I've never felt more at home than in the labyrinths of Blue Prince

Estate of change

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You are standing in the Dark Room, pockets full of gems and keys, eyeing up the eastward door. The three silhouetted templates on your drafting screen all seem equally unpromising. You go for broke and pick the one on the left. Ah nuts, you’ve drawn the Videogame Journalist’s Bedroom. It contains nothing save rotten coils of USB cables, the stink of bad coffee, and a single active computer screen, displaying a just-written article about an esoteric strategy puzzler.

Which strategy puzzler? The one that rhymes with “blueprints”, of course.

Edwin: While you could write heaps about its occult architectural logic, the thing I cherish most about Blue Prince is the calm. I step into the Den and spend a few minutes by the fireplace, listening to the clock and studying the single gem idly abandoned on the coffee table. I head into the light and elegance of the Drawing Room and straighten my back to drink in the pictures ranged along the ceiling.

I stride along the Veranda, sniffing the verdant air. Then I accidentally draw the Weight Room and my pittance of footsteps is halved. I approach another door and wearily gauge the likelihood of drawing a Master Bedroom where I can salvage the remains of the day.

That describes the early to midgame experience of rambling through the manor, anyway – discovering new rooms, trying out different combinations, and letting the larger riddles coalesce in your mind. The limit on how many rooms you can enter per day encourages method, but not urgency, and the game’s shapeshifting house is marvellous whatever you make of it – a place of softly eldritch textures and tidal bricabrac, a building to rummage through in your slippers, trying to find the room with your favourite armchair.

Later, the strategy element kicks in with a vengeance and you push harder against the game’s randomisation elements, identifying ways you can skew the odds by means of items, outer room modifiers, and devious bits of room placement. I’m in two minds whether the early game or the late game are more entertaining. I know many of you found the randomisation frustrating, once you’d clocked the path to a solution. Myself, I just really hate the Boiler Room.

Still, Blue Prince is hardly a dice-roller on par with a predatory gacha game, and some of the lategame puzzles are exhilarating to crack - proper "multiple exclamation marks" in notebook stuff - even if it might take you a few tries to plot a path to victory. More shapeshifting house games, sez I.