Of the many minor indignities that come with being a (literate, adult) fan of video games, the worst might be having to explain, out loud, what types of games you play. The words gamers use to delineate subgenres read like if you gave a monkey a typewriter and then taught that monkey the tech-founder-pidgin of buzzwords, acronyms, and portmanteaus. Just off the top of my head there are:
puzzlers, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and splatformers; first person shooters, third person shooters, arena shooters, hero shooters, extraction shooters, boomer shooters, and looter shooters; MOBAs, MMOs, RTSs, RPGS, JRPGs, CRPGs, and MMORPGs; plus just about any other word you can think of with the suffix “-sim,” “-rogue,” or “souls” tacked on at the end.
I wish I just liked Fifa.
Part of this problem is simply that nerds love assigning labels and definitions to games as much or more than marketing teams do. But, as cringey as gamer talk can sound to the untrained ear, it’s also undeniably functional, a jargon developed as a consequence of what video games are. We label music “rock” or “pop” because of how it sounds. Movies are “comedy” or “horror” because of how and what they make us feel. The difference with video games is that it’s you, the player, that acts on the game, rather than the other way around. The key word, then, is “acts.” Action is the player’s foothold into a game’s fiction. What that action is becomes the easiest way to describe a game. You jump, you shoot, you solve, you strum a plastic guitar. It doesn’t matter, as long as you’re doing something.
The design space for future video games is literally infinite, bounded only by the speed of SSDs. And yet, lest their latest title become a sort of new media cautionary tale, developers are bogged down by genre constraints, hamstrung by the same few questions—“What do you do in it?” “What’s the verb?”
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It’s possible to pin down Blue Prince, one of the critical darlings of 2025’s indie gaming scene (along with Hollow Knight: Silksong and Clair Obscure: Expedition 33), with this sort of subgenre-soup description. (It is a roguelike deckbuilding narrative puzzle game, with tabletop tile-placing elements, after all). But doing so would be a disservice to what is, to me, easily the best and most formally compelling game to come out since 2019’s Disco Elysium. Blue Prince is an achievement. It slyly deconstructs the conventions of puzzle games, not with winking irony or a heavy-handed meta narrative, but by embracing the genre’s conventions and tuning them to near perfection.
Created over eight years largely by solo developer Tonda Ross (though some help was brought in for art design and tricky bits of programming), Blue Prince is refreshingly legible. You play as Simon, a teenager who has inherited a country estate named Mount Holly from an eccentric, puzzle-obsessed great uncle. And, because he’s a sort of aristocratic Riddler, the uncle has posed one final challenge to Simon before he can claim the inheritance: he must find the secret forty-sixth room of the forty-five-room house.
It’s a set-up out of a Ms. Marple mystery, and Blue Prince leans into that pulpy detective atmosphere. You gain control of Simon in Mount Holly’s Entrance Hall, a lavishly decorated foyer drawn with thick, comic-book-style lines and walls painted a melancholic blue. In front of you, in each cardinal direction, stand three closed doors. For simplicity, each room in Blue Prince is square, and these rooms are arranged within Mount Holly’s outer walls in a long, five-by-nine grid. Simon is presented with a blueprint (note the homophone) of the house, blank except for the room he’s in, and the ominously-named “Antechamber” at the far, north end.
But there’s a catch. The mansion’s layout is not set. Meaning, behind those closed doors could be any one of close to a hundred possible rooms. When you open an in-game door, you’re prompted to “draft” (meaning, select one from a small RNG’d pool) what will be behind it. And so, as Simon, you design the mansion as you progress through it, at least until the end of the in-game day, at which point the arrangement of rooms resets. Each morning, the game drops you back in the Entrance Hall with nothing but a now-blank blueprint and (hopefully) whatever knowledge you’ve accumulated along the way.
With no real direction beyond getting to the forty-sixth room, the game leaves you to explore, reach a dead end, reset the house, and explore some more. But even within this fantastical conceit, it will quickly become clear that there’s more to Blue Prince than what it tells you. The moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty straightforward—fidgeting with potential room placements so you’re not left with dead-ends, collecting keys to open locks, and managing Simon’s energy (demarked by a count of “steps” that ticks down with each room he passes through). But as you get good at Blue Prince’s resource management, you begin to notice the puzzles lurking not particularly far below the surface. There are locked safes, dormant computer terminals, a garage door that won’t open, and dozens and dozens of books, postcards, and memos with writing scribbled in the margins. The game encourages you to take notes.
