Blue Prince dev Tonda Ros talks mind palaces, unsolved puzzles, and Mount Holly developing a personality of its own

Dogubomb’s Tonda Ros has been busy. Not just since the launch of Blue Prince in late April this year and the new, unavoidable responsibilities that come hand-in-hand with releasing a critical and commercial hit. But also for the better part of the past decade bringing to life this cryptic architectural puzzle centered around the shapeshifting Mount Holly. Ros explains to VideoGamer after kindly accepting to answer several probing questions we pinged over that the project was a deceptive route. “The primary difficulty of development was, in my opinion, just getting to the finish line…From the beginning of the project until the end, I was eternally under the impression that the game was going to be released within one year. And with each passing year, the goal posts moved. It always felt close, but just out of reach.”

But the game did release, garnering the type of attention and success most indies only dream about. Asked about whether he expected the game to land quite as well as it did, Ros says, “I made the game for specifically the type of player I am, with zero concern for wider appeal. If I thought of an idea that I knew would excite me as a player, I would incorporate it into the game. Some of these ideas I knew would not be popular with everyone, but I feel strongly that the best work is done when people are not trying to please everyone. Given that, I am somewhat surprised by the extent of the game’s popularity, but I always knew there woulod be a lot of people whose taste aligns with my own who would fall in love with it.”

One of my favourite aspects of Blue Prince is the complete lack of hand-holding. It’s a far cry from saturated HUDs and quest marker abundance where every expected action is overtly telegraphed, the player shepherded in a sometimes overbearing, agency-sapping manner. In more ways than one, Blue Prince is deeply respectful of the player’s intelligence and their appetite for progression through trial and error, deduction, and dogged perseverance. Asked about whether Dogubomb had any fears about making the game too challenging or that the studio had placed too much weight on the player’s curiosity to drive progress forward, Ros didn’t beat around the bush. “Personally, I dislike overt hand-holding in design, and further dislike modern games’ absolute aggressiveness at providing as frictionless an experience as possible. Not everyone is going to be able to ride a bull without falling off, but the entire journey of growth starts with a player’s decision to get up, dust themselves off, and get back on the bull. But many modern designers, in their unwillingness to risk losing even a single player, have taken to applying copious amounts of superglue to the saddle.”

In Blue Prince, puzzles stack on top of puzzles, clues intersect and evolve as you unearth precious new information. The puzzle piece that started it all? “I know the puzzle in the billiard room was in the very first build of the game in 2016, so that has to be among the first. The utility closet as well was in there. However, if you are considering the original origins of the puzzles in the game, several of the designs were created by me years before the project began. The parlor game was something I made for my friends, physically creating a puzzle with real boxes and a windup key. It was inspired by the work of the logician Raymond Smullyan. However, older than all of these was my design for a puzzle box that can be found deeper in the game featuring nine colored buttons. Its design is very similar to a game I created in high school on a TI-83 calculator.”

Despite a fairly unassuming graphical facade and the basic aim of reaching the elusive room 46, there’s an underlying web of interactions and permutations that gets more knotty and complex as you dive deeper into Blue Prince. Clues, puzzles, objects, rooms – there’s certainly a logic to it all but it’s steeped in such complexity that it does get away from you at times as a player, not least the peculiar and unexpected ways the rogue-like RNG elements can behave. A notebook to jot it all down and folder full of screenshots aren’t just recommended but vital about making any progress in Blue Prince.

It had me wondering about how Ros and his team kept track of it all during development. Ros recounted that he originally had a design document that connected rooms and puzzles, but by 2018 it became so cluttered that it lost much of its usefulness and the complexities of this tangled web became very difficult to parse. “Shortly after it hit that point I stopped updating it, and from that point on, I relied entirely on a mental map. This might sound even less efficient, but I’ve spent a lot of my life using memory palaces to recall information. In this space, the rooms, items, and documents of Mount Holly, were connected spatially by function, represented by doors. Just like in the game”, Ros elaborates.

Ros explains that after almost a decade of development, revisions, updates, and changes to the underlying interconnected systems, the house has developed a personality of its own. “Mount Holly is the one who decides how the rooms behave, and I try my best to respect her wishes and design around those quirks and behaviours”, Ros said.

As for whether there are any unsolved puzzles or lingering mysteries players have yet to stumble across, Ros answers in appositely cryptic fashion: “I am a firm believer that the day on which the final stone is overturned and the answer to the last remaining question is found is the day that all mystery in the game dies. Not everything in life is a puzzle that needs to be solved. Some stones are best left unturned.” Make of that what you will.