Your eccentric relative has died and left you Mount Holly, his 45-room mansion and its surrounding grounds, in his will. There's just one catch: to inherit Mount Holly, you have to explore the mansion and find the 46th room. You can't take anything into or remove anything from the house, and you can't stay inside the building overnight. Still, it's a big house, but not that big. How hard can it be?

Well, the rooms change each day, so... harder than you think.

That's where the roguelike part comes in, by the way. The house is represented by a grid of squares, five across and nine high. The center room at the bottom is always the entrance hall, and the center room at the top is always the "Antechamber", the gateway to the mythical 46th room you're trying to reach. What every other square in the house will be is determined when you open the door leading into it. You get a choice of three rooms to "draft" upon entering each "cell" in the map (hence the pun in the title), drawn from a pool of... I don't know exactly how many, but quite a few possible rooms. Each has its own characteristics and possibilities. It's entirely possible to end up stymied by the layout, left with nothing but dead ends and locked doors that you're out of keys to open with, at which point you have no choice but to call it a day and start over in the morning.

I don't want to give away much more than that--discovering the secrets of this strange house is a big part of the game, after all.

Blue Prince isn't an Early Access title, but it is still under active development, and there are things in the game that are clearly hooks for content that hasn't been added yet, but nothing feels glaringly unfinished and the core gameplay features are all there. It runs nicely on my system, but then there's not a lot of really demanding graphical things going on--the environments are pretty and detailed in an interesting art style, but there's not much happening. It's a puzzle game, not action. Also, despite the slightly spooky atmosphere, it's not a horror game. No danger, and no jumpscares that I've encountered in my five-plus hours.

I like it! It's atmospheric and absorbing, and the roguelike element can be frustrating, but also gives it a lot of... I dunno, playability? Is that a word? The uncertainty keeps it from becoming monotonous in spite of the core mechanic being inherently repetitive. Thirty bucks (US) on Steam.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.