There’s a story, too. As Chris Donlan noted in his review for Eurogamer, video games are uniquely good at depicting “absence, specifically recent absence,” something Blue Prince does in droves. As you navigate, and re-navigate, the rooms of the mansion, the atmosphere of loss is palpable. While not literally haunted, you quickly understand that Mount Holly was until very recently a home filled with people. And traces of these people—servants, lovers, cousins, and political rivals—are everywhere. You stumble on emails sent between the estate’s staff, newspaper clippings about Simon’s apparently missing mother, entire documents censored by thick black sharpie, and rumblings that gesture towards an authoritarian regime which has the residents of Mount Holly in its sights. Flipping through photo albums and diary entries scattered throughout the house, it becomes evident that there’s much more to Simon’s story than the simple “claim your inheritance” setup the game sets you on your way with.
With all these threads slowly revealing themselves, you progress through Mount Holly, building a sort of mental map of the house and the uses of its dozens of rooms. And then, finally, you reach the Antechamber—analogous to the game’s first real goal, if only because it’s the only room marked with a fixed location on your map. Though when you approach, you’re met not with a door but an immovable concrete wall.
These cryptic early hours serve to teach players, subtly, that Blue Prince isn’t a game about placing tiles, or solving puzzles, or advancing a narrative. Rather, it’s an unwieldy and exponentially richer combination of all three. It does this not by presenting players with challenges to overcome but by asking them open-ended questions, letting them loose in a world that doesn’t make sense and giving them the freedom to pull on whatever thread catches their interest. When you encounter the sealed Antechamber, the logical next question to ask is how to open it. And though it’ll be a day or two or ten, you’ll find something—behind the false door in the Great Hall, or the weather-vane puzzle in the Secret Garden. Then, when the house resets, instead of plowing northwards, you’ll hoard keys, look for hallways, or try to draft as many garden-like green rooms as possible, since doing so seems to relate to the doors. Maybe in the Greenhouse, you’ll figure out a way to shatter a cracked brick wall. Through a tunnel you’ve made, you’ll find the diary of a disgruntled ex-employee who’d also been obsessed with reaching the antechamber, along with some crude schematics he’s scribbled that make it seem like the fourth lever—not into the Antechamber, but out of it—is in the house’s Basement.
Wait, you might ask, there’s a basement?
The in-game day when you finally do it—draft a room with an Antechamber access lever, grab the Basement key, make it downstairs, navigate two more mazes, find and pull the north-facing Antechamber lever to unlock Room 46, and make it back to the furthest part of the estate without running out of steps—is a genuine rush. This isn’t because of any adrenaline-inducing challenge (in fact, Blue Prince is a uniquely unpunishing game, with no time limits or fail states besides having to reset the house in the morning). After all the fumbling around you do in the game’s early hours, the process to “beat” it is deceptively simple, just a list of rooms to visit in a specific order. But it’s a uniquely rewarding experience not despite that simplicity, but because of it. The tools to get to the forty-sixth room have been available since the first in-game day, with nothing but your own lack of knowledge of the game’s systems preventing you accessing it. But because you’re accumulating that knowledge at your own pace, aided only by your ability to move through the same spaces over and over and keep noticing new linkages, the experience is a totally different sensation than something like Dark Souls. You truly feel like you’ve solved a sprawling, game-long riddle.
But then, right before the credits roll, Blue Prince teases you. In the deepest corner of the Basement, on either side of the lever that opens Room 46, are eight more locked doors. You’re unable to interact with any of them. Once you give up trying to open those, and walk into Room 46, music swells, a brief scene plays, and Simon wakes up in the morning in the entrance hall to the house. He has—in the language that Blue Prince fans have developed to cryptically communicate their progress in the game—claimed his inheritance. A letter from his uncle is waiting on the table in front of you. It says, in so many words, good work, but also that this first challenge—reaching the forty-sixth room—was, obviously, arbitrary. An excuse to get Simon familiar with the mechanics of the house. Mount Holly goes much deeper; Blue Prince is only just getting started.
Does it never end?
There are two loops in Blue Prince: moment-to-moment and day-to-day. The short term loop is all about resource management: getting from one room to the next, maybe stopping in the Parlor for a quick puzzle or in the Billiards Room for a round of darts, but otherwise mainly concerned with avoiding a dead end to your day. The long-term loop is layered on top of this, not supplanting the core gameplay but by widening the curtain of what end it’s in service of. As you roam the same rooms over and over, all the knowledge you’ve accumulated over past runs—mastering mechanics, intuiting what decorative elements of each room might actually be puzzles, and recognizing recurring names and dates—recontextualizes the spaces you walk through many times over. New players will like the Den because it’s free to draft, always includes a gem, and has three doors to help juggle multiple routes through the house. Intermediate players might recognize that, because of its commonness, it might actually be best to save drafting the Den until late in an in-game day, when room placement gets tricky. And it might take until the fortieth or fiftieth time you’ve drafted the room to realize, wait, that mechanical clock on the wall is actually ticking. And suddenly you’re scribbling down notes, trying to do the math for what rate time passes in Mount Holly, and trying to piece together how this realization might help open a time-locked safe in the Shelter, or connect to what you’ve found atop the Clock Tower.
