The best and worst Blue Prince puzzles, according to Blue Prince’s lead creator
Even if you didn't play the game, some insight into a skilled puzzle-maker's values.
I planned to ask the lead designer of 2025’s phenomenal puzzle game Blue Prince two questions, when I saw him last week at GDC.
My first question for Tonda Ros: What was the best puzzle in your game?
My second: What was the worst?
There are no major spoilers for Blue Prince in his answers, but there are some insights into what makes Ros tick.
If you don’t know Blue Prince, just be aware that it’s a first-person game full of puzzles and mysteries. You inherit a mansion from your uncle and need to work your way through its grid of rooms. As you reach each room’s doorway(s) you can choose which room will be on the other side, drafting a new layout for the mansion over the course of each in-game day. Each room has puzzles within it, some more mind-bending than others. I played Blue Prince for over 100 hours last year and loved it.
Ros quickly had an answer for my first question about his favorite:
“It is a puzzle that involves 44 letters, and that is about as much as I’d like to say,” he said.
I knew exactly the puzzle he was referring to. When I started playing Blue Prince a year ago, it was the first puzzle that had caught my attention. It was the one that hooked me, though I initially had no idea that it had anything to do with 44 letters. Discovering that is part of the fun.
Why was it his favorite?
“I really have never seen [that] in any other game, so, to me, that kind of stands out,” Ros told me. A lot of the other puzzles in Blue Prince, he said, are variations on things players have seen before.
That made sense. A puzzle designer would be proud of having created a unique puzzle.
Alright. And the worst?
When I put Ros on the spot about this last week, he said that he’d pick a puzzle from Blue Prince’s parlor room.
Whenever the player visits that room in a virtual day of the game, they will find three small boxes—Blue, White and Black—with notes attached to them. The rules of the parlor game are:
One of the boxes contains prize gems.
One of the boxes’ messages is definitely true.
One is definitely false.
Blue Prince contains dozens of variations of this three-box parlor room puzzle. One of them, Ros said, just might be the game’s worst.
At first, in the heat of the moment at GDC, Ros recalled that there was a parlor game that was so bad he’d patched it.
When I fact-checked that with him this week, he realized he’d misremembered. It’s not that he’d removed the puzzle, but that he wants to change it. That he still might!
He noted that his explanation was getting into the weeds, but that’s okay. Getting in the weeds is a Game File tradition.
First, let me provide an example of a Blue Prince parlor puzzle that’s pretty easy to solve.
This is not a puzzle Ros picked. It’s just one I‘m using to establish how the parlor puzzles work.
The messages on the boxes in this example are as follows:
Blue: “One of the other boxes is false”
White: “You will open this box and find it empty”
Black: “The blue box is true”
To solve this, we could first imagine that one of the boxes was telling the truth. Maybe start with the Black one.
If Black is telling the truth, then Blue is also telling the truth. That requires White to be a lie and therefore White is lying about being empty. The gems are in White.
If we started by thinking Blue is true, we’d again have to believe Black is true and conclude that White was a lie. Same result. Gems in White.
If we’d started by thinking White was true, we’d need Blue or Black to be false. Blue couldn’t be a lie, because there has to be at least one false box. Black couldn’t be a lie, because, again, Blue has to be true. White can’t be true. White must be a lie. Again, the gems have to be in White.
Follow that okay?
Ros told me that there are two versions of Blue Prince’s parlor game that involve “ambiguous solutions.” These puzzles can’t necessarily be easily solved using logic. They require the solver to take an intellectual leap, or at least begin thinking about the puzzle a specific way.
To explain the puzzle he disliked, Ros first wanted to explain a parlor puzzle that he liked, despite its “ambiguous solution.”
Here are the clues for this one:
Blue: “The gems are in this box”
White: “This statement is no help at all”
Black: “The gems are in the blue box”
Ros described this as “a puzzle that I actually love despite it being mathematically flimsy.”
He pointed me toward the statement on the White box. It says it’s not helpful.
If we assume that the White box’s statement is false, then one of the other ones must be true, according to the rules. If Blue is true, the gems are in the Blue box. If Black is true… then, as it says, the gems are in the Blue box. This proves that the White box’s statement actually was helpful, in an indirect way. So the decision to designate White as false was correct. That’s airtight!
