I'm not ready to write the piece I want to write about Blue Prince. It's perhaps the second time in my life that a game has thwarted my attempts to talk about it: there's simply too much happening at once—too many important things done well; too many beautiful things worth talking about—for me to construct the sort of narrative piece that I want to build around it. So you'll have to wait.
(My suspicion is that, when I do publish a more serious piece about it, it'll be on a different site than this one. Watch this space.)
But I do want to talk about Blue Prince, so I'd like to focus instead on the things that it does that I think are genuinely important for the evolution of games as a medium—things that, in time, we'll come to see as parts of the fundamental vocabulary of game design, integral to what the medium is capable of as an art form. The properties I'm describing here can also be found in a handful of other games, which the snob in me would like to call the only games that matter: to wit, Pathologic, Outer Wilds, Rain World, and Kentucky Route Zero. (With maybe else Heart.Break() as a wild card, and Elden Ring as an example of a blockbuster title doing at least some of these things, which is neat.)
This is not a comprehensive survey of techniques that I think will come to define the art of game design. (Pathologic in particular is visionary in ways that nothing else touches; Rain World is a virtuosic masterpiece whose achievements lie in mostly orthogonal directions; et cetera, et cetera.) But Blue Prince perhaps puts more of these things in one place, and in an appealing and accessible package, than I've ever seen before; in doing so, it also demonstrates something that I'm not sure I've seen before, namely that video games have the unique ability to reach artistic heights and complex depths without sacrificing ease of access. Games, as the only genuinely ludic medium we have, are capable of kinds of artistry that other mediums can only feint at. I think that, in Blue Prince, we've seen our best glimpse to date of what the medium can do for us—and, to be embarrassingly grand, how it might speak to the future society we're only on the cusp of creating.
Don't expect the rest of this piece to justify this statement, by the way. We'll have to save that conversation for later too.
Diving in!
(My suspicion is that, when I do publish a more serious piece about it, it'll be on a different site than this one. Watch this space.)
But I do want to talk about Blue Prince, so I'd like to focus instead on the things that it does that I think are genuinely important for the evolution of games as a medium—things that, in time, we'll come to see as parts of the fundamental vocabulary of game design, integral to what the medium is capable of as an art form. The properties I'm describing here can also be found in a handful of other games, which the snob in me would like to call the only games that matter: to wit, Pathologic, Outer Wilds, Rain World, and Kentucky Route Zero. (With maybe else Heart.Break() as a wild card, and Elden Ring as an example of a blockbuster title doing at least some of these things, which is neat.)
This is not a comprehensive survey of techniques that I think will come to define the art of game design. (Pathologic in particular is visionary in ways that nothing else touches; Rain World is a virtuosic masterpiece whose achievements lie in mostly orthogonal directions; et cetera, et cetera.) But Blue Prince perhaps puts more of these things in one place, and in an appealing and accessible package, than I've ever seen before; in doing so, it also demonstrates something that I'm not sure I've seen before, namely that video games have the unique ability to reach artistic heights and complex depths without sacrificing ease of access. Games, as the only genuinely ludic medium we have, are capable of kinds of artistry that other mediums can only feint at. I think that, in Blue Prince, we've seen our best glimpse to date of what the medium can do for us—and, to be embarrassingly grand, how it might speak to the future society we're only on the cusp of creating.
Don't expect the rest of this piece to justify this statement, by the way. We'll have to save that conversation for later too.
Diving in!
Deceptive Scale
Christopher Alexander, in The Nature of Order, says that of the fifteen properties which he thinks define "life-giving" structure, the first and most important is what he calls levels of scale. Architecture creates a relationship between the coziness of human scale and the enormities of the world; so too does great art create a relationship between the personal and the divine, so to speak. And if you think—as I do—that theatre is perhaps the "purest" art form, in terms of how it connects to us and toys with our consciousness, then it's fitting that the essence of drama is the twist, the shift, the reveal: the moment when one scale gives way to another, and we have a brief, cathartic glimpse of reality in all its infinite complication.
