The premise sounds like a gimmick and turns out to be an engine. You are Simon P. Jones, fourteen years old, and your great-uncle has left you a house called Mount Holly on one condition: find Room 46. The estate has forty-five rooms. The floor plan is a grid, five wide and nine deep, with the entrance hall at the bottom and a sealed antechamber at the top. Forty-five rooms, forty-six needed. That’s the whole hook, delivered in the first sixty seconds, and it takes most players a very long time to work out what kind of question it actually is.

Blue Prince arrived in April 2025 from Dogubomb — essentially Tonda Ros — published by Raw Fury, on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. It has been described as a puzzle game, a roguelike, a deduction game and a walking sim, and the reason nobody can settle on a label is that its central mechanic belongs to a genre that doesn’t have a name yet. You don’t explore Mount Holly. Youdraft it.

Drafting as level design

Here’s the loop. Open a door, and rather than a room, you get three blueprints: pick one, and it becomes the room behind that door, permanently for this run. Each blueprint shows its footprint — how many doors it has, and which walls they’re on — plus its cost and any rules attached. Some rooms only place in dead ends. Some cost gems. Some can only appear in the outer columns, or in the back half of the estate. Some are rank-limited, appearing once and never again.

Then you walk in, and the room does something. It might contain a key. It might contain a lever, a note, a shop, a security terminal, a slot for a coin. It might contain nothing except three more doors and three more decisions.

The resource that governs all of it issteps. You start each day with a step budget, every room you enter spends one, and when the steps run out the day ends, the house empties, and tomorrow’s Mount Holly is a fresh sheet of paper. Everything you built is gone.

Set that beside how roguelikes normally work and the difference is sharp. InDead Cells orHades, the run generates a level and you react to it. InBlue Prince the run generatesoptions and you author the level from them, which makes every door a small architectural argument with yourself. Do I take the room with four exits because I need the reach, or the room with one exit because it has a chest in it and I’m nearly out of steps? Do I place the Boiler Room now, knowing it’s cheap and useless, because placing anything else here costs gems I don’t have?

The genius is that the drafting rules are themselves the puzzle. A room that only spawns in dead ends means dead ends have value. A room that must sit on the west wall means the west wall is a resource. Within a few hours you stop seeing a floor plan and start seeing a constraint satisfaction problem with wallpaper. I can think of no other game where the act ofbuilding the dungeon is the intellectual content and the act of walking through it is the reward.

The step economy is the difficulty curve

The elegance of steps as a currency is that it prices everything at once. Curiosity costs steps. Backtracking costs steps. A room that turns out to be a dead end with a locked door costs a step going in and, if you routed badly, several more getting back out. There is no health bar and nothing kills you; the only enemy is the walk itself.

That makesBlue Prince one of the very few games wherelayout efficiency is the skill. Good players don’t have faster reflexes. They have a better sense of the grid — they know that placing a corridor at row three buys them lateral movement for the rest of the day, that a room with doors on three sides at the bottom of the map is worth more than the same room at the top, that spending eight steps on a detour to a shop is only correct if you already have the coins. The difficulty curve is invisible because it’s inside your own planning, and it flattens the moment you get better at reading the grid, which is the most honest kind of progression there is.

The genuine cruelty is that Mount Holly is stingy with the thing you need most, which is reach. Room 46 sits at the top of the grid. Getting there requires an unbroken chain of drafted rooms from the entrance hall to the antechamber, which requires door alignment, which requires luck, which requires that you spend your entire day building a corridor rather than looting one. The house is constantly offering you interesting rooms that lead nowhere and boring rooms that lead north, and choosing correctly means choosing boredom over and over. That’s a real design risk, and the game takes it deliberately.

What actually persists

If the house resets every day, what carries? Two things, and the split is the reason the game works.

The first is a modest layer of permanent unlocks — keys, codes, tools, changes to what can appear in the drafting pool. It’s real, it’s slow, and it’s the least interesting part.

The second isyou. What actually persists across days is the notebook in your head. The house is stuffed with documents: letters, ledgers, memos, a newspaper, plaques, timetables, a set of family records that don’t agree with each other. Read them and a second game emerges underneath the drafting one, made of numbers you can’t use yet, names that mean nothing yet, and rules that turn out to be literal. The most powerful thing you can take out of a run is a fact.

