Alex's Blue Prince review from MW internal

Has anyone been playing Blue Prince, the new mystery roguelike knowledge-gating puzzle game? I'm a big fan of roguelikes, mystery games, and knowledge-gating à la Outer Wilds, and this game has all those elements in spades and diamonds. It starts off simply enough, exploring a mysterious 45-room mansion as you try to get to the secret 46th room. It has this delightful quirk that which room is behind each door is different each day, as whoever opens the door "drafts" one of three blueprint floorplans, which may vary in which onward doors they have pointing in different directions. Each new day the mansion's layout is reset and you get to explore it again.

You may find keys (useful for locked doors), gems (useful for drafting the more special rooms), food to refresh your energy (a limited resource as exploring is exhausting), coins which can buy things in various shop rooms, and a number of other items which vary greatly in how obvious their uses are. But very quickly you discover many mysterious elements to these rooms, hints and secrets, and it won't be long before you're unlocking permanent changes to the estate, blitzing through puzzles that initially baffled you, finding ways to mitigate the randomness of which rooms you're offered each draft step, and filling pages and pages of whatever is your preferred note-taking device.

I got to room 46 after about 20 hours, well aware that there were many secrets I'd not yet unlocked; and sure enough I've already found there's a whole host more mystery waiting for me after the credits roll.

For anyone who likes mystery, exploration, note-taking, and can cope with a bit of roguelike randomness before you find the ways to mitigate it, I highly recommend this one. It's shot straight to the top of a lot of people's GOTY lists, and it's in with a good shot at mine.