On Blue Prince - A Review

You can fall in love with anything. A place, an idea, a piece of media, or even a stranger. Loving something comes with many benefits of course, but also many drawbacks.

When you love something you become its most argent defender, which can be off-putting. You can become blind with love, unable to see something’s flaws. You can become possessive and take ownership over something that doesn’t belong to you. Or you can become obsessive to the point where your love for something overtakes pieces of your life.

I have fallen in love recently with a video game called “The Blue Prince.” And while I want to talk to you about that today, we have to start a year ago in Switzer Canyon.

I have started but never finished a lot of essays, blogs, and videos about Switzer Canyon. I found myself in the canyon in February 2023 during a tough time in my life. Struggling with my health, my grandmother’s health, and general stress. Impulse got me to finally buy a camera (after years of research), with the intention of taking photos of landscapes, but I quickly found myself deep in the weeds photographing, well. Birds.

I didn’t intend to start with bird photography. But when you start paying attention, you realize you see birds more than just about any other type of animal.

So, I became a bird photographer. It was meditative. You go out on a walk, you get some sun, and you get to enjoy the outdoors. You are forced to move slow and take everything in. You learn to listen and identify calls. You learn how to move so animals don’t see you as a threat. You learn to be patient and look for small details, such as the way the wind is blowing or what branches make for good perches.

When I first started doing photography, I spent most of my time in Balboa Park. But one day something told me to turn left instead of right and then I was on a trail. I recognized it as the trail as a shortcut I used on the rare occasion I needed to go to South Park. But I never considered it as a place to explore.

It only took one week of going before I discovered that it was a magical place.

While it isn’t the most beautiful or wild or unique trail in San Diego, it was perfect. It felt designed to ease you in. When you enter you stand on top of a steep hill covered in loose soil, forcing you to ease in slowly. The hill overlooks trees that hawks and owls use as perches, dry creeks that coyotes use as highways, and flowering plants that draw in hummingbirds and butterflies.

As you go deeper you cross through a narrow path overgrown with sage scrub and exit into a wooded trail into an open space that has pine trees, oak trees, blackberry bushes, and all of this was just two streets from a major road in the heart of San Diego.

I started going every day. And every day, I fell in love with Switzer Canyon. I took over thirty thousand photos, dozens of videos, and a couple of scars from the canyon. My time there was perfect and I miss it, but also know that it’s always there and, as cheesy as it might sound, that gives me some peace of mind.

This was the first time I can remember ever having a “happy place.”

We moved out of San Diego this year and into my grandmother’s place. In moving here, I am constantly reminded of her. The places she took me to when I was little, the times we’d stand out and watch the fireworks from Disneyland, and the Texas shaped grass that sort of counts as her front lawn.

Before she got sick, my grandma and mom started remodeling this house. A lot of big decisions were made from her hospital bed, such as the color of the backsplash, the tile in the bathroom, and whether or not to put in a “damn washer and dryer” (her answer? Absolutely not). She loved to cook so her kitchen is state of the art with a nice new stove and fridge and tons of storage.

And many times, while making these choices, she’d look at me and say, “you’re going to love living there.” And I do Grandma. I do.

So, what does this have to do with Indie Puzzle video game: The Blue Prince.

Sometimes media hits you at the perfect time in your life. When you “need” it. My anxiety gets the best of me when I let my mind wander, so I often need a focus point to get me through the day. And Blue Prince is a game that demands attention.

It tells the story of a boy who inherits his great uncle’s 45 room mansion on the condition that he can find the elusive 46th room. This game is full of mysteries and puzzles and small moments that I don’t want to spoil any of it. But it is a game worth playing if you like games where you have to write stuff down or just want to build a big puzzle of a house.

Blue Prince is also one of those games that hides its story. It hides a lot of things actually. You have to piece together your own family’s history by going through and examining different parts of the house. There's a love story hidden by paying attention to where pictures are hung and the solution to an unsolved crime found in a locked safe.

Actually, there is very little the game outright tells you. You have to assume. You have to assume a lot.

In the real world, there are a number of mysteries and lost items that I cannot find among my grandma’s things. One of the most important is the pink slip to her car. A few days ago, I was going through boxes of her papers that she was storing someone else’s house and found a spiral ring notebook. I flipped through the first 20 or so pages, but they were empty. Everything else in the box was important. Old driver’s licenses. Family photos. Jewelry.

Something told me to keep flipping through the pages and I found the eulogy she wrote for her father. I could see the difficulty in her words. She wrote so much about her father’s faith and his health. But there were parts where her usually even script bunched together.

It is weird when someone dies. You think about what you know about them. Family is strange, especially when you’re the kid. You don’t know about so much of your family, but you love them. And then they die and you have to go through their papers and you’re suddenly understanding them in reverse. And you’re finding notes written on napkins. Essays they wrote in college. Receipts they accidentally saved. And they remind you of them in an oblique way where you remember that she loved strawberry milkshakes, but so did Papa. And how she’d bring him Del Taco strawberry milkshakes and then after he died, she would ask you to pick them up for her too.

But this is an essay about a video game called the Blue Prince.

In the game you explore the mansion by “drafting” rooms. This works by walking up to a closed door and left clicking on it. You then get three options from the 45 possible starting rooms. Your goal is to lay out the house so you can get to the antechamber at the back of the house.

Since the game requires a lot of luck, you will lose. To be honest, you’ll lose a lot. Even playing with perfect strategy something you did 5 rooms back can end your run. You will hit dead ends. You will make mistakes. And you will need to start over.

One of my biggest gripes with Blue Prince is sometimes a loss doesn’t exactly feel like your fault. This is a huge issue with a lot of “deck builders,” because sometimes you just draw a bad hand and clever play can’t get you out of it. But since there are essentially a hundred different starting configurations (45 possible starts times 3 separate starting doors times for 3 options on each door) there was probably a better choice you could have made at some point.

So while the game does require a lot of luck, there are some aspects of skill in terms of identifying the correct choice among multiple seemingly correct choices. As you play you’ll develop skills and also unlock things that make the game easier, but these could be spoilers, so we’ll skip over those for now.

While playing The Blue Prince, you will run into a puzzle. These vary drastically from a “one of us tells the truth while one of us always lies” puzzle, to a math puzzle, to escape room “did you notice this clever clue that gives you the code to crack the safe” type puzzles.

Then there are puzzles that are hidden inside rooms that will require an even greater attention to detail. And if you’re wondering how deep the rabbit hole goes, I have, on more than one occasion, kept my girlfriend up trying to explain how the symbol on the back of a dining room chair reveals a grand conspiracy of blackmail, murder, and kidnapping, … I am making some of that up to avoid spoilers.

The beautiful thing is that the game is fully enjoyable and beatable if you just solve the puzzles on the surface. But if you want to go deeper, you can take the red pill and find some mind-blowing things that I want to share but truly can’t because I would be robbing a magical moment from you. Even if there is only a 1% chance you would play this game, it’s worth not spoiling. 

Anyway, this game is a masterpiece that hit me at the right time. It goes on the list of perfect things that were there at the right time alongside the novel The Westing Game, the place East Switzer Canyon, the animated movie Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse, and my dog Cashew.