The best game of 2025 is out today — and it’s not Grand Theft Auto 6.
Blue Prince is the best reviewed game of the year so far, beating out Split Fiction and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. You’ll understand why as soon as you start playing it. The puzzle game is one of the most unique video games I’ve ever played, taking the mysterious vibe of Riven and slotting it into a brainy roguelike about an ever-shifting manor. It’s filled with tough puzzles that might take you years to solve without a guide, and that’s a good thing. While you might be tempted to look up answers as soon as possible, Blue Prince is better the less you know about it.
So, if you’re looking for some tips and tricks to get you started as you search for Room 46, there’s only one piece of advice I’ll give you: Treat it like you would any roguelike.
In Blue Prince, the goal is to work your way through a manor in search of a hidden room. You’ll always start in an entrance hall with three doors. Each time you open a door, you have to draft a new adjoining room from three options. Each room can contain items, puzzles, and secrets, while others have specific utilities that work in tandem with other rooms. There’s a lot of random luck involved, as you’ll often find yourself hoping to pull a specific room with a specific item in it, but getting something entirely different instead.
That might feel frustrating early on, but the key to success in Blue Prince is learning how to deal with the cards you’re dealt just as you would in an action roguelike. For instance, say you head into the manor and get a shovel early on. That’s an item that will let you dig in dirt patches for important items like keys and gems. With careful drafting, you’ll find that you might be able to create a “build” of sorts that lets you better take advantage of that. Maybe there are rooms that you know are more likely to contain dirt. Maybe you’ll find ways to spread more dirt around the house. The more you experiment, the more information you’ll pick up that will make later runs easier. There’s no such thing as a bad run in Blue Prince so long as you’ve learned one thing. If you ever get stuck, the best thing you can do is draft a room you have never seen before.
The same idea extends to the rooms you draft. There’s a tremendous amount of strategy in that simple hook, and I’ll leave it to you to discover it all. What I will say is that you should never go all in on one singular strategy. It’s rare that you’ll get the exact rooms in the exact layout you want at first, so you want to be flexible and reactive to anything you’re dealt. There are several mystery threads you can chase at once. Take mental (or physical) note of every lead you have and follow them based on what rooms you draft rather than trying to force one specific chain of events to unfold. There is not one single path to Room 46.
In this sense, Blue Prince shares more in common with Balatro than it does Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. In the former, everything comes down to how you deal with random chance. If you go in determined to make a functioning high card deck but you don’t get any Jokers that synergize with that idea, you won’t get very far. Instead, success occurs when you take what you can get early on and shape the rest of your run around it. Go into Blue Prince with the exact same mentality. Did you find a key with a specific function early on? Then focus on trying to draft the one place where you’ll need to use it. Did you pull a room with a power breaker? See if you can pull more rooms that take advantage of it.
If you follow this line of thinking, you’ll find yourself getting further and further on each run the same way you would in, say, Hades 2. That’s not because of permanent progression, though there is a bit of that too. Rather, it’ll be because you’ve picked up drafting nuances, learned exactly what to do with each tool, and worked out puzzle solutions that give you more to work with each run. You’re powering up your knowledge instead of your attack stat with each run.
So before you start rushing for guides to solve the manor’s biggest mysteries, just stop and trust yourself. You aren’t going to hit credits in a day, and you certainly aren’t going to solve every mystery you find without a major time investment. But embrace that and let yourself get lost in the web of clues. Keep a notebook handy. Take a lot of screenshots. Play it with a friend if you can and trade secrets if you need someone to bounce ideas off of. Whatever you do, just play it.
Blue Prince is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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