The unique space that games occupy might be described as the intersection of architecture and theatre. Namely: games give us spaces whose shapes and sizes we can't clearly see and don't fully understand. Games can deceive us in ways that no other mediums can: we know how long a book or an album or a film is, but a game doesn't have to tell us any more about its shape or size than it thinks we ought to know. (This was the core premise behind Frog Fractions, a seminal game and still one of the most delightful games I've ever played. Check it out.)
Blue Prince has more fun concealing its scale than any other game of its size. What size is that? Very good question! And one I'd rather not answer. I will say that it runs longer than it has any right to, and throws mindbogglingly big new things at you well past the point where you think it's winding down to a close. I've become obsessed with YouTube videos of gamers discovering its final puzzle: they all, to a tee, have the same series of microreactions, culminating in vast, stupefying surprise. There's a several-second period where none of them seem to comprehend what they're looking at, because it seems like there's no possible way for Blue Prince to have hidden something this major from them for this long, and to have hidden it behind such a diabolically intricate series of challenges.
Blue Prince also conceals its own nature as a game, for longer than you'd expect. Yes, one mechanic—the central advertised mechanic—is made clear up front, and is fantastically well-handled. But the game runs so far beyond that mechanic, and uses that system in so many unexpected ways, that the experience most players will remember is only loosely connected to the game that was sold to them to begin with.
The unique space that games occupy might be described as the intersection of architecture and theatre. Namely: games give us spaces whose shapes and sizes we can't clearly see and don't fully understand. Games can deceive us in ways that no other mediums can: we know how long a book or an album or a film is, but a game doesn't have to tell us any more about its shape or size than it thinks we ought to know. (This was the core premise behind Frog Fractions, a seminal game and still one of the most delightful games I've ever played. Check it out.)
Blue Prince has more fun concealing its scale than any other game of its size. What size is that? Very good question! And one I'd rather not answer. I will say that it runs longer than it has any right to, and throws mindbogglingly big new things at you well past the point where you think it's winding down to a close. I've become obsessed with YouTube videos of gamers discovering its final puzzle: they all, to a tee, have the same series of microreactions, culminating in vast, stupefying surprise. There's a several-second period where none of them seem to comprehend what they're looking at, because it seems like there's no possible way for Blue Prince to have hidden something this major from them for this long, and to have hidden it behind such a diabolically intricate series of challenges.
Blue Prince also conceals its own nature as a game, for longer than you'd expect. Yes, one mechanic—the central advertised mechanic—is made clear up front, and is fantastically well-handled. But the game runs so far beyond that mechanic, and uses that system in so many unexpected ways, that the experience most players will remember is only loosely connected to the game that was sold to them to begin with.
Ludic Narrative
For all that Pathologic's narrative is ambitious in ways that no other game's comes close to, perhaps the most miraculous instance of narrative design in the last decade was Outer Wilds, which tells its story in an astonishingly meticulous spiral. Virtually any direction you take, any path you pick, will get you started along the game's narrative. But it works like an optical illusion: any path you take will feel like the exact right beginning to a singularly linear narrative, and it will take you on a winding path towards the game's spectacular climax. Because every location and every clue is linked, in a way that sets you on a certain trajectory—and every trajectory takes you to the same locations in a different order, and lets you solve different puzzles at different times, until every player winds up in the same eventual place.
Blue Prince's narrative structure isn't quite as geometrically perfect as that. But it's sprawling and massive in a way that Outer Wilds' isn't: the same non-linear, play-driven approach to storytelling, rendered at a much greater scale. What's more, Blue Prince incorporates random chance into its storytelling: what you get to see, and what you get to discover, boils down to which rooms you're able to draft within your house, with certain revelations hidden behind much rarer rooms. That's a more impressive accomplishment than it seems: it means Blue Prince has to layer compelling narrative revelations into enough pieces, and enough interconnection between pieces, to guarantee you a satisfying story no matter which parts of it you experience first. It also has to know which things to hold back, and for exactly how long, to keep you on the hook as its story unfolds.
