As part of Steam Detective Fest, which began on Monday, 2025’s GOTY* Blue Prince is currently 34% off, dropping its price to what we in the biz call “a steal” at $19.79 / £16.49.
I am writing this post to inform you, PC gamers who may not have played ingenious puzzle game Blue Prince, about a great deal. It is in no way merely a cover for me to revisit the topic of PC Gamer’s official 2025 GOTY vote which I am definitely not still salty about here in 2026.
*According to this very website, Blue Prince is the Best Designed game of 2025. True! But that award reflects that it was the runner-up to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which narrowly beat it for the top game of the year prize. To that result, I say: “Rigged!!”
Okay, not rigged. But I believe I’ll be vindicated by history in declaring this miraculous detective game, designed largely by a single mind over the course of eight years, as the game of 2025.
I fought hard for Blue Prince to get PC Gamer’s top GOTY honor, because I really don’t think there’s anything else like it out there. It contains so many layers of mystery and discovery—puzzles you didn’t even know were puzzles for 10 or 20 hours, clues that may only make sense half a dozen discoveries down the line. It’s a brainworm, but also meditative, and the very, very rare game mystery that felt rewarding for me to solve through my own thinking and note-taking, rather than being guided to a solution.
You may have heard the RNG in Blue Prince is frustrating, which is probably the main thing that held it back from winning our GOTY award. And that’s true, it can be frustrating. But how you deal with the RNG is part of the puzzle of Blue Prince, and if you pay close attention you’ll begin to discover more and more things that seemed random that you simply didn’t understand yet. Your reward for being a smarty pants is gaining ways to further bend the mansion to your own whim.
January is the perfect month to play Blue Prince: Going outside is unappealing, there aren’t yet dynamite new games coming out every single day, and familiarizing yourself with the mansion’s rooms as you visit and revisit them until they become intimately familiar is extremely cozy. Yes it’ll likely consume your entire month, but what better month to burn than this one? And if you still end up bouncing off the RNG, well, at least you paid 34% less to almost get obsessed with the best game of 2025.
There are loads of other games on sale in the Steam Detective Fest, too. It runs through January 19.
