The title of this article must seem a bit odd, a real puzzle of a sequence of words. But I'll do my best to try and break it down. Yes, the concept of this article is a bit of a stretch, but stick with me and let's see what we can figure out together. So the game Blue Prince - brilliant game, at least a 9/10 for me, has dozens of hours of brilliant and brain-busting gameplay. Little of that will be explored here because there's a specific puzzle in one little corner of this game that I want to focus on today.
There are quite a few puzzles like the one I'm talking about - in Blue Prince, they are called Mora Jai boxes - you press down on the tiles on the box and get the right colors into the corners, and if you do it right, your character is awarded an Allowance Token that helps out with extra money to spend on all future runs in the game - something particularly useful in any game with roguelike elements.
Up until this area of the game, these puzzles were placed sporadically, with simple mechanics and usually one little trick a player had to figure out. They could often be "brute forced" - beaten by just mashing tiles and eventually winning by sheer luck - but in this section of the game, buried somewhere past the end credits that signifies getting really only a small fraction into the game, the puzzle boxes get more difficult but more interesting too.
If you don't know, Blue Prince has quite a bit of history written surrounding it. Serious history. What will start out as happening across interesting snippets of cute world-building will become major themes going well beyond the stated goal of becoming the heir to the huge mansion you're exploring. It takes place on a planet that is not Earth, with politics and a bloody history that were weaved into much of the game's art, music, and style.
The specific puzzle box I want to focus on is themed around the victory of the triumphant army of the authoritarian leaders of the realm of Fenn Aries, the country your character happens to be standing in. Opening these puzzles is not required, but getting the Allowance Tokens is extremely helpful. So while players sometimes are only trying to open these for the money within, this puzzle tries to show us a multi-faceted view of an authoritarian dictatorship and how they manipulate the masses and purposely fan the flames of rebellion. Meanwhile, other factions that move and function outside of the main political arms get caught in the crossfire.
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| A pamphlet explains the new color setup seen in this puzzle. |
The Fenn Aries puzzle box is set up with a bit of text (shown in the screenshot above) that explains that these little tile colors actually represent the people of the realm, and it has a set of rules that is based on similar puzzle boxes seen prior, but some new colors have joined with their own special behaviors.
It may help to see some video footage of someone struggling through this puzzle. The YouTuber About Oliver tried to tackle it here - over a period of 90 minutes, after having struggled with simpler versions of these same style of puzzle boxes in past episodes of his gameplay, he tries to take on this one. He is tuned into the game's history and politics, but he is blind to the idea of these little colored tiles actually representing that struggle. He focuses entirely on the mechanics of the box, and his descent into despair and frustration as he struggles with figuring out what each colored tile does, why it matters, and functionally what he needs to do to open the puzzle box is ... fascinating.
Keep in mind that the man we see playing is no idiot - Oliver has his flights of fancy and he has a reputation of sussing out incredible (but correct) stretches of logic while often missing the obvious solutions right in front of him. But I want to point out that he has many YouTube Let's Plays under his belt of very difficult games, he works as an astrophysicist, handles many puzzles in games well, and absolutely adores Blue Prince in basically every other possible way. In short, he's quite motivated to deep-dive into every mystery this game has to offer. And yet he completely misses the human factor of this one.
If the video above doesn't make it clear what's going on, here are some of the rules he may or may not know during this video that one must follow to open this box:
The initial mystery is knowing what color the corner tiles must become in order to click the outside icons and open the box. It takes some trial and error to learn it, but usually that's quick. If you click those corner icons when the appropriate corner tile matches the color shown, they change to the right color and as long as the associated tile stays that color, you're fine. Get all four corners colored red whatever way you can, click those corner icons, and the box opens. If you click one of those corner icons when the tile it's touching isn't the intended color, you will reset the puzzle back to the beginning and get to try again as much as you want. (If my description isn't working for you, there is a page that describes these boxes in further detail, but beware of spoilers if you intend on playing the game.
There are other tiles on the field, however, and the puzzle box rules center around what happens to the tile you actually clicked:
Black tiles, when clicked, cycle the tiles in the entire row the tile is on to the right. The tile on the right wraps back around to the left side of the same row. These tiles only move horizontally, and not vertically.
