One of the things video games do really well is absence – specifically absence. Dump me into a game world and give me enough clues that someone else has just left and I’ll be happy for hours. A cigar still sending up a ribbon of smoke from an overflowing ashtray, the wind plucking at a curtain where a window has been left just slightly open, a microwave that has some kind of horrible lasagne in it that’s still – jeepers – giving off a hint of steam? Games are brilliant at this kind of Marie Celeste set-up. Instant mystery. I don’t need actual people around. I just want to know who, what, why?
Blue Prince reviewPublisher: Raw FuryDeveloper: DogubombPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 10th April on Steam, PS5 and Xbox X/S.
These are all questions that Blue Prince finds time for, in its way, but its most pressing issue is ? An eccentric relative – the best kind of relative – has left you a sprawling house – the best kind of house, now I think about it. There’s a catch, though. The house contains 45 rooms, but if you can find the secret 46th, you get to keep the whole place. And there’s a further catch. More of a wrinkle, actually. These rooms move around every night. So every morning you head into the main entrance lobby where three closed doors await. Open a door and you draft three potential rooms that might lie behind it. Pick one and you’re off on your adventure. You build the house by choosing which room is found behind each room.
There’s more to it than this, of course, but this is in itself a considerable piece of video game magic, and one worth hovering around for a while. This is because it’s seamless. That’s the thing I love about it. You pick the room, open the door, and magically the room you picked is instantly waiting for you behind that door. Even better, when you get a corridor going, you can look through a suite of rooms and see all your choices laid out and connected behind you, and like a deck of cards that’s been honestly shuffled, you might ponder the fact that these rooms may never fit together in quite the same way ever again.
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The game stuff: Blue Prince comes at players in waves. At first, I was just trying to get as many rooms on the board during each day. I needed to get to 46? Fine: I’ll get to 46. At this stage, Blue Prince reminded me, in its own, architectural way, of something we were all concerned with during lockdown itself. Remember R? Apologies if this is causing flashbacks. R was the number of other people that an infected person would pass Covid onto while they had it. The lower R was, the fewer people would be infected, so R was a way of telling – I think – whether Covid was expanding or contracting. With Blue Prince you’re thinking about R in reverse, and you’re thinking about R in terms of doors. When I add a room, does it increase the number of doors in the building? The higher the number of doors, the more likely you’ll be able to keep the floor plan building towards 45, or 46 rooms. The fewer the number of doors – cul-de-sacs, rooms with doors that won’t work because they won’t line up with existing doors you’ve already placed, the sooner you’ll find yourself with nowhere to go. It’s architectural epidemiology.