Anna C. Webster Declares This Year The Era Of The Blue Prince Sicko | Winter Spectacular 2025
I wake up. I make coffee (instant) and oatmeal (not instant, with milk and brown sugar). I sit down at my computer and check my email: I have one related to a current contract, one reminding me of an upcoming dentist appointment, and one from a game design student curious about a career in narrative design. The weather in Los Angeles is 73 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny.
I check social media. An additional hundred of my peers are without a job due to another shortsighted corporate layoff. Some YouTuber I've never heard of is getting cancelled. One of my two cats meows from the kitchen because the automatic feeder hasn't gone off yet. They are adding Sabrina Carpenter to Fortnite.
I send off two invoices and a reply to book future work with a repeat client. The Dodgers go to the eighteenth inning. I check my pending tasks for this sprint and prioritise them accordingly. I find myself humming Dolly Parton's “Hard Candy Christmas” under my breath again even though it's July, because everything just feels like that these days.
Beside me, my other cat, a little black kitten, sleeps with her paws above her head: her warm belly facing up and unguarded toward the sky.
The mundanity of life in 2025 almost feels like it adds insult to injury. Every morning is a fresh hell of news that would vaporise an ancient Gaul in the French Riviera, although I suspect they would be deeply empathetic to the experience of living through a collapsing empire — I'd once heard that many in the far reaches of the realm only learned Rome had fallen after the bridge near their home remained unrepaired for weeks. But I don't even have a bridge. Gotta work with what you've got, I suppose — though a rented apartment in Southern California doesn't have the same ring to it.
The days don't pass easy in 2025, but a childhood forged in the fires of the Bush administration and further sculpted on the anvil of the Great Recession carefully honed me for this. Everyone does what they can to tread the waters of hypernormalization. My kitten, for example, does it by snoring. (Over my shoulder, the automatic feeder in the kitchen finally goes off.)
Many people have survived this year by becoming some kind of a sicko. This, of course, is in reference to a comic strip character colloquially known as "The Sickos Guy," the brainchild of cartoonist Ward Sutton for satirical publication The Onion. A figure of meme-royalty, Sickos Guy is a man wearing a black t-shirt aptly labelled "SICKOS," who is looking through a window with a nefarious grin, saying: "YES... HA HA HA... YES!"
Everyone's a sicko for something, and the rates of sickohood are only escalating as an adaptation to an increasingly hostile environment. Many of the femmes I know in the game narrative space have all gotten into Warhammer, for example, and many of my nonbinary friends have taken up making pottery. I got my Game Director really into Twin Peaks, and I even shockingly started to enjoy going to the gym (-2 Steps).
Same as it ever was since those days when my dad made me Eggo waffles for breakfast before school as I overheard the news declaring blatant falsehoods about "weapons of mass destruction": you're gonna have to get a little bit insane to get through this. It's the only way.
The only way out is "sicko”.
And Blue Prince, an indie game made by developer Dogubomb and published by Raw Fury, is a game practically made for the sickos.
Blue Prince is a game for people who hate when a game tells you what to do. For the people who dare ask: "what if Balatro was a house?" For the people who enjoy playing as an unsupervised, feral tween who doesn't eat the crust of pizzas and sleeps in the woods. For the people who love keeping a notepad full of insane scrawlings beside their controller (or, the ultra sickos like myself, who played the game with virtually no note-taking system at all, just vibes). "But Anna," I hear you say, "how did you know how to—" Your guess is as good as mine, my dude. I am literally just vibing.
Blue Prince's narrative premise is snappy: you (Simon P. Jones, age 14) recently experienced the death of your great uncle (Herbert S. Sinclair). In his will, Sinclair named you as the sole recipient of his 45-room estate, Mount Holly... on one condition. That you find the hidden 46th room. Sounds easy enough, right?
But Mt. Holly is a very unusual manor, as it lacks a certain dedication to continuity — its rooms change their location and orientation from day to day. The only thing that's certain is the player's 50-movement minimum and the manor's grid layout, detailing only 45 rooms. Room 46, therefore, remains a mystery, and you will need to unravel the many secrets within Mt. Holly in order to learn the truth about your own enigmatic family and claim your inheritance.
Each in-game day the player begins at Mt. Holly’s Entrance Hall with a clean slate, with the rooms, your steps, and your inventory reset. When you attempt to open a door to another room in the house, you are presented with a slate of three possible rooms that could be on the other side of it, which are randomly selected from the overall "drafting pool" of possible rooms. Depending on your goal for that run, you will need to carefully balance the RNG nature of the pulls with your own skill and strategy to progress into the house.