There's a piece to be written about just how much technical trickery Blue Prince undergoes to make this possible: how it shifts the probabilities of players drawing various rooms on a day-by-day, and sometimes a choice-by-choice, basis. But whatever statistical sleight-of-hand was required, it's astonishing that it works: all those calculations and deviations are aimed at giving players a story worth experiencing, one that's simultaneously cozy and seemingly endless.
Blue Prince's narrative structure isn't quite as geometrically perfect as that. But it's sprawling and massive in a way that Outer Wilds' isn't: the same non-linear, play-driven approach to storytelling, rendered at a much greater scale. What's more, Blue Prince incorporates random chance into its storytelling: what you get to see, and what you get to discover, boils down to which rooms you're able to draft within your house, with certain revelations hidden behind much rarer rooms. That's a more impressive accomplishment than it seems: it means Blue Prince has to layer compelling narrative revelations into enough pieces, and enough interconnection between pieces, to guarantee you a satisfying story no matter which parts of it you experience first. It also has to know which things to hold back, and for exactly how long, to keep you on the hook as its story unfolds.
There's a piece to be written about just how much technical trickery Blue Prince undergoes to make this possible: how it shifts the probabilities of players drawing various rooms on a day-by-day, and sometimes a choice-by-choice, basis. But whatever statistical sleight-of-hand was required, it's astonishing that it works: all those calculations and deviations are aimed at giving players a story worth experiencing, one that's simultaneously cozy and seemingly endless.
Static Game Board / Shifting Intent
The central gameplay conceit of Blue Prince is a marvel in and of itself. At first, you're presented with a seemingly straightforward goal: draft rooms in your house that connect in the right order to get you to the Antechamber that lies to the north, and find your way from it into the enigmatic Room 46. But nothing about the game demands that you seek Room 46, just as the properties of Mount Holly's rooms that you care about the most at the start—which directions its doorways point, and what resources they may offer you—will matter less and less as you discover other properties that each room may possess.
While the game board remains somewhat the same—yes, you discover new rooms over time; yes, your access to resources will change—your objectives within the game vary greatly. In a sense, the game board is disconnected from the game itself: in the same way that a deck of cards can be used to play all sorts of different games, Mount Holly can be manipulated to varying ends, each more esoteric and more challenging than the last. Your relationship to the space you occupy and the mechanics that govern it constantly change: you are given reason to see the world you live in from new angles, and to see your purpose within that world in new lights.
Plenty of critics have compared Blue Prince to games like Myst, which is obviously accurate on some levels. (Myst developer Cyan Worlds is explicitly thanked in the game's "end" credits.) But the difference between puzzle games like Myst—or even The Witness, which tries to connect its gameplay conceit to its physical world—is that the ever-unfolding layers of Blue Prince happen within a mostly-static board. New mechanics reveal themselves within environments you're already familiar with. And the word "environments" is misleading there, because it matters that Blue Prince's world is highly mechanical and play-driven: what you're really doing is unfolding new meanings behind the rules of play, and discovering new games that those rules of play allow for.
This disconnect between play and game is a vital part of the medium, in ways we haven't really experienced. Frog Fractions delights in how frequently it throws new modes of play at you, creating a narrative of its play rather than through it. Titanium Court, which remains a masterpiece, similarly throws new interpretations of its own central game board at you, while subverting the meaning of the game you're playing. But Blue Prince goes a step further, creating a game board whose many possible meanings allow many possible games, without straying from its primary mode of play.
