Blue Prince’s final puzzle is impossible to solve

The Game Awards announced its 2025 nominees for Game of the Year on Monday, and while it’s safe to say that 2025 will go down as a banner year, there was one glaring omission. Like many fans of puzzle games, I raised an eyebrow at Blue Prince’s absence from the list. Back in March, I started my adventure through Mt. Holly estate. I explored every room, scrutinized each miniscule detail, reached the alluring Room 46, and the next thing I knew, it was already late April (in the real world, not in-game).

Blue Prince was able to grab hold of all of my free time in a death grip without the slightest hint of letting go — not just for me, but for a wide range of fans — so to see it not receive a nomination for top honors was puzzling. I recognize that I am a bit biased here. Blue Prince mashes multiple game genres that I love into one delectable course — a dish consisting of some of my favorite tastes and ingredients. But the restaurant that is The Game Awards is globally renowned. Its critics and diners come from all over the world, and as much as I hope to look around the room to see everyone enjoying the same dish as me, I can see that everyone is dining on some fine French cuisine just about now. There’s a clear reason for this: While other dishes were written in multiple languages on the menu, it seemed that my blue-hued dish only appeared in English, effectively spiking its chances amid a global nominating body.

A day after The Game Awards’ nominees were announced, I caught up with Tonda Ros, the mastermind behind Blue Prince, in a video call.

“I knew releasing the game early that I’d have no idea what the rest of the year held,” Ros said. “I always assumed there’d be some really heavy hitting AAA games that would eventually hit as they often do, and I’m just glad that it was instead the heavy-hitting indie games. I was fine with Hades 2 and Silksong knowing, if I’m going to be trounced out of the category, at least we’re going to have multiple games of indie representation, which is cool.”

Image: Dogubomb/Raw Fury via Polygon

However, there was another puzzle that hindered Blue Prince’s odds: localization. When discussing the herculean task of localizing a game whose puzzles are often based on English language wordplay, Ros told me “there are certainly no concrete plans because it is largely considered near impossible,” but it’s a challenge that he thinks he could undertake. The only downside is the obscene amount of time it would take.

He related it to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1997 novel Le Ton beau de Marot. In the novel, Hofstadter, an American Pulitzer Prize-winning computer scientist, details his difficult expedition to translate French poetry with heavy emphasis on Clemént Marot’s “A une Damoyselle mallade.” Translating a poem nowadays may seem easy, with tools like Google Translate widely available, but a lot is lost in the process of using a machine to do the work. At the click of a button, you might end up with a translation, but you’ll lose the rhythmic structure, the rhyming couplets, the stressed syllables, and the poem’s true feeling.

Blue Prince itself is not a poem in the typical sense, but its puzzles and riddles follow a similar vein. As you explore the Mt. Holly estate, you’ll find that each room has a pair of paintings. If you’ve visited the Study, you’ll realize that these pictures depict minimal pairs, which are two words that differ by one letter. As an example, in the Entrance Hall, the two paintings each show a hand holding a playing card — one with a queen and the other with an ace. Now, of course “queen” and “ace” are not one letter apart, so you’ll need to interpret the images a little differently. We know that the queen is also a “face” card, which is one letter away from “ace” — forming a minimal pair.

Image: Dogubomb/Raw Fury via Polygon

Translating all 45 pairs is doable, but in doing so, you’ll lose the number of letters in each word, the similarity between each word, the associated imagery, and, of course, the puzzle’s ultimate solution. Localization is still plausible, but to put things in perspective, “A une Damoyselle mallade” is made up of 28 lines, with each line featuring three syllables, and it took Hofstadter years to land on a revision that was satisfactory. If Ros were to follow in Hofstadter’s footsteps, who knows just how long it could take.

It’s still something that Ros wants to do. “It’s a tough decision to let Blue Prince be discoverable by more people, but potentially risk burning out myself and/or giving up making a whole nother game,” he said. As Blue Prince took over eight years to create, localization may very well take literal years to complete. Ros equated it to “creating a second game” — or, in other words, essentially making Blue Prince 2.

Unfortunately for Blue Prince fans, neither localization nor a sequel are in the picture, but there is potential for the Blue Prince universe to grow. “I want all my projects to be able to stand up on their own and be unique things,” he said. “That’s just the type of sequels that I like. I like Myst followed by Riven, not Myst 2.”

Ros told me, though, that “there will not be a direct sequel to Blue Prince. There might be a game set in that universe, but I can’t even say it likely will be in the same genre.” As Blue Prince was a genre-defying and one-of-a-kind experience, he wants to continue creating games that no one has seen before. Whatever the next endeavor may be, he reassured me that “it would take as many risks as Blue Prince took.”