LAST EDITED ON Apr-23-25 AT 02:07 AM (EDT)
 
I saw a couple of holos playing this, and was intrigued enough to check it out myself. It's an exploration/puzzle game with a roguelike element to it, and five and a bit hours in, I like it well enough to recommend it if you're into that kind of thing.

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.
-><-
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.

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

>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.

IOW, it's "Winchester Mystery House: The Game."

>>Well, the rooms change each day, so... harder than you think.
>
>>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.
>
>IOW, it's "Winchester Mystery House: The Game."

Yeah, pretty much! Mount Holly's aesthetic is less spooky than the Winchester House's, because Uncle Herbert didn't have Mrs. Winchester's obsession with spiders and the number 13,* but the vibe is pretty similar.

I miss being able to visit the Winchester House. Living not-too-far away from it is one of only a handful of things I miss from my brief and disastrous sojourn in California.

--G.
* seriously, if you didn't know, she prioritized these elements in her decor choices. windows with 13 panes, spider- and spiderweb-themed stained glass, etc. all over the place
-><-
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.

> hence the pun in the title

Holy crap. Even with you saying that it still took me three passes before it parsed correctly. That’s kinda brilliant! I thought it was just a gacha but with cute boys or something! Perhaps the name and marketing was a touch too clever for its own good :3

Too bad about the price, or I’d go for it - I’m especially broke at the moment.

>> hence the pun in the title
>
>Holy crap. Even with you saying that it still took me three passes
>before it parsed correctly. That’s kinda brilliant!

It's more obvious when you're in the game, since a lot of the UI has a distinct architectural flavor to it.

>Too bad about the price, or I’d go for it - I’m especially broke
>at the moment.

Yeah, I got it on sale, but unfortunately the sale had ended by the time I had enough playtime on the game to know it'd be worth posting about. I'd say wishlist it and watch for the next one.

--G.
-><-
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.

Oh, small update on this, I discovered last night that Blue Prince is on Xbox game pass, so hey!

This one was not the run.

This is a good example of how the room selection RNG can screw you, especially when you get a "dead-end rooms spawn more often" debuff early on. I didn't put down any, but they narrowed my other options to the point where I ended up with this closed-off layout after only two ranks. (The outlier is a permanent room you can unlock by finding a Certain Thing.) It's too bad, too, because I had found some cool stuff.

Welp. Tomorrow is another day. Back to the tent to contemplate the vagaries of fate.

--G.
-><-
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.

I've had my eye on this one instead from Northernlion and PatStaresAt. For me it's on the wishlist and I'll snag it at some point during a Steam sale. Some time may also see if the dev adds something to deal with the occasional complaints I've heard of people trying to set up late game combos and just getting RNG locked for days in a row and making no progress.

LAST EDITED ON Apr-26-25 AT 02:06 AM (EDT)
 
>Some time may also see if the dev adds something to deal
>with the occasional complaints I've heard of people trying to set up
>late game combos and just getting RNG locked for days in a row and
>making no progress.

Yeah, I get that. I had an amazing run tonight, with nearly the whole map filled in and a real possibility of unlocking 46, but the drafting choice dead-ended me at the last minute. That's the roguelike life, I guess.

--G.
Fun fact: I got thrown into timeout by the automod for saying that last sentence in chat when something similar happened to Kronii
-><-
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.

And just because I saw this post the other day, and because I watch Cohh, Youtube gave me this gem:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zTGPztMDJdQ

The day I need photoshop to play a game, I think I'll go elsewhere.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The
Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-
Covered Balls!"