One game is at this point, the best-reviewed title of 2025 with a 92 Metascore and an almost surefire GOTY nomination.
That would be Blue Prince, the new PS Plus/Xbox Game Pass/$30 Steam game, a cryptic puzzler that can be incredibly frustrating but it’s worth pushing past its initial, confusing runs.
I am not terribly surprised that Blue Prince is not blowing up the charts yet. It’s doing well for the type of game it is, I suppose. It’s peaked at just under 10,000 concurrent players on Steam, and is ninth on PlayStation’s most-played charts. This is solid enough, but this is still not enough people playing this game which I feel like I need to evangelize more.
I have in fact heard from a number of people who have attempted to play either on console or after a Steam purchase, and said they’re confused and they don’t really know what to do, so they’re bouncing off.
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I get it, in my first few days (game days, which equals roguelike runs) I felt like a moron and maybe this game just wasn’t going to be for me. But soon, you’ll start to understand. I’m not going to give away any puzzle answers, but here is some advice for very early on so you don’t want to throw in the towel:
- Focus on pathing. You may not immediately pay attention to the maze-like aspect of the game right away, just planting down any interesting sounding room that comes up. You need to focus on getting as far as you can with proper door alignment to avoid dead-ends, and I would recommend going sideways more than purely up at the start.
- There are in fact permanent upgrades. I won’t tell you what they are, but this is not a game that is going to delete literally everything in every run, as you will ultimately be able to find stuff or items that stay in place, ultiamtely making progress with each run in some way.
- Write things down. Yes, this is something you will almost never do in any game, and the game will tell you do this, but I’m serious, it’s essential past the early days. I have a Word doc for this specifically that is now about eight pages long. Pictures? Log them. Numbers? Log them. Puzzles? Describe them, even if you can’t figure them out immediately. Books? Screenshot them, put them in folders for later. Not kidding, I have like eight of these.
I may do a separate post with more hints, but that should be enough to get you started. Don’t give up! And tell your friends about it!
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