While the game board remains somewhat the same—yes, you discover new rooms over time; yes, your access to resources will change—your objectives within the game vary greatly. In a sense, the game board is disconnected from the game itself: in the same way that a deck of cards can be used to play all sorts of different games, Mount Holly can be manipulated to varying ends, each more esoteric and more challenging than the last. Your relationship to the space you occupy and the mechanics that govern it constantly change: you are given reason to see the world you live in from new angles, and to see your purpose within that world in new lights.
Plenty of critics have compared Blue Prince to games like Myst, which is obviously accurate on some levels. (Myst developer Cyan Worlds is explicitly thanked in the game's "end" credits.) But the difference between puzzle games like Myst—or even The Witness, which tries to connect its gameplay conceit to its physical world—is that the ever-unfolding layers of Blue Prince happen within a mostly-static board. New mechanics reveal themselves within environments you're already familiar with. And the word "environments" is misleading there, because it matters that Blue Prince's world is highly mechanical and play-driven: what you're really doing is unfolding new meanings behind the rules of play, and discovering new games that those rules of play allow for.
This disconnect between play and game is a vital part of the medium, in ways we haven't really experienced. Frog Fractions delights in how frequently it throws new modes of play at you, creating a narrative of its play rather than through it. Titanium Court, which remains a masterpiece, similarly throws new interpretations of its own central game board at you, while subverting the meaning of the game you're playing. But Blue Prince goes a step further, creating a game board whose many possible meanings allow many possible games, without straying from its primary mode of play.
"Alphabets" of Play
After completing the first half of Fez—spoilers for a wonderful oldish game incoming, sorry!—the player is given a pair of 3D glasses that let them discover secrets nested in places hidden away from the game's usual forced-2D perspective. Among those secrets is a series of rules that, among other things, reveal a hidden language written across the game's landscapes, which in turn allow the players to alter the world by inputting various button sequences at various points.
Like Blue Prince, Fez introduces one primary mechanic to the player, then introduces a second (decoding language) and a third (secret button presses). But Blue Prince takes this concept even further: there are a variety of ludic concepts layered onto one another, each connected to some kind of discovery that players need to make. The discovery reveals the mechanic, so to speak, and the mechanic in turn reveals the games that can be played with it.
Again, I struggle to talk about aspects of this game without revealing certain late-game elements that are best not hinted at. But there comes a time when these vocabularies of play intersect, and where puzzles are constructed that overlap all of these vocabularies at once. It's a test, not of the player's ability to play, but of the player's understanding of the game. A test, you could say, of how richly they understand the world they're in, one that doubles as a congratulations of sorts, highlighting just how far they've come and just how much they've learned along the way.
It's a different approach to game design: play-as-vocabulary, play-as-terminology. The individual mechanics are just letters in the alphabet. The real play is the eloquence written in and with those letters.
Like Blue Prince, Fez introduces one primary mechanic to the player, then introduces a second (decoding language) and a third (secret button presses). But Blue Prince takes this concept even further: there are a variety of ludic concepts layered onto one another, each connected to some kind of discovery that players need to make. The discovery reveals the mechanic, so to speak, and the mechanic in turn reveals the games that can be played with it.
Again, I struggle to talk about aspects of this game without revealing certain late-game elements that are best not hinted at. But there comes a time when these vocabularies of play intersect, and where puzzles are constructed that overlap all of these vocabularies at once. It's a test, not of the player's ability to play, but of the player's understanding of the game. A test, you could say, of how richly they understand the world they're in, one that doubles as a congratulations of sorts, highlighting just how far they've come and just how much they've learned along the way.
It's a different approach to game design: play-as-vocabulary, play-as-terminology. The individual mechanics are just letters in the alphabet. The real play is the eloquence written in and with those letters.
Relationships With History and Space
The best games in recent memory have involved, not sprawling journeys from level to level, but an unfolding awareness of a singular space. Pathologic was lauded for this two decades ago; Planescape: Torment was lauded for it earlier even than that. More recently, Disco Elysium brought the concept to fruition, with a town whose layers were concealed not only in the enigmas of physical space but in the histories of its citizens, and of the unseen world at large.
