How playing Blue Prince IRL solved a real historical mystery

There are mysteries hidden everywhere. That's the essence of Blue Prince, a stunning puzzle game from indie developer Dogubomb that fuses fiendish brainteasers with roguelike randomization. It's also true to real life, as I learned during an expedition with a historian to a medieval church to crack a mystery from a manuscript over half a millennium old.

Blue Prince is arguably the best puzzle game since Obra Dinn. It's certainly the most innovative. As the great-nephew of the eccentric Baron Sinclair, you are set to inherit his business empire, but only on the condition that you can somehow find the 46th room of his 45-room mansion.

The layout of this mansion changes daily: turning a door handle lets you choose one of three different rooms to appear on the other side, generating a new configuration each day. Reaching that final room demands careful resource balancing of keys, the gems needed to unlock high-level rooms, and your exploration energy, while ensuring the geometry of the house doesn't lock you into dead ends.

It's a puzzle box that you must build before you can crack it. Some rooms change how others work, or permanently alter the mansion and its estate, revealing more mysterious puzzles. There's a wealth of information hidden in documents, and it can take hours to realize that something that seemed like backstory is actually a clue to a deeper mystery.

I've been playing through Blue Prince with a particularly excellent puzzle cracker, Dr. Sarah Gilbert. She's a historian who works with medieval manuscripts at several colleges at the University of Cambridge. These are ancient books, so old that the term 'book' hardly applies. They're handwritten, in Latin, medieval French, German, or English, on animal skin. Her job is to identify which texts are bound inside each creaking volume, and what its history has been - a far harder task than it sounds.

Medieval manuscript owners constantly altered them with the help of bookbinders, curating a set of texts they thought fit well together, just like you might curate a music playlist. Sections get rearranged, lost, stolen, damaged, and repaired; scribes copy errors into texts and add their own; generations of authors add annotations and their own naming and indexing systems…

Given her day job, it's no surprise that Dr. Gilbert plays puzzle games to win. She's used to puzzles that might not even have solutions, where the clues themselves are a challenge to decipher. She takes notes with multiple colors of ink, and she annotates everything. By the end of a weekend spent gaming, we had over forty pages.

If you haven't played a puzzle game with a co-pilot, I recommend it. The second perspective is excellent for working past puzzles, and it's great fun to espouse theories like conspiracy theorists and high-five when you finally crack a sticky puzzle. After two days with Blue Prince, we had one last day of puzzle-solving - in real life.

Dr. Gilbert was hunting for a dead man. While cataloguing a curious volume of medical lore, she discovered a note from a former owner claiming he had inherited it from his uncle, Sir John Wharton. According to the note, Wharton had "died at Kirkby Thore in Lent-tide in the year of our Lord 1484, in the second year of the reign of King Richard the Third, dominical letter B" - that last letter being an old church dating tool. Learning the definite date at which a manuscript changed hands is a rare prize. There's just one problem. The three days didn't match up at all.

Another sentence in the note hinted at a possible resolution to the puzzle of the dates. Wharton was buried "in the nave of the church, in the same tomb as his wife" in Kirkby Thore, just an hour's drive from where I lived. His grave marker, if it existed, would have the best answer we were ever likely to get. We arrived at the church with trepidation. Its medieval bones were hard to see - the Victorians had clearly renovated. Inside, it was empty, somber, but obviously still used. The floor of the nave was modern, with no grave marker in sight.

After a weekend poring over inscrutable puzzle rooms, we weren't ready to give up. Maybe the gravestone had moved. Maybe a Victorian architect had recorded it when they replaced the floor, and we'd find the answer in a little church history guide. As we began to scrutinize every corner of the church for clues, I realized we were still playing Blue Prince.

A list of past rectors revealed someone with the same surname as our missing man had been the parish vicar at roughly the right time. A name inscribed on the font shared a surname with the man who had received the manuscript. A framed painting showed the nave as it had been before the Victorian renovation, but there was no trace of the grave. We searched the grounds, in case the marker had moved. It wasn't there.

This was always the most likely outcome: disappointment. But as we left, Dr. Gilbert spotted a little pamphlet, a history of the church. Although the mystery of the manuscript was unanswered, it turns out that we had made a discovery. Between 2015 and 2019, during the most recent church renovation, archaeologists discovered two medieval grave pits and moved the four occupants to new plots in the grounds. They had no idea who they were, but we did: Wharton and his wife. We had intended to solve one mystery, and instead we solved another.

Did playing Blue Prince all weekend help? Perhaps. If we hadn't been completely puzzle mad, primed to scrutinize every detail of an environment for any hint, we might have looked a little less closely, left a little sooner, and never found that pamphlet. Coming so close to missing it makes me realize how easy Blue Prince is, objectively speaking. Every puzzle in Blue Prince has a solution. Every clue has a purpose. Yes, the clues are obtuse, some puzzles are hard, and RNG can make it frustratingly difficult to find the right room to test a theory.

History, on the other hand, cannot be solved. It cannot be completed. It has an infinite number of puzzles, and the few clues that were ever created are almost all lost. If you want to see what a clue to a real puzzle looks like, check out the original document that sent us on our side quest online. If we had missed that pamphlet at the end of our expedition, it would have been years before another historian even considered the manuscript, and decades before one thought to investigate the church.

I'm still playing Blue Prince, swapping notes with Dr. Gilbert. I've made it to room 46. The adventure can stop there, with a cathartic final cutscene and a sense of well-earned accomplishment. But there are more mysteries in the mansion. And unlike Dr. Gilbert's day job, every puzzle in Blue Prince has an answer. Why stop now? We're on a roll.