Tonda Ros’ Blue Prince is one of the best puzzle games I have ever played, and a big part of WHY it’s so good comes from the game’s depth. In an interview with Nick Calandra of Second Wind, recorded a few days before the game came out, Ros spoke about how he spent eight years developing Blue Prince, and that “If anything has cooked long enough, this certainly has.” Ros’ ability (which stemmed from a successful Hollywood career pre-Blue Prince’s development) to work continuously and quietly on the game for nearly a decade meant that it could be exactly as layered as he wanted it to be, and, as it turns out, he wanted layers to rival the Watkins Co..
I want to talk a bit about some specific moments in Blue Prince, but to do so will inevitably spoil parts of the experience if you have not played it yourself. All the information under this paragraph will contain Blue Prince puzzle solutions, including what may be some big reveals depending on what you’ve uncovered. If you are currently playing Blue Prince and have already reached Room 46, and kept going after you rolled credits, you may be safe. Everyone else should leave now, unless you just want to read about the game and not play it yourself (like I do with every MMO) or unless you just don’t care about spoilers. I’ll try not to get too much into the plot stuff, if only because I really want people to uncover the family secrets themselves and definitely not because I’m confused about anything. Everything else is on the table, so be warned.
Blue Prince Day-to-Date Conversion
Oh, before I forget, I wanted to mention that I made a Blue Prince Date Calculator, which you can try out for yourself with that link. All you have to do is put in what day you are currently on in Blue Prince and it will tell you what the date is in the game, up to Day 999. Just something to make it a little easier when figuring out some of the later puzzles. Made it for myself, but feel free to use it if you need it. Okay, now let’s get started for real.
Blue Prince Safe Codes
The key(s) to solving the safe codes in Blue Prince are all excellently interwoven, and it’s fantastic how nearly all of them appear to be solvable in multiple ways. Let’s talk specifically about the safe in the Drafting Room (the first keycode-based safe I solved) and the safe in the Drawing Room (which I solved this morning). Now, in the Drafting Room, there’s a tiny little model of the study with a little safe, and if you bring a magnifying glass you can interact with the safe’s buttons.
Really trying to ease into the spoilers here, but we can’t not talk about Blue Prince’s painting puzzle when discussing safes. Almost all of the rooms in the manor have two paintings, and if you record which letter is missing from the pair of paintings and arrange them in a grid formation to match the manor’s potential floorplan, you get an important clue: “If we count small gates, eight dates crack eight safes.” In the Drafting room, there’s a calendar which marks Nov. 7th, Day 1 on the Blue Prince timeline. Above the dates on that calendar, there’s a picture of apple trees surrounded by fences, and on those fences are a number of gates.
This is perhaps the most in-your-face application of the hint, but it’s far from the only one. Let’s take that same clue over to the Drawing Room puzzle in Blue Prince, where the hidden safe is in a room with no mention of a time of year and no gates. Instead, it’s a bunch of pictures of people walking. I spent hours in this room staring at the paintings, wondering if perhaps some combination of the people and animals depicted were supposed to mean something. I talked to a friend who was also playing and he said “Count the guys and gals,” but I did and that did nothing.
Of course, it did nothing because I was counting the wrong guys and gals. The revelation came to me just this morning, prompted by hearing my wife say “She has a very elegant gait,” while watching television. Every painting in the Drawing Room had lines depicting how short or long the legs of each creature depicted were spread. “If we count small gaits.” I took the clue of “guys and gals” from my friend, combined it with this idea, and the safe opened.
The thing is, my friend hasn’t solved Blue Prince’s art puzzle yet. He hasn’t made it to Room 46 yet, hasn’t seen half the rooms I have, hasn’t even drafted a Drafting Studio room. He doesn’t have the clue about gates and dates that I do, and he doesn’t need it. That safe in the Boudoir? He solved it before I did, because I was overthinking the hint and looking for something relevant to “gates” in the room. I’m down here opening chests at the bottom of the reservoir, and he knows more about the characters than I do.
Blue Prince’s Parlor Game Puzzle
One box always lies, one box always tells the truth. There’s also a third box which could go either way. This is ingrained from very early on. Something else you learn early on is that blue memos in Blue Prince are true and red memos are lies. However, there are also green memos. What about a memo that’s being held in a black-and-white photograph? What about a whole room full of memos with all of them contradicting each other?
