Figure 1: Blue Prince, my current contender for GotY

Figure 1: Blue Prince, my current contender for GotY

Note: I’m going to do my best not to spoil Blue Prince but it’s a hard one to talk around and everyone has a different tolerance for spoilers. If you feel like I’m giving too much away, let me know!

I spent the weekend playing Blue Prince with my kids. And they seem to be enjoying it? They’ve gotten into videogames recently but rarely stray outside of the standard kid’s fare like Minecraft and Mario Kart. I think they like the fact that Blue Prince is cozy and slightly cerebral, even if they don’t quite understand all of the things that are happening or why I might draft one room over another. But in the game, each room is a puzzle or a layer to a puzzle and I love hearing them theorise what each element of the room might be.

(Incidentally, they’ve occasionally been really helpful. There’s a picture on a wall that I just couldn’t figure out. For hours, I kept thinking “Is that Donald Trump??”. And my daughter copped it first time. I’d still be bashing my head against it if it wasn’t for her).

Playing it yesterday with my 7-year-old beside me and I reached a room with a load of things in it that I didn’t understand. “I’m not sure what these are but I’ll bet they’re important”, I said to him. So I grabbed screenshots of all the things, and asked him what he thought they were. And so we came up with a little story of what they were, and then moved onto another thing.

A couple of runs later, we were doing something else in the game and came to a whole new area I’d never visited before. As I was looking around, getting an idea of what I was looking at and I said “does this look kinda familiar?”. And at the exact same time, we both came to the realisation that these were the things we’d been looking at just an hour ago and that I’d screenshotted. The delight on his little face as he realised he’d worked it out was spectacular.

(The other take-away from this is that I have the same mental capabilities of a 7-year-old but let’s just skip over that for now.)

Anyway, Blue Prince is a really great game. But even better if you can play it as a multiplayer experience with two little buddies.