This is the same trickReturn of the Obra Dinn andLorelei and the Laser Eyes run: the gate is knowledge, and knowledge doesn’t reset.Blue Prince welds that to a roguelike’s structural churn, so the randomness that would ruin a fixed puzzle game becomes the delivery mechanism for the clues. A run that ends four rooms short of the antechamber still hands you three documents, and the documents are the actual progress. Once you understand that, the failed days stop feeling like failures. You aren’t trying to reach Room 46 today. You’re trying to learn something today, and Room 46 falls out of enough somethings.

I’d argue the real ancestor is the old cassette-era adventure: the games I typed into a C64 in the eighties where you kept the map on graph paper because the machine wasn’t going to keep it for you, and the memory the game relied on was yours.Blue Prince is that idea rebuilt with a modern designer’s understanding of variance. The graph paper is back. Get a real notebook — the in-game journal does some of the filing, and it doesn’t do the thinking.

Where it fights itself

Two things chafe, and both come from the same source.

Variance can hand you a genuinely dead day. Not a hard day — anothing day, where the drafts come up cheap and doorless, you’re out of gems by row three, and you walk the corridor already knowing there’s no route north. Ten minutes of a game that has no combat and no failure state is ten minutes of walking. The design’s answer is that documents still drop, and the answer holds most of the time. It doesn’t hold all of the time.

And the late game asks a lot. Once you’ve cracked the surface,Blue Prince keeps going — considerably further than most players expect — into puzzles that assume you’ve been transcribing details for thirty hours and cross-referencing them off-screen. That’s not a flaw so much as a filter, and the game is admirably unbothered about who it filters out. It won’t tell you when you’re done. It won’t tell you that you missed something. It just leaves it there.

The verdict

Blue Prince is the rarest thing in games: a mechanic nobody has done before, executed by someone who understood exactly what it was for. The drafting isn’t a delivery system for the puzzle box; the draftingis the puzzle box, and the manor is the physical form of a decision tree. It is also gentle, funny, beautifully lit, and quietly sad about the family it’s describing — a game that could have been a pure abstraction and chose to be a house instead.

The step economy will frustrate anyone who wants a puzzle game to sit still and be solved. Everyone else gets forty hours of the specific, disreputable joy of realising that a note you skimmed on day six was an instruction. Play it on PC if you want the notebook open on a second screen; the console versions play identically and you’ll just want paper instead.

If it lands, go toLorelei and the Laser Eyes next for the same respect for your attention, orAnimal Well for the same conviction that the real progression happens in your head.

Spoilers below

The moment the game shows its hand is when you realise the forty-five-room count was never the constraint. Mount Holly’s grid has edges, and the game spends its opening hours training you to treat those edges as walls. They are not. Once the estate proves it can extend past its own footprint, the drafting rules you’d internalised as physics turn out to be conventions, and every “impossible” placement you’d written off becomes a question again.

That’s the structural rhyme with the story. The house is a document about a family that lied about its own shape — an inheritance built on a boundary that was drawn wrong on purpose. Simon is handed a floor plan and a puzzle, and the puzzle is that the floor plan is a claim, not a fact. Learning to distrust the grid and learning to distrust the paperwork are the same act, arriving at the same time, which is about as tight as a game and its theme ever get.

About six hours intoLorelei and the Laser Eyes I got up, went to the kitchen drawer, and came back with a pad and a biro. I hadn’t done that for a game in a very long time — long enough that the gesture felt archaeological. The pad filled up. By the end it had a page of four-digit numbers, a rough map of a hotel’s ground floor, two dates I could not stop seeing, and a doodle of a hedge maze with an arrow and the wordWHY.

Simogo’s game, out on 16 May 2024 for Nintendo Switch and PC and published by Annapurna Interactive, is a fifteen-hour puzzle box that has made one enormous, deliberate, slightly rude decision: it will not remember anything on your behalf. That decision is the design. Everything else is decoration on top of it, admittedly some of the most beautiful decoration anyone shipped that year.

The invitation, spoiler-free

It is 1963. A woman is invited to a hotel in central Europe by a filmmaker named Renzo Nero, who wants her for a project he is not in a hurry to explain. The hotel is called the Letztes Jahr —Last Year — and if you have seen the Alain Resnais film that name is nodding at, you will know roughly what kind of trouble you are in before you have opened a single door.

Inside, the place is a museum of itself. Rooms hold documents, exhibits, film equipment, correspondence, ledgers. There are locked doors with numeric keypads and locked doors with stranger requirements. There is a maze outside. There are machines running crude, chunky little programs that feel decades older than the hotel’s own fiction. And there is an escalating suspicion, gathering across hours, that the building is a single object with a single lock on it.

