Blue Prince is an unimaginable puzzle recreation. Set in a lonely mansion with unimaginable structure, it’s layered in mysteries, conspiracies and household drama. The mansion, Mt. Holly, formally has 45 rooms, however so as to accumulate your inheritance, you need to discover the forty sixth. Day-after-day you’re given a set variety of steps, and you need to actually construct the manor (and the sport) as you go, drawing from a pool of floorplans to create a brand new format with every run.
That is the muse, nevertheless it goes a lot deeper: After I previewed Blue Prince in December 2024, I couldn’t have imagined its complexity. It’s not a recreation you’ll be able to totally perceive in a number of runs; it takes 10 hours to understand what its core puzzles even are, and even longer to then piece their options collectively, room by room, step-by-step. It’s a gradual, supremely satisfying burn. The puzzles in Blue Prince are cavernous and stunning, and it’s thrilling to work together with the sport’s mechanics and objects. To not point out, it’s all completely beautiful.
Although Blue Prince isn’t marketed as a cooperative expertise and it doesn’t have any sort of multiplayer enter, it naturally lends itself to co-op play. Mechanics matter lower than the ideas on-screen, and it’s helpful to have one individual on controls and one other on a notepad, jotting down clues and monitoring progress. Plus, among the best methods to get unstuck in a recreation like that is to speak issues by, and this naturally occurs while you’re enjoying collectively. Blue Prince is only a actually intricate puzzle, in spite of everything, and we’ve been doing these issues in group settings for ages.
It is a true of many single-player puzzle video games — their widespread theme being that they’re secretly sofa co-op experiences. You would say all video games are native co-op for those who attempt exhausting sufficient, however solely in puzzle video games can a bystander play alongside with out ever touching a controller, directing the motion and offering essential breakthroughs just by paying consideration. You’re not going to have the identical stage of influence watching your good friend play Murderer’s Creed, ?
Blue Prince is barely the most recent instance of an undercover sofa co-op puzzle recreation. My associate and I’ve fortunately performed a handful of comparable video games collectively in recent times, and it’s gotten to the purpose that I now breeze proper previous the “single-player” descriptor on most puzzle titles. Right here’s a shortlist of my family’s favorites:
All of those video games are formally single-player, however they’re nearly as good, if not even higher, when performed with a liked one. On my sofa, we’ve additionally loved precise native co-op puzzlers like Escape Academy, so in case your relationship can survive these video games, it ought to be capable of deal with Lorelei, Talos or Blue Prince with ease.
Whereas we’re waxing poetic concerning the intricacies of online game sub-genres (OK nice, simply considered one of us is), Blue Prince falls into one other considered one of my favourite classes, which I affectionately name “anti-GameFAQs puzzle video games.” These are designed to be unimaginable to seize in a conventional walkthrough information, and whereas the class isn’t giant, it consists of a few of the finest titles of this era, like Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. These lean so closely on the factor that makes video video games distinctive as a media product — participant autonomy — that they really feel like a hostile assault on step-by-step explainers, and I completely love that. (These video games additionally are likely to remind me of Home of Leaves, which could possibly be one other sub-genre by itself, however I’ll cease right here. For now.)
Taking part in Blue Prince with my associate in 2025 jogs my memory of the precise lazy afternoon in the summertime of 2008 when some mates and I found Braid on Xbox Dwell Arcade. We spent hours enjoying from my buddy’s dingy sofa, passing the controller round, pointing on the display screen and yelling out methods, and simply marveling at that little time-shifting poisonous dude. Shared experiences like this generate a particular sort of heat, and an incredible puzzle recreation can produce these moments again and again.
Even when it’s technically single-player.
