Blue Prince

The player takes the role of Simon P. Jones, who has been willed the Mt. Holly Estate, a mansion owned by his deceased great uncle Herbert S. Sinclair. The one stipulation in Herbert's will is that Simon must locate a hidden 46th room within the mansion in order to secure his inheritance. Failure to reach that room within the span of a single day means Simon must start the search fresh the next day, as the house's architecture is rearranged overnight. While discovering the 46th room is the primary goal of the game, there are other mysteries that the player can discover related to the mansion, such as the disappearance of children's author Marion Marigold. The mansion is represented by a grid of 45 room tiles, nine rows by five. Only two rooms persist in the same locations every day: the Entrance Hall where the player starts, and the Antechamber that leads to the 46th room on the opposite side of the map. Upon opening a door to a new room, the player is prompted to draft that room by choosing one of three randomly selected floor plans to place in the adjacent space. The doors and walls of the new room do not necessarily need to align with already-placed rooms' existing doors, but failure to align them results in blocked, unusable doors. Many potential rooms are dead-ends. These are sometimes still desirable, offering rewards for constructing them. Traversing from one room into another costs one "step". The player begins each day with 50 steps, but can replenish them by eating food items and entering bedrooms. Once the player exhausts their steps or otherwise finds they cannot progress further, they are forced to leave the mansion for the night and abandon all objects they have collected. There are means to retain items between runs, as well as gain permanent upgrades that provide extra steps, gems, or coins at the start of a run. The player also retains knowledge of the larger puzzles in the mansion, and is encouraged to take notes. Once the player has successfully reached the 46th room for the first time, they unlock challenges for future runs, and can collect trophies to denote completed challenges. == Plot ==

The game begins with Simon P. Jones arriving at Mt. Holly Estate, where he has set up a camping tent outdoors. Though not explicitly told to the player, the estate is located in the realm of Fenn Aries, one of numerous city-states on the low fantasy, parallel universe planet of Mora. While superficially similar to Earth, major differences in technology include commonplace use of airships as transport, and a building technique called "drafting" that is able to materialize and disintegrate individual rooms on a space-time level. As Simon traverses the estate, he is able to view various clues to the world's history. While censored in its typical form, a secret original copy of a history book explains the realm's past: the formerly peaceful realm of Orinda Aries, named after that world's paragon, or angel, of royalty, was overthrown by an uprising — the Fennsurrection — led by nobles from the cities of Fenn and Oris who opposed King Desilets III's generosity towards commoners. After the War of Ruin, the highly unpopular Desilets IV was forced into exile, and the traitorous General Teskin set up an authoritarian regime under the name of Fenn Aries. The original black color of the Orinda Aries sigil was changed to red. This in turn provides a basis for solving the disappearance of Simon's mother, the children's book writer Mary Jones, who wrote under the pen name Marion Marigold. Angered by the government's oppression, including its censorship of The Red Prince, a book about Simon's childhood obsession with the color red whose ending of him seeing the blue sky was deemed a political statement - Mary joined the Children of Black Water, an Orinda Aries restorationist resistance group. After stealing the ruby crown of Orinda Aries in a major heist, she fled the country, hoping that Simon would discover the clues one day. Sinclair was an accomplice in the heist, and was later blackmailed by the estate's disgruntled gardener, Denny Revane, using stolen letters from Room 46. Reaching the antechamber to the 46th room allows Simon to access the estate's inner sanctum, which contains remnants of a mining operation that stumbled upon ancient Castle Orindia, the original capitol of Orinda Aries. Simon also realizes that the 46th room contains the stolen crown, though the rubies have been replaced with sapphires, making it the Crown of the Blueprints. Using the crown and other items, Simon can reclaim the original Orinda Aries throne by drafting the castle's throne room, making him the eponymous "Blue Prince". He can subsequently go on to find the secret will of the manor's original designer, Baroness Auravei. ==Development==

2026 Blue Prince was primarily developed by Tonda Ros. Prior to development he had frequently held annual gatherings for his friends at different rental vacation homes, spending time to devise a puzzle game spanning the home based on ideas in the 1992 board game Jewels in the Attic. After playing through the games Gone Home and The Witness, Ros became inspired to test ideas with the Unity game engine, finding development would be easier than he originally thought. Maze had intrigued Ros in his youth, and he considered it a predecessor to modern day first person adventure games. Ros was able to find an online Maze group and through them contacted and commissioned Manson to develop art and one of the puzzles within Blue Prince. Other puzzles in the game were inspired by those of Martin Gardner and Raymond Smullyan. While the game was mostly developed as a one-person project, Ros also commissioned work from others, including art director Davide Pellino and the jazz duo Trigg & Gusset, to help with the atmosphere of the game. ==Reception==

Blue Prince received "critical acclaim" from critics for the PC and Xbox Series X/S versions, while the PlayStation 5 version received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 95% of critics recommend the game. Giovanni Colantonio, also for Polygon, said that because the game only provided support for the English language, the game would have a difficult time competing in The Game Awards, due to the awards' international jury. Ros acknowledged that it would be near-impossible for his team to provide all the necessary translations, in part because several of the puzzles are based on the English language or use clues from texts in their original language, and that it would take years to complete a minimal set of localizations, equating the task to "creating a second game". Accolades The game was selected by Eurogamer, The Guardian, and Polygon as their Game of the Year. ==References==