Why Blue Prince, from Dogubomb, is Eurogamer’s 2025 game of the year.
My great aunt lived to be 102, and when she was dying she revealed that she had been married not five times but six. We have no idea who the sixth husband was or where he fit into the Aunt Mickey timeline. I have to assume we’ll never know.
Because of this, Aunt Mickey has been my go-to example, though by no means my only example, of a strange truth about us human beings. It’s this: when we head off, we often leave more questions than answers. Houses are left in a friendly domestic muddle. Paperwork is missing. Phone messages will have to go unanswered. Nameless confidants stare out of forgotten photographs.
This kind of thing has created great fiction: I’m a massive fan of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 which is, allegedly at least, a book about trying to execute a will. And last week I saw Denis Villeneuve’s astonishing moving Incendies, which follows two siblings on a harrowing mission to make sense of their late mother. And it made me realise that there’s another example of this kind of thing and it’s been right in front of me for a year or so. It’s Eurogamer’s Game of the Year. It’s Blue Prince.
It’s fitting that it took me a while to work out what Blue Prince is really about for me – a while to realise that it’s about my great aunt’s sixth husband. This is because Blue Prince is both daringly simple and dizzyingly, migrainiously complex. And yes, I did just come up with migrainiously, but it works for me where no other words will do.
Blue Prince is, at its simplest, a game about exploring a house. It’s a strange house to be sure: each time you reach a doorway, you get a choice of three rooms that could be on the other side. Your job, it seems, is to navigate as much of the house as you can, juggling a handful of in-game resources that allow you to keep adding rooms, or may let you unlock doors or pay for special rooms or things like that. You’re doing all this because the house seems to have 45 rooms, but there is the rumour of a 46th room. What’s inside it? What’s the trick to finding your way there in the first place?
The house, of course, resets every night, which means that you explore as much as you can, hopefully find some new things, and then have to understand that when you’re out of options you’re going to be building a different layout the next time you play.
