Blue prince is an incredible puzzle game. Located in a lonely mansion with an impossible architecture, it is bunk in mysteries, plots and family drama. Le Mansion, Mt. Holly, officially has 45 rooms, but to collect your inheritance, you must find the 46th. Each day, we give you a defined number of steps, and you must literally build the manor (and the game) as you go, pulling from a pool of floor plans to create a new arrangement with each race.
This is the foundation, but it goes much further: when I previewed Blue prince In December 2024, I could not have imagined its complexity. It is not a game that you can understand entirely in a few races; It takes 10 hours to achieve what its main puzzles are, and even longer to reconstruct their solutions, piece per piece, step by step. It is a slow and extremely satisfactory burn. Puzzles in Blue prince are cavernous and surprising, and it is exciting to interact with the mechanisms and objects of the game. Without forgetting, everything is absolutely magnificent.
However Blue prince is not marketed as a cooperative experience and he has no multiplayer entry, he naturally lends himself to cooperative game. Mechanics counts less than concepts on the screen, and it is useful to have a person on controls and another on a notebook, to note the indices and to follow progress. In addition, one of the best ways to take off in a game like this is to talk about things, and it happens naturally when you play together. Blue prince is just a really complex puzzle, after all, and we have done these things in a group for ages.
It is a real one for many solo puzzle games – their common theme being that they are experiences of cooperation secretly couch. You could say all The games are local cooperative if you try strong enough, but it is only in the puzzle that games can play a passer -by without touching a controller, directing the action and providing critical breakthroughs, being careful. You will not have the same level of impact by watching your friend play Assassin’s Creed, do you know?
Blue prince is only the latest example of a cooperative subcoverage puzzle game. My partner and I have happily played a handful of games similar in recent years, and it happened to the point that I now exceeded just beyond the “solo” descriptor on most puzzle titles. Here is a limited list of the favorites of my household:
Lorelei and laser eyes
The Talos 2 principle
The sexy brutal
The rise of the golden idol
Return of Obra Dinn
The witness
Viewfinder
Storyteller
All these games are officially solo, but they are also good, if not even better, when they are played with a loved one. On my sofa, we also appreciated real local cooperative puzzle as AcademySo if your relationship can survive these games, it should be able to manage Lorelei,, Talos Or Blue prince with ease.
While we were poetic on the subtleties of video game sub-genres (ok very well, only one of us is), Blue prince falls into another of my favorite categories, which I affectionately call the “anti-gamefaqs puzzle games”. These are designed to be impossible to capture in a traditional step-by-step guide, and although the category is not large, it understands some of the best titles of this generation, as Tunic And Lorelei and laser eyes. They look so strongly on the thing that makes video games unique as a multimedia product – players’ autonomy – that they feel like a hostile attack on explanators step by step, and I love it. (These games also tend to remind me Leaf houseWho could be another sub-genre alone, but I will stop here. For the moment)
Playing Blue prince With my partner in 2025 reminds me of the lazy afternoon specific in the summer of 2008 when friends and I discovered Brave On Xbox Live Arcade. We spent hours playing from the dull sofa of my boyfriend, passing the controller, pointing the screen and screaming strategies, and amazing this little toxic guy who changes time. Shared experiences like this generate a specific type of heat, and a great puzzle game can produce these moments over and over.
Even if he is technically a single player.
This article originally appeared on engadget to
