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Blue Prince is already the very best shapeshifting videogame houseCellar door
Cellar door
Image credit:Raw Fury
Image credit:Raw Fury
I’m currently trying to find a new flat in London. This is not much fun, though it’s a great opportunity to meet and bond with other would-be tenants over a shared, grinding resentment of landlords who will literally stuff a bed in a toilet and call it a “studio apartment”. It’s also left me powerfully invested in the premise ofBlue Prince, a first-person puzzler which looks like a graphic novel and starts with your character inheriting a huge, weird, isolated mansion, Mt. Holly, from an eccentric great-uncle.
Blue Prince Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Blue Prince Announcement Trailer
“I had a design of drafting rooms where you passed room cards from player to player, and you’re each selecting one room to draft,” he goes on. “So I was like, ‘Okay, I wonder how that would combine with the first person adventure thing?’. And so I built a prototype in the first three months. And it was really fun. And I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll commit to another six months and finish it’. That was eight years ago. So my timeline was a little off. And the ambitions grew and grew. And I think the more I went on, the more I became obsessed with the idea of everyone’s day [in the house] being different.”
Image credit:Raw Fury
You’ll find tools, as well, like a magnifying glass that lets you read tiny clues in any books or pictures you discover. There are keycards for electric doors. Some rooms contain circuit boxes that rout power between those electric doors and other gadgets. There’s a darkroom with pegged-up photographs, which can’t be seen until you turn on the lights. And then there are the rooms and artefacts that crack open windows upon your great-uncle’s past, and hint at an explanation for the mansion’s bizarre behaviour.
Image credit:Raw Fury
He’s found it exhilarating, watching different players discover different combinations of rooms and apply different strategies to the deck. “We’ve done three years of internal playtesting, and the cool thing is that I’ve seen so many styles of play. And we’ve designed the game to embrace everyone’s style. There’s people spend two hours on each [in-game] day. And there’s some people for whom every day is 10 minutes. I’d say the average day is about 30 minutes, for the average player, but it depends on how good at strategy you are. As you solve puzzles in the game, you unlock permanent upgrades, that may grant you more resources each day, so that it becomes easier, the more puzzles you solve. But for players that don’t really like puzzles, they can just play it as a more difficult strategy game.”
Blue Prince doesn’t have a release date yet, but you canwishlist it on Steam.