The presentation is black, white and one shade of red, rendered with fixed camera angles and a deliberately coarse resolution that makes a corridor look like a woodcut with a light on in it. It is the best-looking game Simogo has made, which for the studio behindYear Walk,Device 6 andSayonara Wild Hearts is a genuine claim.

The mechanic is your notebook

Here is the systems read, and it is short, because the whole thing rests on one refusal.

Modern adventure design has spent fifteen years quietly assuming responsibility for your attention. You find a code; the game logs it. You find a clue; a journal entry appears, timestamped, cross-referenced, filed under the correct case. Some games go further and grey out the puzzle you’ve already got the answer to. The intent is kindness. The effect is that you stop holding anything in your head, because you have been trained — correctly, by the interface — that holding things is somebody else’s job.

Lorelei keeps a notebook. You can call it up. It contains almost nothing you would call a solution. It has a scattering of noted material and a great deal of white space, and the white space is deliberate: it is the exact shape of what the game has decided you should be carrying yourself.

So you carry it. You read a plaque in the east wing in hour three and use what it said in hour eleven, and the reason you can is that the plaque went intoyou rather than into a menu. Simogo understood something that a decade of quality-of-life features has obscured: the feeling people describe as “this game respects my intelligence” is usually the feeling of having been permitted to store something.

And the payoff is physical. When a door opens because you remembered a number from a room you left four hours ago, the sensation in your chest is your own memory working, which the game has arranged to happen and then stepped politely out of the way of. A solved puzzle feels like a solved puzzle. This feels like being handed proof that you still have the equipment.

The real ancestor of this is the code wheel

Everyone will tell you the ancestors areMyst andThe Witness, and they’re in the family. But I loaded games off tape into a C64 when the industry’s answer to piracy was to make the game unplayable without the paper that came in the box, andLorelei is descended from that far more directly than from anything Cyan built.

The code wheel, the manual lookup, the dark-red-on-black page you had to hold under a lamp: those were anti-copying measures, cynical in origin, and they had a completely accidental side effect. They put part of the game outside the machine. The desk you played at became part of the apparatus. You hadstuff — a pad, a manual, a wheel — and the fiction leaked onto it.

That vanished, for good reasons, and what replaced it was the journal. The journal is more convenient and it is a smaller experience, because it moved the whole game back inside the box.

Lorelei puts it back on the desk, by choice this time, with no cynical motive at all. And because it’s a choice rather than a defence against piracy, it can bedesigned: the information you need to externalise is metered, the puzzles that depend on recall are placed at distances that a human memory can actually span, and nothing in the fifteen hours ever requires you to have transcribed something that wasn’t obviously worth transcribing. That last part is the craft. Plenty of games make you take notes. This one isfair about it.

Two other things are worth flagging for anyone who cares about how the parts fit. The camera is fixed, which is a survival-horror inheritance, and it functions here the way it did in 1996: the frame is chosen, so the frame is a statement, so an object placed in the corner of a composed shot is being pointed at. And the in-fiction machines, running their blocky little programs, do more than provide period colour — they let the game change what a puzzleis without breaking its own reality, which is a trick most games only manage by cheating.

Where it fights itself

The pacing sags. There is a stretch in the middle where the density of documents outruns the density of ideas, and the reading becomes a task rather than a pleasure — an inevitable hazard when your design principle isthe player holds everything, because the moment the player’s arms are full, every new page feels like weight.

Some of the maths puzzles are maths puzzles. That sounds churlish; I mean it precisely. The best locks in this game are made of the fiction — you open them because you understood the hotel. A few are made of arithmetic, and those ones could be lifted out and dropped into any other game with no loss, which in a design this coherent registers as a seam.

And the fiction is dense in a way that will lose people. Simogo has never been afraid of obliquity, and the film-history apparatus around Nero rewards a particular kind of viewer. If you want the story to resolve, it will — the puzzle box is honest and it does open — but the game’s tolerance for you shrugging and moving on is lower than most.

The verdict

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the most confident piece of adventure design of 2024, and its confidence is expressed almost entirely through subtraction. No quest log. No highlighting. No greyed-out solved puzzles. No hand on your elbow. What it gives back for all that removal is the experience of your own head doing the work, which is the thing the genre used to sell and mostly forgot it was selling.