The rooms of the Mt. Holly Estate fall into different categories, each denoted by a colored border around their associated icon:
Blueprints (blue border): these rooms, such as the Parlor, Rumpus Room, Pool, and Security office, are the most common and have additional doorways that can lead you deeper into the house (provided they aren't locked). They can also contain economy items, such as keys that can open locked doorways, as well as chests, gems, and other special pickups. They also may provide additional functions that can allow the player to progress with certain puzzles.
Bedrooms (purple border): these rooms, such as the Master Bedroom, Servant's Quarters, and Boudoir, often provide additional "steps" (the movement currency of the game) to you when you walk through them. But this is where things get interesting — these rooms once belonged to members of your family and the servants of Mt. Holly themselves, and their personal stories and relationships remain hidden in plain sight, ripe for speculation.
Hallways (orange border): these rooms, such as the Foyer, West Wing Hall, and Secret Passage, provide additional "door spots" that (provided they aren't locked) connect to other potential rooms of the house. While they don't appear to offer much at face value, a well-placed hallway can make or break a run.
Green Rooms (green border): my personal favourite, these rooms, such as the Courtyard, Veranda, and Cloister, provide benevolent boons and "dig spots" where a player may find additional items (provided they have a shovel in their inventory). Plus, I think they're pretty.
Shops (gold border): these rooms, such as the Kitchen, Commissary, and Bookshop, allow you to purchase additional items on their run with money from your allowance (or change found buried in the proverbial couch cushions). Purchased items will not appear in the player's inventory on the following day, but a well-placed shop can be an invaluable resource on a run, especially when combined with items such as the Coupon Book, which, as you might expect, lowers the sticker price.
Red Rooms (red border): these rooms, such as the Furnace, Bathroom, and Gymnasium, are considered "bad" rooms, as they are a dead end at best, and actively take resources or steps from the player at worst.
Blackprints (black border): these are the rarest and most special of rooms, often considered "secret." These usually need to be unlocked by solving sicko-level puzzles within the game.
There are also some special rooms that do not reset with the house each day and will always remain in the same spot on the grid, such as the Foundation, Entrance Hall, and Antechamber. And there are some rooms, such as the Aquarium and Maid's Chamber, that are associated with more than one color category.
...Ya got all that?
While the mechanics are a delight unto themselves, in my opinion the real resonance of Blue Prince lies in the way its puzzles and narrative design threads coalesce in a downright chaotic knot alongside them. On a run, I might choose to pull at one thread, one puzzle or element of the story: see where it catches, where it twists. Hang on: our mother wrote what? Was our great uncle being blackmailed before his death? Wait, why is there a conlang? Just where is my mom? Why am I getting weird prophecies from a coin-operated fortune teller? And most terrifyingly of all: I have to do math?
Although it's pitched as the original goal, finding Room 46 is just the beginning of this game. In fact, the first time you "roll credits" is only a third of the way through the full story, if that. What you find instead is hours more gameplay leading you beyond the architecture of Mt. Holly, into a world of political and familial intrigue. To truly get to the end of Blue Prince, you have to truly be a sicko.
With that said, criticism of this title online is varied and legitimate. "I don't feel like the game respects my time" is a frequent one I've seen. "I don't appreciate how much RNG factors into the success of a run" is another. And while I agree that the game leaves a lot up to chance, I also felt like that is part of its charm. It is sometimes out of my control. It is absurd and somewhat kafkaesque. So it really shouldn't surprise anyone that in this most insane of times, I found myself so comforted by this insane game.
Sure, the escapism is always nice: I don't want to talk about how many times I told myself "just one more run" even though my bedtime was over an hour ago. As Simon and I searched for the truth about this strange estate, for the truth about his mother, there was a quiet solidarity. Simon and I would each wake up on a new day, not knowing what fresh horrors awaited us. It was all we could do to take things one day at a time, make careful choices about the story thread we wanted to chase at any individual moment, and allocate our precious resources accordingly.
We are in this crazy knot of the mysterious and practical together, Simon and I. We are beings of the same era. We're gonna have to get a little bit insane to get through this.
I wake up. I go to the leftmost door of the Entry Hall. I draft a Den. Then a Pantry (+4 coins). There has been a recall of radioactive shrimp at Wal-Mart. I draft a West Wing Hall, then a Parlor. SNAP benefits are not being paid out for the month of November, meaning 40 million people (mostly the elderly, disabled, and children) will not be able to purchase food. I outsmart the box puzzle and get my two gems. I need to empty the dishwasher and fold my laundry. I head back through the Entrance Hall to its centre doorway and draft a Spare Room to a Courtyard (with a shovel, thank goodness). SNAP benefits are ordered by a judge to be paid out anyway. I go to a dig spot and get digging.
