RoguedexPart 4 (Dec 2025) · #2 of 3 in that tierWatch the moment (0:05:48)
Welcome to Mt. Holly, where every dawn unveils a new mystery. Navigate through shifting corridors and ever-changing chambers in this genre-defying strategy puzzle adventure. But will your unpredictable path lead you to the rumored Room 46?
Consensus
A80/100
Steam players86.3% positiveVery Positive20,259 reviews
Metacritic ↗92/100Users: 7.7/10
OpenCritic ↗89/100
VG Insights estimate ↗≈779K copies · ≈$16.1M gross
What creators say
Ranked Jun 2025 · #3 of 21 in that tierListen to the episode
Scored 8.04/10 · tier derived from the score
What players say
A first-person puzzle-mystery game by Dogubomb (published by Raw Fury) in which you draft a shifting 45-room manor each day, roguelite-style, hunting for the hidden Room 46 and the estate's many secrets.
Blue Prince is one of the best-reviewed games of 2025: Metacritic 92 (critics), OpenCritic about 89 with roughly 96% of critics recommending it, and a Steam rating of Very Positive (about 86% of roughly 20,000 reviews). Critics and fans praise the puzzle depth, atmosphere, environmental storytelling and the feeling of obsessive note-taking discovery. Player opinion is noticeably cooler than critic opinion, though: Metacritic user score is 7.7 and the Steam negatives cluster around RNG-gated puzzle testing, lack of mid-run saves, and diminishing returns in the long endgame. It is a finished, released game (PC April 10 2025, PS5/Xbox, Switch 2 in March 2026), not early access.
Players love
- Deep, layered puzzle design where nearly every room hides clues connecting to other puzzles across the manor
- Addictive draft-a-room core loop: choosing from three room options and planning routes through the grid feels strategic and fresh
- Atmosphere, art direction and music; Mt. Holly has a distinct early-20th-century fictional-world identity
- Environmental storytelling told through notes, photos and letters that players piece together themselves
- Rewards curiosity and obsessive note-taking; players report spreadsheets, notebooks and screenshot folders and sharing it with a partner or community
- Easy to start but hundreds of hours deep; many Steam reviewers report 100-270 hours and call it a favorite game ever
- Randomness is woven into the fiction (e.g. frequently-seen family members show up more in the house) and into tactical decisions
Common complaints
- RNG gates testing of solved puzzles: you can know the answer yet wait many runs/days for the needed rooms or items to be offered
- No real mid-run save; 'Save and Quit' effectively abandons the run, and runs can take an hour or more, which drives refunds and negative reviews
- Diminishing returns: the early game feels great, the late game narrows toward one big endgame goal where luck dominates
- Little permanent meta-progression compared with Hades, Isaac or Balatro; upgrades are sparse and many purchases vanish at day's end
- Quality-of-life friction: unskippable animations, slow walking speed, intro and day-start sequences, slow item pickup, and reports of crashes or softlocks
- Some late puzzles are very cryptic or contrived, and word-play or pronunciation-based clues disadvantage non-native English speakers
- Story payoff / cliffhanger ending leaves some players unsatisfied after very long playtimes
Can feel tedious
- Repeating known steps over many runs just to get the rooms needed to execute one solved puzzle
- Post-game and endgame grinding for coins, crafting and filling the room gallery, which feels luck-dependent
- Long unskippable animations and slow movement that compound across hundreds of days
- Needing one-hour-plus uninterrupted sessions because of the no-save design
- Bad-luck streaks where the draft offers dead ends or none of the rooms you need
What's unique
- Combines a roguelite room-drafting loop (drafting rooms onto a grid) with a 3D first-person Myst/Outer Wilds-style mystery
- Meta-progression is knowledge, not stats: the real unlock is what the player learns and writes down
- Every day the manor layout is reshuffled, and puzzles often span multiple rooms and multiple runs
- Room 46 goal framed by a will whose rules (take nothing in, take nothing out, leave by night) define the mechanics
- Puzzle design that expects the player to keep external notes, photos and even math
Players want
- Add a true suspend-and-resume save, possibly as an accessibility option
- Give more ways to manipulate or influence room RNG earlier, or let players lock in already-achieved progress
- Speed up or allow skipping animations, intros and traversal, and raise baseline movement speed
- Reduce reliance on luck in the endgame so players who know the solution can execute it without waiting for lucky runs
- Add more lasting between-run upgrades so repeated days feel cumulative
- Better in-game notes or hint-tracking tools to reduce reliance on external notebooks
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
PuzzleExplorationMysteryInvestigationSingleplayerStory RichRogue-liteIndieFirst-PersonAdventure
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Tier list Part 4 (2025)
Blue Prince is a first-person puzzle roguelike where you draft rooms to build a new mansion each day, hunting for hints to hundreds of persistent, knowledge-based puzzles. He was initially skeptical that puzzles and roguelikes could mix, but thinks the game blends the two counterintuitive genres into something unique and amazing. He calls it kind of a masterpiece and an 'escape room roguelike', and names it an obvious S tier knowledge-based progression game. He has a few wishes: a save feature, an in-game camera, clearer signalling of puzzle solvability, and less punishing handling of RNG and of the room 46 ending.
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