Play it on whatever you have — Switch and PC both do the monochrome justice, and the handheld option suits a game you will want to put down and think about. Play it with paper. The pad is the intended hardware.

If this is your shelf,Return of the Obra Dinn is the other great two-tone deduction machine and the obvious next stop;Tunic is the game that took the same 8-bit inheritance and made themanual the thing you assemble; andThe Case of the Golden Idol trusts you in exactly the same way, at a fraction of the length.

Spoilers below

The single sharpest structural move in the game is that the hotel is itself the puzzle, and the individual locks are its teeth.

You feel this the first time a solution requires you to compose two things that the game never presented in the same room, the same hour, or the same register — a date from a document, a shape from a screen. At that moment the map in your head stops being a route and becomes adiagram, and everything you have written down reorganises itself around a centre you hadn’t noticed you were circling.

That is why the note-taking has to be real, and why a journal would have destroyed the game rather than eased it. An auto-log stores facts as a list. Lists have no shape. The pad on your desk, by the tenth hour, is full of arrows — you drew connections as you found them, and the drawing is the act of understanding. Simogo could not have given you that, because the whole value is that you made it.

The title, by then, has stopped being a piece of Simogo whimsy. Laser eyes cut through. Memory is what you cutwith. The game hands you a labyrinth and withholds a thread, and the ending’s real trick is that when you finally see the centre, you understand you have been building the thread out of your own recall the entire time — which is, when you think about what a puzzle box is actually for, the only honest way it could ever have opened.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from modern puzzle games. It isn’t the puzzles. It’s thedistance between them — the walk back to the thing you already solved, the second cutscene explaining the lever, the collectible you’re meant to want. Most puzzle games are a good idea wrapped in forty minutes of administration.

Cocoon has none of that on it. Geometric Interactive’s debut, released on 29 September 2023 across PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch under Annapurna Interactive, runs somewhere around five hours and spends all five of them doing the one thing it exists to do. I have played puzzle games since the C64 was the only machine in the house, and I can count on one hand the ones this disciplined.

The idea, stated once

You are a small winged thing. You walk. You have one action button. You can pick up a glowing orb, and it sits on your back like a rucksack.

Each orb is a world. Set it on a pad and step in, and you are inside it — a whole biome, with its own colour, its own creatures, its own puzzles. Step onto another pad and you are spat back out, standing next to the orb you were just living in.

That’s the sentence. Everything Cocoon does for five hours is a consequence of it.

Because an orb is a worldand an object, you can carry a world into another world. You can be inside orb A, holding orb B, and set B down and enter it — you are now two worlds deep. Later you’ll be carrying a world that contains the world you need to be in, and you will have to think about what “inside” means for about ninety seconds before it clicks into place.

And because an orb is an object, it can also be atool. Each one lends a power to whoever’s carrying it. So an orb is simultaneously a place you can go, a key you can hold, and a thing that has to be somewhere for a puzzle in a different place to work. Three roles, one noun, zero explanation.

Teaching with the level instead of the text

Cocoon has no dialogue. No text. No tutorial pop-up telling you to press the button. No hint system, no HUD, no map, no journal.

This is easy to describe as minimalism and get wrong. Minimalism is what it looks like. What it actually is isteaching — every mechanic gets introduced in a room where only one thing can happen, in a place where the wrong answer is visibly the wrong answer. You learn the orb-as-tool idea in a corridor where the tool is the only variable. You learn nesting in a chamber that gives you two orbs and a very short leash. By the time the game combines the ideas, you’ve already been quietly examined and passed.

Jeppe Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer on Limbo and Inside at Playdead, and this is the same craft with the safety off. Limbo taught you by killing you; the rooms were short, the deaths were instructive, and the restart was instant. Cocoon barely kills you at all, and it doesn’t need to. It teaches bygeometry — a ledge you can see and can’t reach, a pad that’s clearly a pad, a door that clearly wants something. The lesson arrives through your eyes before it arrives through your hands.

That’s an old skill and a rare one. The real ancestor here is Geoff Crammond’sThe Sentinel (1986), which I played on a C64 in a room with the curtains shut and no idea what I was doing for the first hour. The Sentinel had a handful of verbs and no story at all, and it taught you its entire logic by putting you on a hill and letting you look. Cocoon has that same faith: that a player looking at a well-built space will work it out, and that working it out is the whole product.

Portal (2007) is the other obvious relative, and Cocoon is more austere than Portal — no voice in your ear, no jokes, no character to be charmed by. What it keeps is Portal’s teaching curve, where the tutorial and the game are the same object and you can’t see the seam.

