Blue Prince, the award-winning strategy roguelike for puzzle freaks, is over a year old. But for many of you, the best time to play it was decidedly not a year ago. It’s now.
That’s because Blue Prince has just gotten a major accessibility update that aims to alleviate many of the biggest issues people had with the actual act of playing it, most notably a lack of colorblind accessibility features or controller remapping. Update 1.7 adds Color Assist to the Accessibility menu in-game, which includes the ability to make puzzle colors more vivid, add patterns to puzzle colors to make them even more distinct, and something I haven’t really seen before: a color labeler that just…tells you what color things are:
That’s pretty cool, especially the labeler feature! It is, annoyingly, over a year late. Blue Prince released on April 10 of last year, and it remains wild to me that a game with multiple mandatory puzzles dependent on being able to see and interpret different colors didn’t account for colorblind folks, or couldn’t have at minimum put in the pattern overlays sooner while the team worked on other things. A lot of people who wanted to play Blue Prince a year ago couldn’t. Hopefully now they can.
In addition, developer Dogubomb has added button remapping options both for controller and keyboard (another feature I’m floored wasn’t in there already), options to adjust the game’s cursor opacity, style, and size, a toggle that effectively enables autorun so you don’t have to hold down a button to move at a reasonable pace, and motion assist settings to reduce motion sickness.
The full list of changes, including a number of bug fixes, can be found here. Patch 1.7 is now live on Steam and is on its way shortly to all other platforms pending platform holder approvals.
This won’t be the last major update for Blue Prince. Creator Tonda Ros has promised one big “final update” in 1.10 that will add the missing arcade game Digiblocks, a cat, some more cinematics, and a few other things. This accessibility update covers a meaningful chunk of what Ros promised to add to Blue Prince before he moved on from its development, putting him even closer to closing the book personally on a game that, if you want, doesn’t ever end.
Blue Prince is fantastic, so if you gave it a shot last year and very reasonably bounced off due to not being able to see a dartboard, I highly recommend heading back into the manor now. It’s either a pleasant 20ish-hour puzzling jaunt, or a 100+ hour mindfreak that actively tries to send you spiraling. I belong in the latter category of puzzle sicko and this was one of the best things I played last year.
And seriously, go into this one with a blank notebook. You’ll regret it if you don’t.