Green tiles, when clicked, trade places with their opposite corner or side.
Orange tiles, when clicked, will only do something if two other tiles of the same color are touching them orthogonally (up/down/left/right) - that tile will convert to that surrounding color. Otherwise, clicking an orange tile does nothing. Essentially, they're a mutable faction of people ready to convert in the face of a larger number of surrounding people.
Red tiles, when clicked, will simultaneously convert all black tiles to red and all white tiles to black, signifying their military victory over their enemies, the white tiles. Clicking a red tile twice in a row effectively converts all black and white tiles to red. Keep in mind that red tiles do nothing else - they do not move any tiles.
Gray tiles do nothing when clicked. These represent the politically neutral, unmotivated, inactive. They are critical to the story this puzzle box is telling and to actually beating this particular box, but they are inactive otherwise.
White tiles, when clicked, activate any gray tiles next to them orthogonally, but the white tile you clicked will itself turn gray at the same time. This behavior represents the political cycle of many who simply are too busy to protest and rebel their government (the "grays"), where the rebels (white) getting others involved in the political process is so exhausting - or costly in lives - that in doing so, the group becomes politically inactive themselves. If a white tile is touching multiple gray tiles when the white tile is activated, those gray tiles all turn white while the activated tile becomes gray. This is their best hope: that they can activate multiple gray tiles next to them in order to add to their ranks and not just trade one for the other. To me, these tiles represent the rebels, giving of themselves and their safety to try and motivate the populace to fight authoritarianism.
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| The initial setting of tiles on this puzzle box. |
What's interesting here is that most of the tile colors represent different realms in the known world of Blue Prince and the tiles' behavior mirrors some element of that civilization. Additionally, this particular puzzle box does not end in a victorious fight against tyranny. Instead, you track the uprising of the rebels all around the realm and then Fenn Aries swiftly crushes them.
For this particular puzzle box, you are trying to get red tiles of the oppressive Fenn Aries faction spread to all corners of the realm, subjugating the rebels and "neutral" people and bringing them under your banner. But to do so, you must enable just enough resistance and coax those people into the critical corners of the puzzle. Red tiles can only convert white and black tiles to red, so the challenge is in getting them to all four corners and then clicking the red tile to win. It's only when that hope is spread to all corners are you to defeat it in quick order by activating a red tile to convert the white tiles to black tiles, then again to convert black to red. That is how you win: giving the resistance a glimmer of victory and then smashing it into pieces.
The best way to approach this puzzle box, in my experience, is to understand the rules that each tile abides by (as I mentioned above) and then work out how to get black and white tiles into the corners through manipulation around the red one in the center.
What is interesting is that Blue Prince's developers built this particular puzzle box from the Fenn Aries perspective, showing you in a bite-sized morsel the history of how this kingdom was able to manipulate and defeat what seems to have been an outnumbering force of dissidents that initially resisted their movements. Then Fenn Aries defeated them in battle and created a large and overwhelming authoritarian state.
I want to point out that by this point in Blue Prince, the player will have seen dozens of news clippings, quotes in its history books, charts, maps, and more to give you this history. If you were paying attention to at least half of this material and not blinded by the abstraction that is a "Mora Jai Puzzle Box", it should've been clear there was a point to this - and that the developers are making a statement about both this fictional world as well as our own.
Now maybe I'm stretching here, trying to enumerate exactly what kind of modern political commentary this little story, told in sold color tiles in a puzzle box, has on modern politics. And yes, the developers also make their position known much more explicitly through the written history itself, but to boil it down into a simple one-screen puzzle with only a few colored boxes: that's the part I find genius. If nothing else, I think this one puzzle box has a lot to say about the politically "inactive", the sacrifice made by the rebellious to try and get more people on their side, the side factions that have power but only in certain spheres, resistance against authoritarianism, and how a small faction of "red tiles" can manipulate their way to victory against an outnumbering electorate of gray and white tiles.
It's brilliant. And it's why Blue Prince is my Game of the Year of 2025.
Blue Prince is available on PC via Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles.