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sam.bigos
It's dangerous to stay a while and listen.

Blue Prince - Notebook snapshot at day 35

May 22, 2025

For posterity I thought it would be nice to record a snapshot of my notes and thoughts at Blue Prince day 35. For some less spoilery thoughts on the game you can read my previous post.

For obvious reasons this is spoiler heavy!

Room 46

I think I reached Room 46 around day 20. I entered the inner sanctum by rotating the circular platform thingy in the underground from the basement side (through the foundation room), and then going back out and entering the underground through the crypt, which required activating the statues in the order depicted in the chapel room. Pulling the lever in the inner sanctum opened the door to Room 46 and I then opened the west antechamber door using the lever in the secret garden (I might have found the key in the music room but not sure).

The first time you enter Room 46 the credits roll and the next day starts, you don’t actually get to see what’s in there. The cutscene is Mary reading The Red Prince book to one of her sons. From the bunk room we know Mary had two sons and I’m thinking the one she’s reading to in the cutscene is your brother and not you. One being the blue prince (Simon) and the other the red prince. Perhaps something bad happened to the red prince?

It actually took me a while to go back because I was checking out other things. In the meantime I had discovered how to drain the fountain to create a way to enter the other side of the underground without needing to draft the crypt, which was useful. I’d also found how to open the other doors to the antechamber, in addition to the secret garden unlocking the west door, a lever behind one of the locked doors in the great hallway opens the east door, and finding the broken lever and then using it to pull the lever in the greenhouse opens the southern door. I’d also discovered a secret path around the back of the underground rotating platform which allowed me to enter the inner sanctum directly through the foundation.

Actually exploring Room 46 for the first time revealed a document with hints for where the eight sanctum keys are, to open the doors in the inner sanctum. Here are my notes on that:

Also in Room 46 was the Blue Crown, which I thought would be permanent, since the effect seemed pretty minor (actually can’t remember what it was), and having to open Room 46 to get it means by the time you get it, it’s not very useful. This probably lends credence to the idea that the crown has some other purpose other than just its inherent effect.

There was also a threatening note in the drawer made of cut-out letters, saying “This secret room is not as secure as you thought. We have your letters. 8 letters 8 payments 100 gold instructions to follow.” There are eight red letters hidden inside eight safes, though Alzara suggested I can only open seven of them. I assume these are the letters the message is referencing. Assuming the message was sent to Herbert Sinclair, it suggests he’s in some sort of trouble with some shady organisation. Perhaps this organisation infiltrated Room 46 as he was setting it up for Simon (the player), or maybe this whole inheritance game was not Sinclair’s idea at all, and he was murdered? Lots of potential implications here.

Letters

I’m pretty sure the red letters are kept inside safes which are in various rooms. I’ve been making slow progress here. I opened the safe in the boudoir using the code 1225, or christmas day, hinted at by the photo on the desk. It contained a letter from Daniel, Simon’s father and Mary’s (aka Marion) husband. The letter is addressed to Herbert Sinclair and chasitses him for staying silent about Mary’s ‘disappearance’.

So Sinclair and Daniel obviously knew about what Mary was doing, i.e. trying to steal the old Orinda jewels from a museum in Fenn, to try and claim her position as royalty. There’s a heavily redacted history book you can read in the library room that details how the old kingdom of Orinda was taken by force from the Oris. Mary thinks she is from that bloodline and wants to claim her birthright. There’s a note in the hideout (accessed through the reservoir) which contains the following sentence, “Tomorrow, the Crown of Orinda will finally return to Oris.” Oris being the first king of what I assume is Fenn Aires (the continent/country the manor is in). It seems unlikely that she means this literally, as in Oris is still alive. Perhaps she means returning the crown to Oris’ tomb, or perhaps is figuratively using Oris to refer to her bloodline.

Presumably more will be know after reading the other letters, but that’s where I’ve been stuck for a while. The missing letter picture puzzle, when solved, gives the message:

Eight safes that presumably contain 8 (or 7) letters. I know the safe in the boudoir is unlocked by a date (Christmas day), so I assume all are cracked using ‘eight dates’. What those dates are though, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’ve also only found half the safes: study, boudoir, drawing room, and office.

