Blue Prince is an ingenious first-person adventure about exploring a house and uncovering its tantalizingly unexpected secrets. It’s already the highest-rated game of 2025 on Metacritic so far, and it also happens to be hitting Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus the day it comes out.
Launching on April 10 across PC and console (except for Switch), Blue Prince is part point-and-click walking sim, part resource management roguelike, all wrapped up in a narrative mystery adventure that doesn’t quite feel like anything else I’ve ever played. I’m nowhere close to finishing it. The average play times seem to range from 15-25 hours to “beat” the game, but people have kept play for double that to explore every nook and cranny. But I’m far enough to begin “getting” what’s so special about it and can see why it’s being praised by early critics.
Blue Prince has a Metacritic score of 92 with reviews from just over 20 outlets so far. That puts it at the top of the aggregating site’s ranked list for 2025, and just one point ahead of Split Fiction. This year’s other top-rated games so far include Monster Hunter Wilds, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and fellow puzzle adventure The Roottrees Are Dead. Blue Prince is much harder to talk about than those games, though, in part because explaining too much can ruin the joy of discovery what’s so great about it, similar to The Outer Wilds.
It’s enough to know the basic premise: you’re exploring a mansion that will be bequeathed to you from a dead relative if you can discover its hidden 46th room. Every time you hit a doorway you can select from a set of rooms to “draft” on the blueprints (Get it? Blue Prince?) for it to appear on the other side. This will impact what resources, clues, and additional doorways you find inside. Once you deplete your “stamina” for the day you go home and rest, coming back the next morning to a completely blank slate to be drafted all over again with the help of everything you’ve learned and new room types you’ve unlocked.
“Later runs in Blue Prince are less about puzzle solving or deckbuilding, and more about excursionary quests into the house to solve certain puzzles (“Can I somehow get the Boiler Room to connect to the Laboratory?”) or information gathering sessions as you try to piece together a message obliquely scattered across all but one room in the mansion,” writes Aidan Moher. “It’s about unravelling the spooled mystery behind the mansion and its titular blue prince, a fascist nation, and the cost of freedom. It’s not so much about solving puzzles as it is about understanding the link between agency, experience, and story. Journey before destination.”
This might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but a really nice bonus for Blue Prince is that the it’ll be practically free for millions of players who are already subscribed to Game Pass on Xbox and PC or PS Plus on PlayStation 5. “Polished indie puzzle game with simple mechanics but bold ideas on a subscription service” recalls last year’s Animal Well, a strong 2024 GOTY contender in its own right. But there are two notable distinctions. Calling Blue Prince a “Metroidbrania” would probably make people who use that genre nickname mad, and also Animal Well was only on PS Plus. This time around, players on every platform get to take advantage of a a big day-and-date get for subscription services (except Switch).
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