The mystery house, in which players explore a sprawling residence in search of secrets, is one of the richest themes in video games. Standouts across several genres include Resident Evil, Gone Home, Castlevania and What Remains of Edith Finch.
It is an approach that began in 1980 with a game titled Mystery House, the debut of the influential designer Roberta Williams as well as the first adventure game with graphics. And it gets an ingenious entry this week in Blue Prince, which is enthralling critics with its layers of interlocking puzzles: logic riddles, word games, math problems and many codes and passwords.
The puzzles in Blue Prince start with its title, a play on words that takes on increasing significance as you unravel its story, a timely parable of the price of dissent under autocratic rule. Even when the credits roll — like in last year’s indie hit Animal Well — you realize you are just getting started. There are many more secrets left within its walls.
Mystery house games captivate players because they are about “the enchantment of an everyday home space,” said Melissa Kagen, who wrote the book “Wandering Games.”
“What if the kitchen were not just a kitchen?” she said. “What if there were secret passageways out of the kitchen into some other world that only you were going to be able to find?”
In Blue Prince, which is available on the PC PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S and PC, you are poised to inherit an eccentric 45-room manor from your great-uncle, the Baron Sinclair, if you can prove yourself by locating its rumored 46th room. Complicating the assignment is that the manor’s layout changes each day, but some is within your control: Each time you open a door, you may choose one of three rooms it leads into.
At first you find ordinary chambers like the hallway or the den; deeper inside you begin to uncover tantalizing rarities like the clock tower and the secret garden. Keys, of course, are essential for further progress, as are a variety of other tools and mechanisms that layer more complexity and mystery into each attempt. (Some of the game’s brainteasers were inspired by the works of the mathematician-magician-philosophers Martin Gardner and Raymond Smullyan.)
“The game is pretty deceptive about its size,” admits its creator, Tonda Ros. He added, “We’re letting the player discover, which is really my favorite type of thing.”
Blue Prince is so fully realized and tightly constructed that it is surprising to learn that it is Ros’s first video game. “When I started, I didn’t even intend to make a game,” he said. “I just wanted to explore the technology.” But within 24 hours, he had started making Blue Prince. Three months later he had a full prototype. “I thought, ‘OK, another six months to polish and I’ll be done.’”
That was in 2016.
Ros had been working as a commercial director but dropped everything to focus on the ever-expanding Blue Prince. He mostly worked solo, although important collaborators such as the visual artist Davide Pellino and the jazz duo Trigg & Gusset helped create the game’s distinct atmosphere.
Ros’s immediate mastery of the form makes a bit more sense when you learn that he has long had a hobby of designing puzzles for his friends, for whom he hosts a semiregular gaming getaway. Inspired by the 1992 board game Jewels in the Attic, which is designed to be played across an entire house, Ros has spent months concocting an elaborate, site-specific multiroom experience for whichever Airbnb he had booked.
But Blue Prince’s biggest inspiration, Ros said, is a different kind of domestic game, a genre of illustrated book known as the “armchair treasure hunt” that asks readers to solve a maddeningly cryptic puzzle to win a real-world prize. The first, in 1979, was “Masquerade,” by Kit Williams, but the main influence on Blue Prince was “Maze,” by Christopher Manson, whom Ros commissioned to create a special puzzle hidden deep within the manor.
In a complex game like Blue Prince, Kagen said, it is tempting to identify actions that actually alter the game space, like selecting the next room, as the central mechanics. But in mystery houses, the most important mechanic is comprehension. Blue Prince, she said, reminds her of the House of Eternal Return, a permanent installation in Santa Fe, N.M., by the art collective Meow Wolf.
“It’s a big old Victorian mansion, and it seems just like a house,” she said. “But then you open the refrigerator door, and there’s a sliding passageway into an alien planet.” When you start to understand, doors will open to rooms that were never before possible.
