Quick Links
What do you get if you mix a very tough puzzle game filled with escape room elements with a randomised, almost roguelike ‘start all over again, rely on luck’ gameplay loop? You getBlue Prince. This game has you drafting rooms and creating the blueprint of a large stately home in an effort to find the mysterious Room 46.
A huge aspect of the game is the fact that you’ll come up with your own strategies for progression and solve puzzles at a totally unique, personal pace - but having some hints from someone who has gone through the trouble before you can’t hurt, can it?
First Ranks First
The Blue Prince map is separated intonine different ranks; you begin at rank one with the entrance hall and work your way up to rank nine, where you’ll find the antechamber. Whenever you open a door, you’ll generally be presented with three different options for the room you may create in the adjoining room.
You may feel the impulse to head straight for the north end of the manor and dart straight for the Antechamber. This is a trap for a few reasons:
It’s a good idea to attempt to get as many rooms built as possible instead, and this will involvefilling out the early rankswith as many rooms as you can based on your luck. The main reason for this is that the rooms you have available to you form a limited stack - once you’ve built a room once on a particular day, it generally cannot be offered to you again.
This means that themore rooms you use to fill the low-rank gaps, the better chance you have of encountering rarer or newer rooms, which will provide you with new puzzles, new clues, and new opportunities. Without doing this, your days are more likely to end by you running out of things to do rather than running out of steps, and thus, you miss out on potential progress.
Related to the above tip, it’s worth singling out the importance of using dead ends where they make sense - for example, in locations where youwon’t be missing out on many paths forward. There are multiple reasons for this:
A good practice is to save dead ends for the sides of the manor at early ranks - as long as you have alternative ways to progress northwards in the manor, of course.
New Rooms Are Important
As hinted at in the previous tip, anew room is always worth draftingwhen it pops up as an option. Even the most innocuous-sounding rooms can have vital notes or clues inside that can help you solve a puzzle or even alert you to the very existence of one.
The same is true of red-bordered rooms that have nasty side effects. Some, like the Gymnasium, are standard punishments, but others havetroves of informationinside that can help you learn crucial information that can help you on future days.
Gems Are A Good Early Focus
A good portion of the rooms that you may draft requireGemsto choose. In many cases, you’ll be forced to create dead ends or miss out on a new room or discovery thanks to the perfect choice being locked behind a Gem cost.
This makes it a good practice to focus on picking rooms that provide Gems early on in a day to enable those more expensive but powerful rooms.The Parloris usually a very strong choice, as solving the puzzle inside will give you two Gems.
The Picture Puzzle
Many of the puzzles in this game will take a very long time to figure out, but one is a bit more noticeable than the rest. You may notice that the vast majority of rooms you draft containtwo picturesinside them -pencil drawings on a white background.
Some room varieties, such as some green-border rooms and some corridors, do not have these drawings on them!
You will eventually find explicit hints as to what you need to look out for regarding these pictures andhow the puzzle is constructed, but knowing what to look out for earlier is something we would have loved.Reveal the spoiler belowto learn a bit more about this puzzle if you don’t want to be spoiled for this particular puzzle.
Spoilers
This puzzle has two elements:
Imagine that the manor’s blueprint is a coded message, and you should be able to start filling it out using the clues here!
Don’t Worry About Ending Days
A particularly frustrating part of this game is running out of things to do before you run out of steps. Knowing that you might have progressed further had you drafted different rooms, or you think you know how to solve a puzzle, but you weren’t offered the right rooms is uniquely annoying.
Having to end a day early is a natural part of this game, though. The main ‘meta progression’ element of this roguelike is knowledge - it takes a long time before you’re able to make concerted efforts into actually entering Room 46, and so your initial goals should be to collect as much information as you can. This might mean some days of aimless drafting, simply hoping for something new (or old) to jump out at you.
Luckplays a large role in a player’s success with Blue Prince, and sometimes, the best way to make progress is to reroll the dice and start again on the next day.
Get Some Permanent Upgrades
While a massive portion of the game relies on knowledge being your best pal, with puzzles and their progress being tied to luck and information being applied in different ways. There are a few things, however, that can be done to permanently unlock some buffs.
Two you can unlock very early and easily are the two locked gates you can encounter if you explore the outside of the manor. One leads to anapple orchardand has a code lock on it, while the other gate leads to thewestern side of the houseand can only be unlocked by reaching it from the other side.
If you want hints on how to unlock these upgrades, reveal the spoiler below.
Spoiler
To unlock the west gate, you’ll need to somehowleave the manor from the west. TheGaragecan be drafted on the western side of the manor, but the button that unlocks the door to the outside is currently not working. How might youpowerit?
To unlock the apple orchard, you’ll need todiscover the codethat breaks the lock on the gate. There arepictures of the apple orchardin some rooms inside the manor - could they hold clues if you could get acloser lookat the pictures?
The Magnifying Glass Is Incredibly Useful
Of the many tools you can find in the manor, one stands out above the rest for its ability to push you along so many different puzzles - the Magnifying Glass. This is a simple tool that allows you to look far closer at any notes or pictures you can examine on-screen.
When you get a Magnifying Glass, it’s worthtaking a closer look at every single thing you may, in case it’s hiding something important.
The Magnifying Glass is so supremely useful that it’s a very worthy candidate for being checked at theCoat Checkif you manage to draft that room. Not only is it useful for its main purpose, but it’s also the crucial ingredient in some Workshop recipes.