While Blue Prince is a bit less dense than Disco Elysium—it relies on epistolary narratives, rather than on interactions with flesh-and-blood individuals—it has a similar understanding of history, and of how history relates to space. The past informs the present; past and present combined suggest a future. Similarly to Disco Elysium, it sees our ignorance of the past as a limitation which keeps us from understanding the present; unlike Disco Elysium, its mechanics specifically revolve around that ignorance, and just-as-specifically bind history to space. Our ignorance of the space we occupy goes hand-in-hand with our ignorance of the past; the process of understanding the world around us is both one of understanding our dwelling in terms of space and time at once.
Where Blue Prince perhaps falls short—as do most games that aren't either Pathologic or something by Jason Rohrer—is that it doesn't incorporate the future into its scope. (Neither does Disco Elysium, for what it's worth: the game waits contentedly for you to progress, rather than turning your rate of progress into a metric that determines how its outcomes unfold.) But that binding of time and space feels new. While its story is in some ways less richly wrought than Pathologic's or Disco's—in part because it relies so much on player inference, and on people connecting literal and figurative dots—I can't think of a game whose gameplay is bound to history this richly or this literally. To learn how to play the game is to learn something of this world's past; to advance in the game is to take true possession of Mount Holly. At first, it seems like a cute children's-story conceit that the game's narrative is about you inheriting your great-uncle's home; towards the end, it feels like that burden of inheritance might be the game's central mechanic after all. You cannot beat the game without accepting the mantle, because the gameplay itself is so bound to the place it's set, and because mastering it requires you to fully inhabit that space.
This is less esoteric than it seems, I suspect. One day, I think we'll come to understand this (as with the other properties here) as a key part of what defines a mature game, and we'll look back on games that lacked this dimension as, not bad necessarily, but perhaps somewhat insubstantial: masterful confections, but relics of an era when the medium hadn't been wholly explored, and still wasn't fully understood.
While Blue Prince is a bit less dense than Disco Elysium—it relies on epistolary narratives, rather than on interactions with flesh-and-blood individuals—it has a similar understanding of history, and of how history relates to space. The past informs the present; past and present combined suggest a future. Similarly to Disco Elysium, it sees our ignorance of the past as a limitation which keeps us from understanding the present; unlike Disco Elysium, its mechanics specifically revolve around that ignorance, and just-as-specifically bind history to space. Our ignorance of the space we occupy goes hand-in-hand with our ignorance of the past; the process of understanding the world around us is both one of understanding our dwelling in terms of space and time at once.
Where Blue Prince perhaps falls short—as do most games that aren't either Pathologic or something by Jason Rohrer—is that it doesn't incorporate the future into its scope. (Neither does Disco Elysium, for what it's worth: the game waits contentedly for you to progress, rather than turning your rate of progress into a metric that determines how its outcomes unfold.) But that binding of time and space feels new. While its story is in some ways less richly wrought than Pathologic's or Disco's—in part because it relies so much on player inference, and on people connecting literal and figurative dots—I can't think of a game whose gameplay is bound to history this richly or this literally. To learn how to play the game is to learn something of this world's past; to advance in the game is to take true possession of Mount Holly. At first, it seems like a cute children's-story conceit that the game's narrative is about you inheriting your great-uncle's home; towards the end, it feels like that burden of inheritance might be the game's central mechanic after all. You cannot beat the game without accepting the mantle, because the gameplay itself is so bound to the place it's set, and because mastering it requires you to fully inhabit that space.
This is less esoteric than it seems, I suspect. One day, I think we'll come to understand this (as with the other properties here) as a key part of what defines a mature game, and we'll look back on games that lacked this dimension as, not bad necessarily, but perhaps somewhat insubstantial: masterful confections, but relics of an era when the medium hadn't been wholly explored, and still wasn't fully understood.