Some games make you feel clever; others make you feel at home. Blue Prince is being praised for doing both at once, wrapping a dense strategy-puzzle structure inside a playful, eerily familiar maze of rooms that seems designed to lure curious players back for “one more run.”
In a new reflection piece from Rock Paper Shotgun, the writer drops readers into one of Blue Prince’s signature moments: standing in a “Dark Room” with pockets full of gems and keys, forced to choose between three shadowy “templates” on a drafting screen. The twist is that your choice effectively draws the next room into existence, and not all rooms are equally helpful—especially when you’re chasing progress deeper into the labyrinth.
The article leans into Blue Prince’s sense of humor and atmosphere, describing an unlucky pull: the “Videogame Journalist’s Bedroom,” a space filled with the detritus of the job—rotting USB cables, stale coffee, and a lone computer screen displaying an article about an “esoteric strategy puzzler.” It’s a meta gag that also underlines the game’s broader appeal: its rooms are as much about tone and storytelling as they are about function, loot, or optimal routing.
That blend of systemic decision-making and authored personality is the hook. Blue Prince’s drafting interface turns progression into an ongoing design problem—your path isn’t just discovered, it’s constructed, with each selection shaping the run’s risks, resources, and future options. By framing room picks as uncertain templates rather than explicit outcomes, the game encourages speculation, experimentation, and the kind of player-driven mythmaking that thrives in puzzle-forward roguelike spaces.
Actus Gaming take: Blue Prince looks like it understands a key truth about modern strategy puzzlers—complexity lands better when it’s carried by texture, jokes, and places you remember. If the full game sustains that mix of mechanical depth and lived-in worldbuilding, it could earn the rare status of a “thinking game” that also feels comforting, even when it’s actively trying to trap you in its maze.
Source: {“title”:”I’ve never felt more at home than in the labyrinths of Blue Prince”,”link”:”https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ive-never-felt-more-at-home-than-in-the-labyrinths-of-blue-prince”,”pubdate”:”Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:59:00 +0000″,”guid”:”https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ive-never-felt-more-at-home-than-in-the-labyrinths-of-blue-prince”,”media:content”:{“props”:{“medium”:”image”,”url”:”https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/advent-calendar-2025-blue-prince.jpg?width=690&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp”},”value”:null},”description”:”
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rnYou are standing in the Dark Room, pockets full of gems and keys, eyeing up the eastward door. The three silhouetted templates on your drafting screen all seem equally unpromising. You go for broke and pick the one on the left. Ah nuts, you’ve drawn the Videogame Journalist’s Bedroom. It contains nothing save rotten coils of USB cables, the stink of bad coffee, and a single active computer screen, displaying a just-written article about an esoteric strategy puzzler.rn
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rnWhich strategy puzzler? The one that rhymes with “blueprints”, of course.rn
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