Almost every one of Blue Prince’s rooms is like this, to the point that if the game wasn’t so masterfully paced it would be dauntingly complex. This is especially true in the late game, as the narrative gets more and more involved. Story elements that initially scanned as Agatha Christie-lite set dressing eventually become both the content of and reward for solving late-game puzzles. The Archives, for example, start as a room you’re reluctant to draft, because doing so comes with the penalty that you’re no longer able to see all three options for future rooms. Inside are four doors, unhooked electrical wiring, and a bunch of locked file cabinets. A photo album on the desk is filled with old newspaper clippings, detailing how Simon’s mother was a successful children’s book author and has been missing for years. It seems like set dressing, at least until you’ve passed through it two dozen times and you start to realize just how important heredity—as a theme, narrative device, and in a roundabout way, a puzzle in and of itself—is to the game. Eventually, you’ll be taking notes on family crests, the flags of each of the world’s countries, their industries, infrastructure, and the temperament of their inhabitants. And so when you finally return to the Archives, intentionally for once, now armed with a key to one of its file cabinets (which itself requires an extensive, multi-day puzzle involving the Pump Room, an empty Aquarium, and a treasure map hiding in plain sight), the birth certificate you find inside won’t just read as lore but a genuine “a-ha” moment, the missing link that clarifies another puzzle which up to that point you’d only half understood.
The game is at its best during this lengthy middle act, involving eight “Sanctum keys” that unlock the doors it teased you with in the basement. Having reached Room 46 (and been rewarded with little more than another riddle), this is when Blue Prince’s training wheels come off. It says to the player, “remember all those interesting things you noticed on your way to Room 46? Now, solve those, too.” It is also when it becomes clear that the repetitive, run-based nature of Blue Prince wasn’t an arbitrary design choice to pad its length or to ride the “trendy” wave of rogue-like games, but a brilliant, gamified way to force even the most brute-force-loving puzzle freaks to slow down and notice things. By the time you’re tasked with finding the Sanctum Keys, you’ve probably encountered and digested more hints than you even realize. And so, when it clicks that “Major Key” might have multiple meanings, or that it’s possible to cheese open the eight doors in the Machinarium by surrounding it with dead-ends, you feel brilliant. Though in reality, Blue Prince has been spoon feeding you hints the whole time. The game—both its form and its fiction—has been priming you to solve puzzles you didn’t even know existed.
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My first playthrough of Blue Prince lasted seventy-seven in-game days, which took me more than forty hours, though I’d “rolled credits” by finding the forty-sixth room much earlier than that. For the vast majority of these hours, I was totally engrossed in Mount Holly, grinning ear to ear as I hand-wrote notes about the paintings on every wall and the color of the chess pieces in each room. I opened the Tomb, drained the Reservoir, and solved the Clock Tower’s logic puzzle on my first try, each time patting myself on the back for cracking what I imagined had to be some of the game’s trickiest puzzles. I only really hit a wall between Sanctum key seven (found by riding a boat to your mother and her guerilla comrades’ secret safehouse) and eight. I knew it had something to do with an in-game book I’d found titled, infuriatingly, A New Clue, its pages filled with obvious ciphers that I nonetheless couldn’t crack. After an hour of taking a magnifying glass to every book in Blue Prince’s Library, I caved and (irl, this time) looked up a guide online.
The guide explained that the hint I was looking for was actually hidden in plain sight, in A New Clue’s illustrations. Sheepishly, I followed its instructions, unearthed the two hidden microchips, used them to unlock Mount Holly’s secret Throne Room, which, once drafted inside the house, revealed the final Sanctum Key. From there, the rest of the Sanctum Key puzzle was simple enough—some shape and word associations that required less-than-LSAT-level logic puzzling and a few lucky guesses. My reward for solving this sequence of puzzles was, you guessed it, another clue. The next level of Blue Prince, deeper and weirder, was waiting. And yet I balked at the opportunity. At the next offramp the game offered, a satisfying enough, if incomplete, conclusion, I accepted the ending. I felt foolish for having come all that way just to end up needing help. Why hadn’t the illustration of the sledgehammer and the broken vase rung any alarm bells in my head? Had the first thirty-five hours of Blue Prince taught me nothing? Surely, another few in-game days, a few more chances to flip through A New Clue, and I would’ve figured it out. Right?
