When puzzle strategy roguelite Blue Prince launched in April, the singleplayer game quickly became a collaborative effort. Players shared more than just puzzle solutions online, they began piecing together the sprawling story that takes place outside the mansion's walls, which includes generations of history about the world of Blue Prince.
The non-linear nature of the game and the sheer amount of information concealed within it makes it hard to know if you've found everything in Blue Prince, even if you've technically finished the game. I've played for 83 hours and watched a number of videos explaining mysteries I never solved myself—and I still don't feel like I know the whole story.
Speaking with Blue Prince developer Tonda Ros of Dogubomb this week, I asked if players had discovered everything hidden in the mansion of Blue Prince, or if there were still mysteries in the game that no one had figured out.
"There are certainly mysteries still in the game, and there will probably always be some mysteries in the game," Ros said. "And in order to preserve that mystery, I will probably never fully acknowledge whether or not everything has been solved.
"I know that for some games, they'll have, like, a canary in the coal mine, right?" he said. "I think it's Animal Well that has a website that's like, 'Has everything been found yet?' That kind of serves as a canary."
(If you visit haseverythinginanimalwellbeenfoundyet.com, by the way, it simply says "no.")
"I think for me, that's going to be a question that people are always asking. The only thing I will say is that there are still mysteries," Ros said. "Not to say that they're necessarily things that can be solved in definitive ways, but they are things that you can piece together answers to, oftentimes intuitively."
Cryptic, sure but that's perfectly fitting. There are a couple mysteries Ros was willing to shed light on during our chat, however: the infamous missing cat (Blue Prince dataminers found animations of a house cat in the game files, but there was no cat in the game) and the non-functional Dirigblocks arcade cabinet seen in the mansion's commissary. Both the cat and a working arcade game are coming to Blue Prince.
"I am happy to say that I am intending to include them both in the final update of the game," Ros said, "which is forthcoming at some undisclosed date." Whoops. There's one more mystery after all.
