Blue Prince is the puzzle sensation that’staken the world by surprise, a genre-bending mix of roguelikes and environmental puzzles to a degree that’s hard to perfectly explain.
Through the simple act of drafting blueprints in a shifting manor, you uncover all manner of secrets, both pushing progression forward and revealing the story. And you thought just redecorating the living room was rewarding!
10 Most Obtuse Video Game Puzzles Ever
These puzzles don’t simply scratch your brain, but completely scrambles it.
Given how Blue Prince’s precise mixture of genres and gameplay elements is so unique, it can be tricky to find an exact existing match.
However, if you broaden your scope a bit, there’s actually quite a few games with at least a few of the same ingredients, whether it be an emphasis on environmental puzzles or a looping, roguelike framework. Out of those, these are the 10 that’ll really scratch that intellectual itch.
10Lorelei And The Laser Eyes
Look With Your Special Eyes
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Something of a requirement for success in puzzle games like Blue Prince is the ability to see through circumstances that appear impossible or confusing to find the kernel of sense within. If you want a weird game that’ll test the limits of your perception, tryLorelei and the Laser Eyes.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an exceptionally strange game, whereina young woman is brought to an old mansion to complete some manner of unspecified project. As she enters the manor and begins solving its many puzzles, things only start to get stranger and more abstract, the point where reality itself may start to break down.
Acommonality between Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Blue Princeis nonlinearity. Due to the former’s basic game design and the latter’s roguelike elements, you’ll often find yourself completing puzzles in whatever order you find them in, as opposed to needing to tackle them one after the other.
9The Forgotten City
A Game Of Social Deduction
The Forgotten City
The common interpretation of “the Golden Rule” is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In The Forgotten City, that rule is modified into a slightly more extreme variant, “the many shall suffer the sins of the one.” You’ll have to put that noodle to work if you don’t want to suffer for some jerk’s misdeeds.
The Forgotten City isa mystery and deduction game where you’re spirited away to an ancient Greek city. If anyone does anything considered morally wrong, the whole city’s populace gets punished, and your only escape is a time loop. To solve the mystery, you’ll need to talk to everyone, remember individual schedules, and run interference to prevent any errant sinning.
While it’s a different kind of puzzle to Blue Prince, it’s also a game that encourages out-of-the-box thinking, and may also benefit fromhaving a pencil and a piece of scratch paper handy.
8Outer Wilds
Find Clues On Another Planet
Outer Wilds
Speaking of time loops and puzzles, perhaps the most well-known game to contain instances of both is the critically-acclaimedOuter Wilds. If you fancy yourself skilled at spotting the many minute details of Blue Prince’s puzzles, let’s see how good you are at carting clues around an entire solar system.
In Outer Wilds, you’ve only got a brief window before the sun at the center of your solar system goes supernova andsends you back through a time loop. In that time, you’ll need tocarefully pilot your ship around the system’s planets to uncover the remnants of a lost civilizationand decode the breadcrumbs to a cosmic revelation that they left behind.
Neither Outer Wilds nor Blue Prince are games that will hold your hand through the puzzle-solving process. There are no hints, no difficulty settings; you either figure it out or you don’t. The difference with Outer Wilds is that you’re under a constant time constraint.
7The 7th Guest
Another Mansion, But Spookier
Release Date
April 28th, 1993
PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch
Adventure, Puzzle
1993 was a good year for video games in general, and especially puzzle adventure games. It saw the release of classics like Sam & Max Hit the Road, Return to Zork, and of course, the spooky vibes of The 7th Guest.
As an amnesiac hero finding themselves in a seemingly abandoned mansion, you’re guided along by the spirits of departed party guests to figure out what happened. Nearly every one of the mansion’s rooms has some manner of logic puzzle to solve, with each success gradually unraveling this supernatural mystery party.
The 7th Guest is like Blue Prince without the roguelike element, and maybe with a coat of spooky wallpaper. In lieu of randomness, it hits you with puzzles and capers one after the other to challenge your deduction skills.
6The Witness
The (Il)logical Approach
The Witness
One of Blue Prince’s big appeals is the quantity and quality of backstory and intrigue you can find between and during its puzzles. Sometimes, though, a puzzle doesn’t need much in the way of set dressing. If you want more puzzle and less narrative, that’s a job forThe Witness.
The Witness has very little story, at least overtly. You’re on an island, there are over 500 puzzles, solve ‘em. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. While many of these puzzles have some similarities, each of them also tweaks established formulas in manners both subtle and overt, so you’re never quite solving the same puzzle twice.
Set dressing aside,The Witness shares some puzzle DNA with Blue Prince, employing a healthy dose of elements like pattern recognition and logical deduction. If you’ve got an eye for detail, these are both games you can beat.
