Blue Prince Preview: Wandering Through an Empty House Hasn’t Been This Fascinating Since Gone Home

ign.com:

I’m never more excited than when I’m playing games where I’m not even sure the main mechanic is fundamentally interesting. Despite hours playing Blue Prince and still thinking about it when I’m doing anything else, somehow, delightfully, I can’t figure it out. This clawing madness - trying to get a sense of whether this is all a waste of time, while happily wasting that time - is a feeling few things have been able to evoke within me.

With Blue Prince, the first release from up-until-now film studio Dogubomb, that metagaming sense of not quite having the full picture in mind perfectly mirrors the in-game activity of exploring a procedurally generated mansion in search of its answers and rarely finding any.

Hurrying through the grand estate of Mt. Holly to ensure the retrieval of some inheritance from a departed family member, every time you open a door you’re presented with a choice of three additional rooms. Whichever one gets picked is instantly bolted on ahead, as if it was always there. Each room is carefully authored by the development team, but the order that they’re offered up is procedurally chosen from a pool that grows in size over the course of a run. Ideally every choice is the one that’s most beneficial for that moment. Often enough, it’s actually just the least worst.

A decent handful of these rooms are complete dead-ends. Maybe they’ll contain a useful item like a key or a gem, which will need to be spent to place more complicated structures. Some of the rooms have additional doors which lead on to other rooms. If you’re lucky, you’re facing the right direction, and there aren’t any other rooms already blocking the potential exits, a hallway or such with multiple additional doors will appear and you’ll be able to create even more options for how to proceed.

Certain techniques for making proper progress are beginning to occur to me after more than five hours playing the surprisingly generous demo. I’m deliberately drafting dead-end rooms without much