Blue Prince is one of 2025’s first indie breakouts, and for good reason. This is a puzzle roguelite game brimming with mysteries – and by design, no two players are having an identical experience with the game.
Players explore a manor called Mt Holly, and they ‘build’ the layout of the house as they go. Each time they open a door, they select a room type for what’s behind it – like a kitchen, bedroom or dining room, among many others. They gradually assemble the manor on a vast grid, searching for items and currency along the way that’ll help prolong their journey before the protagonist, Simon, calls it a day when he’s tired out.
The twist is, the layout of the manor is always different the next day. There’s no telling which combination of rooms will come up when Simon begins exploring anew.
The goal is to reach a mysterious 46th room, the clues to which are left to the player to find and figure out. Each day is fraught with potential failures: dead end rooms that bring a run screeching to a halt, for example, or too many locked doors without enough keys.
In contrast, success can be measured by players finding a room type they’ve never seen before, a vital piece of information that enables progress, or one of several permanent unlocks that makes exploring the manor a touch easier.
The randomness of which rooms and items come up – the RNG, as it were – is a key factor of why players love it. It’s perhaps its undoing for other, less patient players. There’s no better conversation starter of a game in 2025, as players compare notes on the extremely granular details that could make or break a day of exploring Mt. Holly. Classifying it in terms of genre is strangely tricky.
“Those mechanics came entirely from the world of tabletop and card games”
Tonda Ros
For first-time developer Tonda Ros of Dogubomb, who worked on the game for more than eight years, even calling it a ‘puzzle roguelite’ comes with a lot of baggage. “I find it nearly impossible to describe Blue Prince in genre terms because there are so many built-in preconceptions about each of these terms,” Ros tells GamesIndustry.biz.
“On one hand, I think it’s important that these structures are challenged. Developers shouldn’t feel pressured to include elements in their game just because they are expected in their genre.
“A lot of people talk about Blue Prince as a roguelite, but I had never played a roguelite when I created the game, so for me, those mechanics came entirely from the world of tabletop and card games.”
It’s not just tabletop games that inspired Blue Prince – one section of a cult favourite Squaresoft RPG on the original PlayStation helped form the germ of its core idea.
“Over the years, I’ve played a lot of tile placement games, like Carcassonne, Saboteur, Labyrinth, and Seafarers of Catan, which is my personal favourite,” Ros says. “But, funnily enough, I think it was during a playthrough of Vagrant Story, exploring the Snowfly forest, that I remember that first seed of the idea sprouting. In a lot of ways, that area is similar to the original Zelda’s layout and navigational forest puzzle.”
The Snowfly forest in Vagrant Story is a labyrinth, and still a section that fans complain about on Reddit long after its release. Players can get through it faster if they know exactly where the different routes connect, but navigating it with no guidance is not for the faint of heart.
Ros never had to pitch Blue Prince to publishers, and only approached them once the full game was playable. In an email, he attached some “attractive key art” and offered an invitation to try it out – publisher Raw Fury signed the game. “I always felt strongly that it was a game that speaks for itself.”
Despite there being clear influences on Blue Prince, Ros says he “got really lucky” in how the game ultimately came together.
“I took a lot of disparate ideas for projects I had been working on and combined them all, and found a lot of cool synergy and design interaction that let the game blossom in an original way.
“We are currently in the golden age of indies, and so many people only play AAA games. They are missing out on so many of the best experiences in this medium.”
Tonda Ros
“I say ‘lucky’ because I’m not sure if that process would have a very high success rate if I tried to replicate it. However, I do feel that a lot of game developers should get a little more bold with combining ingredients that don’t normally go together. I think projects are always more interesting when they take chances and explore new territory.”
It’s not unusual for a puzzle-oriented game to take off and find an audience, but the sheer amount of conversation (and guides articles on major websites) that Blue Prince has created is much rarer.
“I think there’s a lot to be said for evangelising thinky games as I think there are a lot of stigmas and misconceptions with puzzles in general, and I would love it if more people went outside of their comfort zone and tried some of the more critically acclaimed titles,” says Ros when asked about the challenges of getting players to pick up puzzle games versus titles in other genres.
“I think the same can be said for indie games as well. We are currently in the golden age of indies, and so many people only play AAA games. They are missing out on so many of the best experiences in this medium.”
Discovering Blue Prince
Blue Prince was one of the demo highlights of June 2024’s Steam Next Fest, giving players a generous four days to explore Mt. Holly, but Ros wasn’t too fixated on the impact of it from a marketing perspective.
“I had never heard of Steam Next Fest before they told me about it, but I have come to understand that it is one of the most impactful things for reaching a wider audience. But to be honest, I mostly ignore metrics and marketing and just let my partners at Raw Fury handle that while I work on the game.”
He found releasing such an expansive demo for Blue Prince benefitted development of the game more directly, however.
“Having thousands of people play the demo certainly helps us to find a lot of corner case bugs that had been overlooked. In a game like Blue Prince, where there are so many different permutations of room and item effects, there are just too many combinations to test on our own.”
Other factors have helped players discover Blue Prince. It’s the second highest-reviewed game of the year so far, according to Metacritic. It also launched on both Game Pass and the Premium tier of PlayStation Plus, galvanising the number of people playing the game out of the gates – though it debuted strongly in sales on Steam, too.
“As a designer I don’t really consider the technical benefits of platforms, so much as I consider Game Pass and Playstation Plus a fantastic opportunity to provide a large number of players an opportunity to discover and play the game,” Ros says.
“I feel the exact same way about accessibility features. We need to figure out ways to lower barriers that might prevent people from being able to experience art. This is something I strongly believe in.”
Getting players to find Mt. Holly hasn’t been a problem for Dogubomb, then. Figuring out where they go once they’re inside there, of course, is another story.
“The game is designed from top to bottom for the curious,” says Ros when asked how he ensured players don’t get too lost in the ever-changing manor.
“I think if you find it fun to explore, theorise, and experiment, then there’s not too much of a risk of just dropping a player into the world without explaining things. I believe those types of players will have a lot of fun figuring out how the world works.”