5Loop Hero
Never Quite The Same
A wise man once said that stories change when you read them twice. You notice new elements, interpret events differently, and walk away with a unique experience. Roguelike games are kind of like that too, and much like Blue Prince,Loop Herochanges its tune at the start of every fresh run.
In Loop Hero, a terrible spell has left the world in a fractured looping state. By recalling your memories of the world, you can rebuild it in the void to seek out resources.Through randomized cards, you can build out a map of locales and points of interest for your hero to follow on their looping journey, changing the path as necessary to uncover new equipment, upgrades for your campsite, and vital clues to the world’s fate.
Loop Hero is the Roguelike/Idle Game Combination I’ve Been Dreaming About
Loop Hero takes elements of idle games, deck builders, and roguelikes to create something that is truly spectacular.
Like Blue Prince,Loop Hero requires a bit of planning and strategizing to create the ideal layout. Some cards need to be played in a particular order to optimize your adventures, getting the best gear before you tackle stronger monsters.
Oh Hai Puzzles
Not every game has the necessary scope to render an entire mansion full of puzzles like Blue Prince does. If you’re looking for a slightly more bite-sized environmental puzzle game, then enter the attic and visit The Room (no relation to that one movie).
The Room is a bite-sized mystery, wherein you’re presented with an ornate safe laden with elaborate carvings and contraptions on every side. Only through carefully piecing together each puzzle and determining their relation to one another can youcrack the proverbial peanut and discover what lies within.
If you’re not sure you can handle the caliber and volume of more elaborate puzzle games like Blue Prince, The Room might be a good way to test your mettle with fewer constraints. It’s endlessly satisfying to untangle a seemingly obtuse puzzle, a feeling you’ll get more of after you finish it and move on to Blue Prince. And hey, if you beat it too fast and crave more, then good news: there’s four of these games.
3Chants Of Sennaar
Learn A Language Or Two
Chants of Sennaar
It could be said that language is one of the oldest puzzles and solutions in human history. We can’t even imagine how long it must’ve taken for two ancient societies to realize they had different words for the same things. If you’re keen to find out, though, Chants of Sennaar is the closest you’ll get to those ancient times.
In Chants of Sennaar, you need to traverse a massive Babel-like tower that’s home to five different societies. None of these societies share a spoken or written language, soto find their points of commonality, you’ll have to gradually logic out the meanings of different words and symbols. It’sground zero linguistic codebreaking, connecting people through lost root dialects and shared histories.
There’s plenty of codebreaking to be found between Chants of Sennaar and Blue Prince, with both games requiring you to pay particular attention to the words and stories that you uncover. Of course, Blue Prince is in English, so you don’t have to take an extra step to parse and understand it like you do in Chants of Sennaar.
2Animal Well
An Evolving Vania
Animal Well
The primary goal of Blue Prince is to gradually uncover the mansion’s map, carefully drafting rooms in the ideal order to avoid dead ends and locate upgrades and services. You could say its emphasis on map mechanics is similar to those of a Metroidvania game, and when it comes to cerebral Metroidvanias,Animal Well’s got quite a brain on its shoulders.
Animal Well is a minimalistic, nonlinear Metroidvania, dropping you into a sunken realm with no particular direction or hints.Using nothing but your own wits, plus some platforming skills, you’ll need to determine where you need to go and can go with your current abilities, expanding your scope of the world by solving puzzles in an out-of-the-box manner. You never know what you might be able to accomplish if you use your acquired abilities in unconventional ways.
In terms of map scope, Blue Prince is obviously a smaller game, as there’s only 45 possible rooms in the mansion. However, the variability of those rooms’ layouts makes uncovering them rather similar to Animal Well’s more sizable, yet static map.
The OG Of Environmental Puzzles
Remember when we were listing puzzle games from 1993 a moment ago? Well, there’s one we missed, arguably one of the tentpoles of the entire environmental puzzle game genre:Myst. This vintage game walked so the likes of Blue Prince could run.
Myst is set on a massive, derelict island, positively littered with secrets and puzzles.Within the island’s library is a pair of siblings trapped inside enchanted books, both requesting your assistance. By solving puzzles and recovering the pages, you can find out more about what happened to these siblings, as well as the truth of what led them to their current predicament. It’s a game of observational acuity, as it’s not always clear what’s set dressing and what’s there for you to fiddle with.
Myst could be considered a prototypical version of Blue Prince. They share the same emphasis on environmental puzzles, coupled with story and intrigue linked to said puzzles, but Blue Prince adds the extra step of its procedurally-generated roguelike mansion.