The one in the drawing room is perplexing because SMALL GATES could be a wordplay on ‘small gaites’ i.e. small strides, and the drawing room is full of pictures of people/animals with either big or small strides. There are 19 pictures of ‘small gaites’, but 19 doesn’t crack the safe. I also tried four numbers, each being the number of small gaites on each wall, but no dice. It’s also not a date. So I’m a bit stuck with that one.

The office safe was presumably set by Sinclair, so will be a date that is significant to him. Such as the birthday of his niece or grand-nephew. There’s also the cryptic message in the drawer which highlights a book called “March of the Count”. March is a month, so perhaps part of the safe’s code. There are also busts of Count Isaac Gates littered around the office, which has to be significant considering COUNT and GATES are on the missing letters puzzle solution, and Count is on the message in the drawer. But I’m drawing blanks on a code for the safe.

Sigils

There are 8 sigils, one for each country. One of the inner sanctum doors had the sigil puzzle for Fenn Aires behind it, which is the one with the pentagon in the middle. From the sigil on Mary’s fake passports in the vault I was able to align everything to unlock the path forward, which didn’t reveal a whole lot other than the trickiest Mora Jai box yet. There was a postcard written by Herbert Sinclair, which seemed to be sent to the estate as a sort of keepsake or memory of his travels. I think these postcards will give the solution to the pins-on-the-map puzzle in Room 46.

By combining the magnifying glass and metal detector I was able to make a burner which lit the candles in the candle room underground. That opened up a stairway down to the old mine. There seems to be a lot of lore surrounding this place, with an expedition into the depths all the way back in 1915 by the Sinclair who was baron of Mt. Holly at the time. In addition to that there was a semi-destroyed book about the sigils and how read the different elements. I imagine I will have to construct some of the sigils from descriptions of each kingdom rather than from a picture of the sigil. There was a cryptic note at the top of the clocktower which I thought might be something to do with this.

Chess

There’s something going on with the chess pieces in some rooms. Unlike the framed pictures puzzle, the chess pieces are locked to the room rather than the house cell they’re located in. There’s a chess board inside the study with only a single king placed there. I imagine counting all the pieces in all the rooms will give the rest of the pieces (i.e. 1 more king, 2 queens, 4 rooks, etc), but not sure what happens after that.

There’s also a puzzle in the underground mine, reached through the candle room, that requires drafting a room that contains each of the different chess pieces, and then placing them on a board which is the same shape as the estate (5x9). When a piece is correctly place, the cell lights up. I haven’t done this yet, I’m guessing it might activate the lift at the end of this section which would potentially give another path into the underground section (though with the fountain drained that doesn’t really help much, so hopefully it’s something a bit more).

Children of Black Water

The group trying to reclaim their birthright, the crown of Oris, call themselves the Children of Black Water, which relates to Blackwater as well. This seems to be the main mystery of the game, which everything connects to. Mary is the leader of this group, plus I think another author and a publisher. There are newspaper clippings in the archive which lay out the timeline of Mary’s (Marigold’s) disappearance, during which they were hiding out in the safehouse which used to be an old metro station.

Also in this safehouse was a note showing the security monitors of the security room, with one marked to ‘delete this’. Looking at the screens, this is the archive room, so I’m wondering if this is suggesting whoever was compiling the newspaper clippings was learning too much and Mary wanted to eliminate them. I think I need to remove the archive room from the draft pool, which I think can be done with the spray can item. Perhaps after removing it from the pool, something else will appear on the monitor?

The Red Prince, the book Mary wrote was intially deemed too political for publication so she had to change the ending. The book seems to be an allegory for the old king Oris, and it seems to suggest Simon (the player) is some sort of reincarnation of Oris and the deserving heir to the Orinda kingdom. This fits very well within the structure of the game, with the first ‘act’ being Simon inheriting the estate from his uncle by finding Room 46, and the second act revealing he’s actually trying to inherit the throne from Oris, with the help of his mother, Mary. Super neat.