It’s ridiculous how all the puzzles in Blue Prince are able to tie in to each other in such organic and interesting ways, and it’s something that is only possible because of the development time invested. So often in a good game’s development things are cut for time or budgetary reasons, but Tonda Ros was pressed for neither time nor money while making Blue Prince. And because the game continues to reward this lateral thinking, because every smart guess leads to both physical boons and additional information, it feels like nothing is off the table. In a world where “count small gates” can also mean “the amount of people who take short steps,” what does it mean when a green memo says “There are 12 major keys”? Like, for doors, or for pianos? Both? Some secret, third thing? What about when you learn about the man named Count Isaac Gates?
Is there anything going on with the chess pieces all over the manor? Yes, of course there is. Do those stained glass windows mean anything? Obviously. Is the fact that “45292” is written in the same colors as Blue Prince’s Billiard Room maths puzzle significant? IT SURE SEEMS LIKE IT SHOULD BE BUT IF YOU SOLVE THE EQUATION IT EQUALS ZERO HELP ME I AM GOING INSANE—
Everyone who I have spoken to has had Blue Prince unfold around them differently, and it’s a testament to the game’s design that very rarely does “breaking” a puzzle sequence feel like a bad thing. Because there are so few concrete rewards, because so often you are earning information and inspiration along with your permanent upgrades, you can jump into nearly any puzzle at any point and not lose any of that sense of wonder or excitement as you unfold the mysteries on either end. I say nearly for a reason, however.
Blue Prince Music Sheets
I’m pretty sure there’s another use for these that I haven’t discovered yet, but there’s one puzzle concerning the music sheets in Blue Prince that I accidentally discovered out of order. If you follow the bolded words on the music sheets marked 1-8, you will get “first words on the sheets are true message.” If you then go back through the sheets (and if you didn’t screenshot them or write it all down, have fun finding all eight again) and look at the first words, you’ll find that putting them all together reads “find among the white trees ____ ____ stones.”
There’s two words missing from that sentence because I stopped jotting them down in my notes after I learned the next word was “trees”. I had solved this puzzle already. I knew what was among the white trees next to some stones, or under two stones or whatever it might say. I know this because, the very first time I got the shovel as an item in Blue Prince, video game instinct told me to go outside and find something to dig up in the yard. It was pure, dumb luck that I found the right place, but I did. That was around Day 2 or Day 3, and in the middle of decoding the music sheet puzzle on Day 50-something I let out a long, frustrated sigh as I realized what was happening.
Even so, I don’t think I’ve learned everything I can from the music sheets, I’ve just noticed the most obvious clues. I’m on Day 83 currently1 and there are a lot of things I still don’t know if I know. I don’t know the Admin Password for Blackbridge, I literally just found my first Sanctum key this morning (time to dive into the glyph book), and I think I can thaw out the Freezer if I put it next to a Furnace, but that’s just a working theory at the moment, I haven’t had a chance to test it out yet. It was disappointing to solve the puzzle on Blue Prince’s music sheets only to realize I already had the prize, but the fact that this has only happened ONCE after 60 hours of playtime, with this amount of interlocking layers, is astonishing.
I could talk about Blue Prince for hours, and I plan on filming an even more spoiler-filled conversation about it once my friend rolls credits. Playing it these past few weeks has been one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have seen some backlash on the internet over the randomness and how “sometimes you’re just screwed” in a run, but I feel like those people are approaching the game with the wrong mentality. It’s not a race to reach Room 46, and if you treat it like that you are going to have a bad time. You won’t master the game out of the box, and it’s not a roguelite deck-builder like Slay the Spire, where every time you are doing your best to make it to the end. It’s roguelite Myst — just grab a notebook, a cup of coffee, and maybe a calculator, and settle in.
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:
- [READ] Painting as a Pastime by Winston S. Churchill
- [EDIT: FRIDAY, APRIL 18] Hi, it’s me, a few days after writing this column. I’m farther in now, so if you just clicked this out of curiosity, go back and finish the article first. Then scroll down.
Okay, so I’ve gotten two Sanctuary keys now and solved one of the rune puzzles. Stupidly, because I know the law of 8’s we’re working with, I opened the last door first and have absolutely no idea currently what sigil the diamond represents, but I have noticed the clues on the fireplace in Room 46. I used my second key to open the first door, which made a lot more sense. Seriously, how nice is it for fluff text to actually be puzzle-relevant literally all of the time? Also, opening that red door in the basement leads to an area ABOVE the gear room? Wild stuff. Love this game.
[EDIT: SATURDAY, APRIL 19] Jesus Christ, there’s more. Are we actually going to go to this blasted train station?
[EDIT: SUNDAY, APRIL 20] wild guttural screams as they lower my body inside the life-size Mora Jai coffin ↩︎
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