The loop, and why the loop holds

Here’s the mechanical thing I keep turning over.

Most puzzle games have a currency problem. They need to hold back abilities so the difficulty can rise, so they lock things behind doors, gate them behind progress, hand them to you on a schedule. The gating becomes the pacing, and you can feel the designer’s hand on the tap.

Cocoon solves this by making the abilityportable and physical. You don’t unlock the power — you’recarrying it, and you can put it down. So the difficulty rises through logistics rather than through permissions. The question stops being “do I have the tool” and becomes “where does the tool have to be standing while I’m somewhere else”. The game never has to take anything away from you. It only has to build a room where you need to be in two places at once.

That’s a beautiful bit of economy, and it has a downstream effect the whole game rides on:backtracking stops being punishment. In a Metroidvania, going back is a tax you pay for the design’s shape. In Cocoon, going backis the puzzle — the return trip is the move, the carrying is the thinking. Walking is never dead time, because the thing on your back is the reason you’re walking.

The other place the fat gets trimmed is failure. Boss encounters are pattern-reading with instant retries; there is no resource attrition, no inventory management, no lives system left over from an arcade that closed thirty years ago. When you die, you are back a few seconds later, and the game has correctly assumed that your punishment was already the fact that you were wrong.

Where it costs itself something

I’d be a bad witness if I said the discipline is free.

Cocoon is a game with almost no friction, and friction is where a lot of people findfeeling. There’s nothing here to be furious at, nothing to grind against, nobody to like. The world is gorgeous — Erwin Kho’s biomechanical architecture is genuinely strange, all chitin and wet metal and machines that look grown rather than built — and it stays at arm’s length. You will not carry a character out of this game, because there isn’t one.

The difficulty sits in a narrow band, too. The puzzles areclean — nearly every one lands with the small satisfying click of a well-made lid — and clean means the ceiling stays low. Nothing in Cocoon will hold you for an hour the way a late Obra Dinn deduction will, or leave you filling a physical notebook. If your favourite feeling in a puzzle game is being genuinely stuck and slightly insulted by it, Cocoon will feel like it’s letting you off.

And the ending is where the restraint runs out of road. A game this wordless has to land its close on shape and sound alone, and Cocoon’s finish is more of a chord than a sentence. It resolves. Whether itmeans anything is between you and the credits.

The verdict

Cocoon is the best-engineered puzzle game since Return of the Obra Dinn, and it wins on completely different ground. Obra Dinn is a mountain you climb with a pencil. Cocoon is a machine with every unnecessary part removed, and the pleasure of it is watching a designer refuse — over and over, for five hours — to pad his own work.

That refusal is worth more than it sounds. This is a game that could have been twelve hours. It could have had a collectible chime and a lore codex and a second act where you revisit the first orb with a new hat. All of that was available, and all of it would have sold, and Carlsen threw the lot away. What’s left is five hours where every single minute is the good part.

Take the afternoon. It only wants one.

What to play next:Chants of Sennaar, which came out the same month and teaches you a language with no lectures either;Tunic, for the other great modern experiment in telling the player nothing; andReturn of the Obra Dinn if you want the version that fights back.

Spoilers below

The nesting reaches its proper depth in the back half, when you’re moving orbs between worlds that are themselves sitting inside orbs, and the game asks you to hold a mental stack three deep. What’s remarkable is that Cocoon never renders this as a diagram. There’s no map of the nesting, no visual aid, no “you are here” — the structure lives entirely in your head, and the game trusts that it will fit there. It does, mostly, and the two or three moments where itdoesn’t quite fit are the most alive the game gets, because you have to stop and physically reason about containment.

The bosses are the one concession to convention, and they’re better than they need to be. Each one is built out of the orb power you’ve just acquired, so the fight functions as an exam on the mechanic — read the tell, apply the verb, repeat with a variation. It’s the Limbo idea again: the encounter is a puzzle wearing a monster costume, and it dies when you’ve understood it rather than when you’ve out-twitched it.

The final stretch collapses the orbs together, and it’s the one time Cocoon reaches for grandeur. It’s a fine ending and a slightly hollow one — the game has spent five hours teaching you that everything means something mechanically, and then closes on something that means somethingthematically, in a register it never taught you to read. I’d have taken one more puzzle over the awe. That’s a small complaint about a game that got almost everything else exactly right.