If, however, we assume that the White box is true, then we need Blue or Black to be false. This, Ros said, produces “a logical web, which leads to no solution.”
Ros is fine with this, because, in the lore of the game, the man who made the puzzles, Herbert Sinclair, is kind of a cheeky guy. He likes how the clue on the White box feels like a wink from Blue Prince’s in-game puzzle maker. “The playful nature of this particular logic puzzle fits Herbert perfectly and I love it,” Ros said. “It is the only parlor puzzle with an intended ambiguous solution.”
Still with me?
We have arrived, at least, at the Blue Prince puzzle Ros dislikes.
“Unfortunately,” he told me, “A second unintentionally ambiguous parlor puzzle slipped through our seemingly inculpable years of logic testing.”
Here’s the puzzle:
Blue: “One of the other statements is false”
White: “One of the other boxes contains gems”
Black: “If you replace the word ONE in the other two statements with BOTH they will both be false”
I started trying to solve this one, and, no, I would have just guessed if I’d gotten this puzzle in the parlor room.
“The above, rather messy, parlor puzzle is, perhaps, my least favorite puzzle in Blue Prince,” Ros told me. “Before the game’s final patch, I would love to revisit this and reword the three boxes in a way that eliminates the clumsy complexity and logical ambiguity.”
Whereas Ros delighted in presenting players with a 44-letter puzzle that was unprecedented, he’s disappointed to have presented players with a puzzle that’s inelegant and confusing.
Makes sense to me.
Good thing Blue Prince is loaded with plenty of other great puzzles in between.
Item 2: In brief…
🇺🇸 U.S. spending on video game hardware, content and accessories totaled $4.6 billion in February, up 1% from a year ago, per the Circana research group.
Hardware was up, off-setting a decline in accessories. PS5 was the top-selling console in dollars and units.
The top-ranking game among tracked publishers, was Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem.
📱 Saudi government-funded Savvy Games is buying mobile gaming studio Moonton (Mobile Legends Bang Bang; 110 million monthly active players) for $6 billion, Bloomberg reports.
That adds to a Savvy mobile portfolio that already includes the makers of Monopoly Go and Pokémon Go.
🥽 Meta will keep its Horizon Worlds VR virtual space online for the foreseeable future, the company said on Thursday, reversing an announcement earlier in the week to take the VR space offline in June, CNBC reports.
But Meta said it will not be adding new games to Horizon VR as it shifts its resources toward mobile.
Meta had once touted Horizon and the VR metaverse worlds as the future, to the extent it renamed the company from Facebook to Meta.
🎬 Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed TV show will be set in Italy in 64AD, the time of Nero and the Great Fire of Rome, Eurogamer reports.
The show will therefore be set three decades after the execution of an extremely famous person who, per the extended Assassin’s Creed saga, was briefly in possession of one of the franchises’ fabled “Pieces of Eden” artifacts. Will they reference that deep lore?
Item 3: The week ahead
Thursday, March 26
Life is Strange: Reunion (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), anime car-racing game Screamer (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and Super Mario Bros Wonder’s Switch 2 add-on Meetup in Bellabel Park are released.
The PAX East gaming show begins in Boston, running through the weekend. It’s one of the largest gaming showcases open to the public in the U.S.
Friday, March 27
Mega Man: Star Force Legacy Collection (PC, console) and Marvel MaXimum Collection (PC, console) are released.
As an absolute fan of Blue Prince, I really appreciated this edition, even if it's so long after I spent countless hours in Mount Holly (which is a white lie -pun intended-, as I'm replaying it now it's on Switch 2) and solved dozens of Parlor puzzles.
Minor correction on your first example, "Blue couldn’t be a lie, because there has to be at least one false box." > If Blue is a lie, that could be the required false box. However, it can't be false because that makes Black false which in turn would make Blue true (and it can't be both true and false).
The second example was such an excellent version of the puzzle and I love Tonda's comments on it.
And yeah, that third one is oddly ambiguous (and doesn't really work grammatically!).
Your finale is brilliant... but I don't know where you hid the gems!
Such a fun interview and great insight!