The first is the house you discover.
Every time you enter the house, the layout wipes itself clean and must be filled in again.
You get 50 steps to begin with, and most rooms consume a single step every time you enter.
What happens to the hamster when the Bunkroom isn’t on the floorplan?
All these spaces immediately fascinate, however humble.
Even the walk-in closets are portentous.
There’s a horror game pallor to the whole thing, though the more appropriate moodboard connection isGone Home.
Opening the door to a grid square along the exterior wall is always a heart-in-mouth process.
The Weights Room exhausts you and halves your steps when deployed.
Some of the resources are gathered by completing smaller puzzles inside rooms.
Which brings us to the third kind of house in Blue Prince, the house that you solve.
The metaphors are also cogs in a plot, without losing their charm as metaphors.
There is a wide world beyond the manor, and there were people who once lived here.
Your uncle is, again, a complex character, seeking absolution from beyond the grave.
To reach the bottom of that mystery you have to put everything you’ve learned to the test.
You will need a hell of a lot of luck.
More likely, it will take you tens of hours.
There’s scope for frustration, once your objectives solidify.
This being the fourth house in Blue Prince, the one implicit throughout.
Resident Evil’s Umbrella Mansion, where every doorway flaps open into uncreated darkness.
I would have liked Dogubomb to have made a touch more of this.
Still, that’s poking at scrapes in the woodwork.
If you hadn’t gotten the message by now, Blue Prince is a marvel.
