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. This is where Blue Prince picks up a bit of criticism: the random energy is rather strong in the early and mid-section of the game. You’re moving through the house, waiting for new rooms to show up, or rooms that you’re really after. Sometimes they do and you make a little more progress. Often they don’t, and you don’t make any progress at all.
But is that true? Because a lot of Blue Prince’s rooms have puzzles, both explicit – there will be pipes and valves and all that Myst jazz – and implied. No spoilers from me as to this kind of puzzle. So the game’s doing something fairly daring with the randomness and the repetition. It feels, at times, like it’s trying to get you so bored and frustrated that your eyes go out of focus and then the whole house becomes one of those Magic Eye pictures that reveals its secrets only when you’re staring through it. This is an analogy, by the way. I think it’s an analogy.
So as you’re playing and getting rooms you don’t want, you’re starting to learn what those rooms contain, and then one day maybe, bored out of your mind, you start to ponder harmonies between detailings in this room and that room. And then you realise you’ve found your way into another level of this fiendish game.
All of this is brilliant, and if Blue Prince was merely brilliant, it would still be a Game of the Year contender, if you ask me. It has the kind of alien logic that powers the best Zelda puzzles, but here it’s expanded across a whole shifting house and its surroundings. Even if you don’t really click with Blue Prince, it can be a game that becomes a companion to you for weeks and months. I’ve spent actual fortnights thinking about a single element of the game and trying to unpuzzle it. I’ve spent actual fortnights distracted by red herrings.
Yep: all good, and clever, and ingenious, and very much a how-did-they-do-this kind of thing. But I’m of a certain age now – late forties – where I feel like the game is speaking to me on a deeper level. It’s the same thing I get when I read A Picture of Dorian Gray recently and found, buried in all the slightly annoying Wildean maxims, this little stick of dynamite: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young.”
Or words to that effect. (I have put the book down somewhere and I can’t locate it.) But anyway, if that sentence feels like a boot in the stomach, then you’re probably at the point in your life where Blue Prince is not just an astonishing puzzle game – as if that would be a simple thing to be. It’s a study in deeper, darker, more human stuff.
Through this lens, Blue Prince is all about absence. It’s about what goes when you go, and what you leave behind for the people you love. To understand the secret of Blue Prince is not just to find this room or that room or solve any number of ingenious puzzles. To understand it is to put back together the world and the fears and the politics and the lived experience of the people who spent time in this place, and to try and make sense of what happened to them and why. And you do that by going through the things they left for you, the things they didn’t realise they left for you. The wills and the letters and the cuttings and the picture postcards, but also the stuff they kept locked away, the way they liked to hide or obscure things, and the stuff they possibly hoped that few people would find.
I’m not yet fifty, but I’m thinking about some of this stuff already. How can I leave as little mess and confusion behind when I go? How can I allow the people I love to get what Friends used to call 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 chilly sober stuff. But that’s what I love the most about Blue Prince, I think. It’s a reminder that games can explore any kind of subjects, and they can connect with any kind of memories. It’s a reminder that the most openly brilliant and universal of ideas can still leave you with something that feels personal. Happy new year, and all the best for 2026.
This article is the last of our end-of-year series, Games of 2025, where we talk about great moments, great games, and our personal favourites of the year. You can read more in our Games of 2025 hub. Thank you for reading, and happy new year!
