I’ll admit I slept on Blue Prince when I was looking for games to review. The game’s roguelike approach to a mansion mystery is hard to convey in trailers and screenshots, though it’s instantly captivating when you actually start playing. I suspect this is one of the reasons that it launched free on PS Plus and Game Pass. Like Animal Well, you just have to get your hands on it to appreciate how genius it is. I’ve put 40 hours into it already, which for a mystery game is bananas.
I’m also ready to quit despite being near the true ending because as the game gets harder it leans into color-based puzzles I cannot solve.
Like 5 percent of people, I am colorblind. When I first started writing about video games at Houston Press, modes that helped colorblind players were still in their infancy. Thankfully, nearly every game now includes some kind of high contrast mode as an accessibility option. In just 14 years, it’s become a standard part of most games’ options.
That’s not the case for Plue Prince. Reddit and YouTube are full of guides for the various puzzles that involve people pushing buttons very slowly so that colorblind gamers can follow. Whether it’s the Mora Jai boxes or the blasted breaker box (seen above), some of us can only push forward in the game with external aids no matter how much of the mystery we’ve uncovered.
A good example of the problem is the Billiard Room. It has a puzzle based around a dart board where different sections light up to form equations. It’s actually a fairly neat recurring puzzle room that nets a reward every playthrough, and it’s not too difficult to figure out once you have some basic context.
However, it changes dramatically after you solve around 20 of them. Previously, the colors indicating the functions (additions, subtraction, etc.) were also assigned to specific areas on the board (addition was always in the inner circle, subtraction in the triple ring, etc.). Once you progress enough, now the colors can be in any area, and I cannot tell them apart. Sometimes, I can’t even tell if the section is lit up because for a game with so cartoonish an art style Blue Prince weirdly has a contrast problem visually. In the end, I had to brute force solutions, which makes me feel too stupid to both play the game and do high school math.
It takes all the fun out of what was quickly becoming my Game of the Year. My teenager, a friend, and I have all been cooperating across playthroughs, sharing solutions and celebrating each other’s accomplishments. It’s a collective form of gaming that is invigorating and adds a true sense of progress to Blue Prince. Like an escape room, it just works better when you’re drawing on group resources. It was the most fun I’ve had gaming all year until this pointless gatekeeping broke my heart.
I understand why developer Dogubomb made the game the way they did. Color is an important thematic element in the game linked to various warring political factions and cultural identities. It’s a richly written world that takes the environmental puzzle design of Jonathan Blow’s The Witness and weds it to a Gone Home-style narrative. The use of color is so much more than an artistic choice; it’s an intrinsic part of the game’s language.
In pursuit of perfecting that language, it’s left a large percentage of gamers unable to play the game as intended. We’re in a golden age of gaming accessibility. Look at the way something like The Last of Us Part 2 accommodates everything from vision impairment to muscle weakness. Blue Prince boldly and coldly ignores that, making the game feel incredibly antagonistic toward someone like me.
Dogubomb is working on a colorblind assist mode, but there is no information on when it will be available. The fact that the developer spent years quality testing its intricate puzzle system and this basic concern didn’t get addressed in the final release sours an otherwise truly revolutionary title.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
