys (used to open locked doors, or trunks containing extra items), gems (used to draft rarer rooms), and coins (used in rooms with a shop function), as well as numerous items that offer extra abilities – from a shovel that can dig up items hidden in patches of dirt, to a wrench that can permanently change how rare a specific room type can be.

Your stated aim is to reach the Antechamber, a room at the far end of the house that contains some means of finding the rumored 46^th room – but there are so many other mysteries along the way. And this is where Blue Prince blows open expectations.

Some rooms contain hints to puzzles in other rooms (get ready to take notes, as you might not see the room you need again for a while), others may need to physically connect, and some can have game-changing effects on the manor grounds themselves. Having played for numerous hours, the feeling of solving some of these puzzles is like little else I’ve experienced in a game, relying on a wealth of knowledge about the rooms I could find, and how even incidental details in one room could be a major clue for another.

In the early stages, the randomness of relying on not only drawing the right room, but having the right currency or item to actually complete a puzzle can feel frustrating. But progress enough and you’ll realise that there are ways to game the system, to bend the rules behind Blue Prince in your favor, or even unlock permanent upgrades.

The deeper you look, the more there is here – including room types I wouldn’t want to spoil for fear of ruining your own moment of realization. Hours into the game, there are scribbled notes in my real-life journal, still pointing me to mysteries I haven’t solved, or puzzles I’m not totally sure even exist – I just have the hunch that something I found is meaningful.

And that’s the beauty of Blue Prince’s weird genre alchemy – the fact that I can’t quite put a finger on what kind of game this is means that it can keep tantalizing me, keep forcing me to guess at what might be important, and keep surprising me when I make a new discovery. There’s nothing else quite like it.

Blue Prince will be released on April 10 for Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, and is available day one with Game Pass. And with Xbox Play Anywhere, play on Xbox consoles, Windows PC, and cloud with full cross-entitlements and cross-saves.

Blue Prince

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☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

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Welcome to Mt. Holly, the mysterious manor with shifting rooms. In Blue Prince, you embark on a genre-defying experience, filled with a unique mix of mystery, strategy, and puzzles that weave together to create an unpredictable journey. Will your explorative steps lead you to the rumored Room 46?

DRAFTING YOUR JOURNEY
Upon reaching a closed door in Mt. Holly, you decide what room appears behind it and each decision shapes your path as you navigate through the manor. Every door can reveal new and exciting chambers that contain their own unique challenges and secrets. But be careful how you draft, for each day the manor’s floor plan resets and the rooms you saw today may not be the same rooms you see tomorrow.

EVERY STEP COUNTS
Your progress each day is shaped by the rooms you select to draft and the tools you find within them. Items in the game can be used in a number of creative ways to fuel your exploration deeper into the house, allowing you to adopt unique strategies to combat the challenges that each day brings. Yet, tread wisely – the house resets each dawn, erasing all but the permanent upgrades to your estate blueprint. That is, if you were clever enough to find one!

A HISTORY IN THE MAKING
As the heir of Mt. Holly, you have been tasked to explore its shifting halls in search of Room 46. Yet as your journey takes you further into the mansion’s depths, you start to discover that there is more lurking under the surface than a missing room. Investigate a past woven with the threads of blackmail, political intrigue, and the mysterious disappearance of a local children’s book author. The deeper you venture, the more you realize that the past is closer than it appears.