At risk of sounding like a puzzle game purist, those sickos who relish the feeling of being completely, utterly stumped, I ruined Blue Prince for myself. I may never have solved A New Clue’s puzzle on my own, but that would’ve almost been a more fitting conclusion than the one I got. This is because, by reaching for a guide, I skirted the one responsibility Blue Prince demands of its players—to pay attention. Rather than drafting, or puzzle solving, or managing resources, or even piecing together Simon’s family tree, the real “verb” of Blue Prince is observation. It’s about using whatever arbitrary objective you’ve set for yourself as an excuse to run through Mount Holly just one more time, listening to and learning from what the game is trying to tell you.
You realize this while playing, but the seamless way Blue Prince scripts your playthrough only really sinks in when you’ve put it down. It’s a brilliant combination of form and fiction, two distinct layers woven together by the house’s puzzles, and which, at each moment that could be an ending, loop back onto themselves like a Möbius strip. By gamifying the moment to moment gameplay, Blue Prince tricks you into subconsciously completing its real progression: genuine understanding of its world. That the game is structured in a largely open-ended way, letting you explore at your own pace, makes the few gated “knowledge checks” (Room 46, the eight Sanctum Keys, the Throne Room puzzle I hadn’t even known existed during my playthrough) that much more rewarding. Rather than prepare you to beat it, the game holds your hand in what’s basically a guided tour, drip feeding you all its secrets. All it asks of you in return is patience, and to pay attention.
In this sense, Blue Prince is clearly in conversation with a buzzy philosophy of game design that goes by many names. The critic Mark Brown calls them “knowledge-based games,” though fans have gravitated to the more quippy “Metroidbrania” (meaning a Metroidvania, itself a portmanteau, in which the only upgradeable tool is your own brain). The distinction I prefer, coined by a listener writing in to the gaming podcast Remap Radio, is that Blue Prince is the archetypical “Lore and Logic” game. These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games. Instead, you finish them by proving your conceptual, narrative, and mechanical knowledge of their world. You feel like you’ve outsmarted them, if only because they often feature a “critical” path operating on a much more straightforward level, and it’s technically possible to do an entire playthrough without even detecting what’s going on under the surface. These games are a know-it-all’s dream.
There were certainly shades of this approach to game making in the auteur-ish critical darlings of past generations—Shigeru Miyamoto’s original Legend of Zelda (1986) or Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid (1998). But it wasn’t until the explosion of indie gaming in the late aughts and early ’10s that this design ethos (which inherently exists as a corrective to less-imaginative models of video games as toys or interactable movies) found fertile ground. Fez (2012), probably the most famous of these, was a visually-striking platformer that had a straightforward collect-a-thon critical path, yet gradually revealed layers of hidden content beneath its surface. These include some now-infamous puzzles, like a fictional alphabet which required knowledge from outside the game to solve (a cardinal sin for puzzle fans) and a true ending with a solution that needed to be datamined.
Yet while it certainly contains DNA of Fez and the games it inspired (2022’s Tunic and 2024’s Animal Well are standouts), Blue Prince does well by avoiding the biggest pitfall that these types of games tend to fall into—being overly obtuse for the sake of proving how clever they are. As new players quickly learn, nothing in Blue Prince is arbitrary. Some of why this works is mechanical, that its run-based nature means any complexity comes from making its small world incredibly dense, rather than wide. But it’s also in no small part due to the narrative, a relatively realist, character-driven story. There’s an internal logic to Blue Prince’s world and plot that goes far beyond the meta-ness of Fez or Tunic. And the unbelievable constraint with which Blue Prince reveals itself to new players might be the most important factor. There are so many strands available at any given moment, but whether they’re more centered in mechanical complexity, story, or simply a puzzle you haven’t noticed yet, they all loop back onto themselves. Developer Tonda Ross has spoken in interviews about how the game was functionally finished years ago, but he and his team took all the extra time to fine tune the difficulty and pacing. All of this obviously paid off. Blue Prince is frictionless, not in the sense that it’s not challenging, but rather that no matter where you go or what you do, you’re probably making progress you don’t even realize. It’s a maze in which it’s, paradoxically, almost impossible to get lost.
All these Lore and Logic games, especially Blue Prince, represent a subtly profound formal shift in what games can be. Away from the tyranny of the verb—so preoccupied with the what? or the how?—and towards something much richer, the why? It’s not flashy tech that’s going to deliver the future of video games and prove once and for all their artistic merit. It’s going to be developers like Tonda Ross, who are clear-sighted enough to mess with the psychological assumptions embedded in how we conceptualize playing games in the first place. Blue Prince proves that the formal future of video games is already here. Anyone still in doubt just needs to pay closer attention.
Martin Dolan
Martin Dolan is a writer from Upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Point, the Cleveland Review of Books, and more.