Trophies

My current trophies are:

I got close to getting the trophy of wealth. I had a great run with a vault, office, lots of crates, that allowed me to buy everything in the showroom. I was expecting to get the trophy but as I bought the final item I was gutted as it revealed the trophy costing another 100 gold. However I’ve since discovered a few more ways to get gold. By combining the coin purse and lucky rabbit’s foot you can make a lucky purse which doubles all gold gain. There’s also the piggy-bank in the chapel which I think will give all the ‘donations’ up until that point. With the lucky purse and that, plus a vault and office, that should be enough for this trophy.

As for the others, some will come naturally during progression (the puzzle ones, the sigil one). Some seem very challenging like getting to Room 46 in one day. I know Dare mode can be bought in the gift shop but not sure about curse mode.

Upgrades

The upgrades are really interesting and often a difficult decision to make. Typically I went for consistency upgrades such as extra gems or keys, over other quite conditional upgrades. Steps are plentiful late-game so things like adding dice to the bedroom is incredibly valuable.

Probably the most valuable upgrade I’ve found so far is to the billiard room, the upgrade which gives a keycard when ending the day there, which seemed like a no-brainer. It’s pretty easy to do that every day, which means no longer worrying about security doors (I subsequently increased the rarity of the security room), and also it’s now possible to start from the foundation. Though it’s probably not advised to skip the lower ranks completely due to lack of resources, it can be useful to draft more dead-ends knowing a guaranteed path to the foundation.

Other stuff

Blackbridge

Powering the laboratory with the boiler room enabled the solving of the periodic table puzzle, which opened the external door to the Blackbridge hideout place. There’s a computer that requires an admin key that I haven’t figured out, and there’s a large door that seemingly requires two microchips to open. There’s one microchip there already but I haven’t found any others in the house. I’m wondering if there’s some metagamey stuff required to get the extra microchips, because the microchip respawns every day and can also be carried over to the next day with coat check room and the moon amulet from the showroom. That makes it possible to acquire three in a single day, but I haven’t tried doing it yet.

Blue flames

There are four fire bowls outside the estate entrance, at the border where the edge of the estate meets the sheer cliff face of the mountain. I’ve found three of the valves which light the torches. One in the mine entrance, one in the orchard (the code to the gate being in a picture in the darkroom), and one somewhere else I can’t remember. I need to find one more to light all four torches and presumably reveal something useful.

Alzara

Alzara is an animatronic fortune teller that presumably tells you what might happen in the future. These are pretty cryptic. I’ve seen four of them, these are some quick notes I took, but there’s seemingly no way to rewatch them.

1 - standing on beach of white sands trying to find something. black cat tied to static red flag. locked door with no key (the safehouse). 2 - crashed car near the fountain. manor in ruins, eight red envelopes, on eight pedestals, containing either letters by eight different hands, of which you will find and read seven. 3 - darkroom and nursery connected with shadowy man standing in door. missing item from lobby. creepy statue in tombs. 4 - children running in the forst, echoes in the courtyard, sinclair sitting in old chair drawing room. all inheritors of the estate meet a different end but in the same chair.

Herbert Sinclair’s tomb room

There seems to be a secret door in the room of the tomb containing Herbert’s sarcophogus. I don’t know how to open it yet (or if it’s a red herring). Perhaps it requires activating the statues in a different order.

Above the rotating platform

In the underground on the way to the inner sanctum, there’s a side tunnel that leads to a door which opens when the red box in the boiler room is powered. This leads to a section above the rotating platform, which has a locked gate that takes a four letter code. Not sure what that is yet.

Powering rooms with the boiler room

In addition to powering the pump room to drain the reservoir, I think there might be other rooms that do something extra when powered. The furnace and the freezer potentially. There are items frozen in the freezer, and raising the temperature would presumably free them. There’s also a note in the laboratory about doing this. There’s also a gap in the wall filled with ice which might be accessible if the ice is melted.

Sheet music

Finding all the sheet music pages revealed the location of the conservatory blueprints, which is a great room because it allows tweaking of the room probabilities, which is one of the only true ‘deckbuilding’ mechanics in the game (others I’ve found being the spray bottle which removes rooms from the pool, but this is very rare, and the spanner which can change the rarity of mechanical rooms).

Biggest runs so far

Day 27

Day 30

Day 33

Day 34