My great-aunt lived to be 102 years old, and when she died, she said that she had been married not five, but six times. We have no idea who the sixth husband was or where he fit into Aunt Mickey's story. I have to guess we'll never know.
For this reason, Aunt Mickey was my favorite, although not my only, example of the strange truth about us humans. The fact is, when we set out on a journey, we are often left with more questions than answers. The houses were left in friendly domestic disorder. There are no documents. Phone messages will remain unanswered. Nameless confidants look at forgotten photographs.
This sort of thing has given rise to great fiction: I'm a big fan of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which is at least ostensibly a book about trying to carry out a will. And last week I watched Denis Villeneuve's amazingly moving Flame, which tells the story of two siblings who face a harrowing mission to understand their deceased mother. And it made me realize that there was another example of this kind, and it had been right in front of me for a year or so. This is Eurogamer's Game of the Year. This is the Blue Prince.
Manage your cookie settings
It's fitting that it took me a while to understand what The Blue Prince really was to me – a while to realize that it was about my great-aunt's sixth husband. That's because The Blue Prince is both audaciously simple and dizzyingly, migraineically complex. And yes, I just made up migraine, but it works for me where no other words would work.
Blue Prince is, in its simplest form, a game about home exploration. It's a strange house, to be sure: every time you approach the doorway, you're given a choice of three rooms that could be on the other side. Your job seems to be to move around as much of the house as possible, juggling several in-game resources that allow you to add rooms or open doors, pay for special rooms, and the like. You do all this because there are supposedly 45 rooms in the house, but there are rumors that there is a 46th room. What's inside? What's the trick to finding your way there?
The house, of course, is updated every night, meaning you explore as much as possible, hope to find something new, and then have to realize that when you run out of options, the next time you play you'll have to build a different layout. This is where Blue Prince gets some criticism: the random energy is quite strong in the early and mid game. You move around the house, waiting for new rooms to appear or rooms you really need. Sometimes they do and you make a little more progress. Often this doesn't happen and you make no progress at all.
But is this true? Because in many of the rooms of the Blue Prince there are mysteries, both obvious (there will be pipes, valves and all this mist-jazz) and implied. No spoilers for this puzzle. So the game does something pretty bold with randomness and repetition. Sometimes it seems like he's trying to bore and frustrate you so much that your eyes lose focus and then the whole house turns into one of those “Magic Eye” pictures that only reveal their secrets when you look through them. This is an analogy, by the way. I think it's an analogy.
So, as you play and get rooms you don't need, you start to learn what those rooms contain, and then one day, perhaps out of boredom, you start wondering about the harmony between the details in this room and that room. And then you realize that you have reached another level of this devilish game.
It's all great, and if The Blue Prince had been brilliant, it would still be a Game of the Year contender in my opinion. It has that alien logic that underpins the best Zelda puzzles, but here it's extended to an entire changing house and its surroundings. Even if you don't really like Blue Prince, this game can become your companion for weeks and months. I spent two whole weeks thinking about one element of the game and trying to solve its mystery. I spent two whole weeks being distracted by red herrings.
Yeah: everything is good, smart, brilliant and very similar to how they did it. But now I'm forty years old, I feel like the game speaks to me on a deeper level. I felt the same way when I recently read The Picture of Dorian Gray and found, buried among Wilde's slightly irritating maxims, this little stick of dynamite: “The tragedy of old age is not that a man is old, but that he is young.”
Or words to that effect. (I put the book down somewhere and can't find it.) But anyway, if that sentence feels like a boot in your stomach, then you're probably at that point in your life where The Blue Prince isn't just an amazing puzzle game—as if that were easy. It's an exploration of deeper, darker, more human things.
From this point of view, The Blue Prince is an absence. It's about what goes away when you go and what you leave behind for the people you love. Understanding the mystery of the Blue Prince is not just about finding this or that room or solving a number of clever puzzles. Understanding this means piecing together the world, fears, politics and life experiences of the people who spent time in this place and trying to understand what happened to them and why. And you do this by going through what they left for you, through what they didn't realize they left for you. Wills, letters, clippings and picture cards, as well as things they kept under lock and key, the way they liked to hide or hide things, and things they may have hoped few people would find.
I'm not yet fifty, but I'm already thinking about it. How can I leave behind as little clutter and confusion as possible when I leave? How can I allow the people I love to get what Friends called closure as painlessly as possible?
And yes, I know: you came to read about our Game of the Year, and here is all this rather sober nonsense. But I think that's what I like most about Blue Prince. It's a reminder that games can explore any subject and connect to any memory. It's a reminder that even the most brilliant and universal ideas can still leave you with something personal. Happy New Year and all the best for 2026.
This article is the latest in our final Games of 2025 series, where we highlight great moments, great games, and our personal favorites of the year. You can read more in our Hub “Games 2025”. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!
