Probably-magnificent mystery house puzzler Blue Prince will release in spring 2025
Drafting the room with the release window
Dogubomb’s Blue Prince boasts my favourite shapeshifting house in a video game, which admittedly isn’t setting a very high bar. Perhaps surprisingly, most video game houses do not shapeshift. Despite being made out of pure imagination and carbon emissions, they remain nostalgically shackled to the limitations of brick, mortar and Euclidean geometry. Blue Prince’s abode is different. It is a house made of house. You’ll actually design the layout yourself every time you wander through it, picking from a selection of mismatched room types whenever you open a door.
Each room harbours secrets, and it’s your job to join those secrets up and discover the mysterious 46th room - which, strictly speaking, won’t fit into the floorplan. The only constraint placed upon the house’s werehousian tendencies is your character’s fatigue, which confines you to a certain number of steps each in-game day. You can bend that constraint, however, by means of various room properties and collectible objects. Sound fun? I bring good news, then - Blue Prince is now pegged to release in spring 2025. Here’s a trailer to celebrate.
And here are some piping hot press release bullet points, for people who couldn’t be bothered to click on my preview link, above.
- Draft your journey - Every door can reveal new and exciting chambers that contain their own unique challenges and secrets, as well as offering or taking resources. But choose carefully, for each day the manor’s floor plan resets and the rooms one sees today may not be the same rooms one sees tomorrow.
- Every step counts - Progress each day is shaped by the rooms selected to draft and the tools found within them. Yet, tread wisely – when the floor plan resets at the end of the day, all but the permanent upgrades to the estate blueprint will be lost.
- History in the making - Investigate a past woven with the threads of blackmail, political intrigue, and the mysterious disappearance of a local children’s book author. The deeper one ventures, the more one realizes that the past is closer than it appears.
You can find a Blue Prince demo on Steam. Got you in the mood to read about bizarre virtual domiciles? Well, I recently did a feature on developers recreating and reinventing their own homes in video games. There’s also Building Relationships, in which houses try to seduce one another. And, of course, I’m bound by my RPS blood oath to mention MyHouse.wad.