The Stack

Heavy plot spoilers for Blue Prince ahead. But be aware that I still haven’t finished the later post-game parts and everything I say about the story should be taken with a grain of salt.

It must be said: The whole idea of a will with strange conditions attached to it, especially conditions in the form of a challenge, is pretty paternalistic, even patriarchal. It’s a way for an elder male figure — it always seems to be an uncle, which is to say, someone who isn’t even your real father — to exert control over you even in death, to demand that you prove yourself to him and make youself worthy in his eyes, because that’s what matters, the approval of old dead dudes. If, as in Blue Prince, it comes with encouraging words along the lines of “I already know you can pass this challenge”, that somehow feels even worse.

So it comes as a welcome surprise that the story of Blue Prince actually mainly foregrounds the relationship between the player character and his mother. Mother-son relationships are seriously underexplored territory for games.

Like everything about this game, it’s disguised at first. You’ll most likely find references to the mysterious disappearance of beloved children’s author Marion Marigold long before you have any idea who she is or how her story relates to yours. But as you learn more, it becomes apparent that (A) “Marion Marigold” is the pen name of Mary Epsen, the mother of Simon Jones, the player character; (B) she was under investigation by a tyrranical and censorious regime that thought it saw seditious messages in her picture books; (C) her disappearance was deliberate and meticulously planned, a way to get out of the reach of the authorities; and (D) she was heavily involved in planning and implementing the challenge you’re going through. It’s not primarily about Great-Uncle Herbert testing your worthiness. It’s about Mary doing what she can to convey the truth about what happened to her, and about the deeper family secrets, without alerting the rest of the world. Because she cares about you and wants the best for you, and under the circumstances that meant removing herself from your life, to minimize your exposure to the risks her presence brings, but it also meant making you aware of who you really are. The cutscene you get on reaching Room 46 has her reading one of her stories to Simon, and the voice acting absolutely cements the idea that this is fundamentally a story about maternal love.

But then I kept investigating. One of the remaining seemingly-unrelated plot threads from earlier was a report about the theft of the Ruby Crown, a symbol of the tyrannical regime’s authority, from a museum. In Room 46, you find the same crown, its rubies removed and replaced with sapphires. How did that wind up there? After some time, I found Mary’s hideout in an abandoned railway station, where she and her accomplices planned the heist. Guns of various sorts lay scattered around. Mary wasn’t simply an unfairly persecuted innocent. She was a rebel, an insurgent, and some notes left behind in her rebel lair make her mindset clear. Whether she was a rebel before she became a target, or whether being targetted led her to rebellion, I’m still not entirely clear on. (Possibly I could resolve this by comparing some dates on newspaper clippings.) But it led me to re-evaluate everything I knew about her. She risked her life and liberty for what, the idea “That crown doesn’t belong in a museum, it belongs on the head of my son”? Is that a good thing to want? I get that the current government is a bad one, but “The reason things are bad is that we’ve got the wrong absolute monarch” isn’t a message I trust. There’s a history book you can find, heavily censored by the authorities. When you later get a look at the uncensored version, it turns out to be nakedly propagandistic in a way that didn’t inspire any confidence in the regime’s opponents.

So, the story as I’ve experienced is one of maternal comfort, which is then complicated by doubt, like in Steven Universe. But it occurs to me that this is only because of the order in which I discovered things. There’s no reason why a player couldn’t reach the hideout before Room 46, and I assume there are plenty of players who have done so. Those players had a story in which what they learn about Mary’s darker side is later tempered by reassurance that she did it all for love of her son. This is a very different story than the one I got!

My usual assumption is that when interactive works make it possible to vary the order of fixed plot elements, it prevents those elements from forming a meaningful narrative arc, turning it into a sort of unstructured mass of plot-stuff. There are often good reasons to allow variation anyway, based on player agency, but that just means it’s a compromise between authorial control and player control, between what makes for effective narrative and what makes for effective interactivity. But this makes me doubt that idea a little. The order of discovery here makes for meaningfully different stories, but I can’t say they’re weaker for it.