Every puzzle game is a couch co-op game, actually
Blue Prince is an incredible puzzle game. Set in a lonely mansion with impossible architecture, it’s layered in mysteries, conspiracies and family drama. The mansion, Mt. Holly, officially has 45 rooms, but in order to collect your inheritance, you have to find the 46th. Every day you’re given a set number of steps, and you have to literally build the manor (and the game) as you go, drawing from a pool of floorplans to create a new layout with each run.
This is the foundation, but it goes so much deeper: When I previewed Blue Prince in December 2024, I couldn’t have imagined its complexity. It’s not a game you can fully understand in a few runs; it takes 10 hours to realize what its core puzzles even are, and even longer to then piece their solutions together, room by room, step by step. It’s a slow, supremely satisfying burn. The puzzles in Blue Prince are cavernous and surprising, and it’s thrilling to interact with the game’s mechanics and items. Not to mention, it’s all absolutely gorgeous.
Though Blue Prince isn’t marketed as a cooperative experience and it doesn’t have any kind of multiplayer input, it naturally lends itself to co-op play. Mechanics matter less than the concepts on-screen, and it’s useful to have one person on controls and another on a notepad, jotting down clues and tracking progress. Plus, one of the best ways to get unstuck in a game like this is to talk things through, and this naturally happens when you’re playing together. Blue Prince is just a really intricate puzzle, after all, and we’ve been doing those things in group settings for ages.
This is a true of many single-player puzzle games — their common theme being that they’re secretly couch co-op experiences. You could say all games are local co-op if you try hard enough, but only in puzzle games can a bystander play along without ever touching a controller, directing the action and providing critical breakthroughs simply by paying attention. You’re not going to have the same level of impact watching your friend play Assassin’s Creed, you know?
Blue Prince is only the latest example of an undercover couch co-op puzzle game. My partner and I have happily played a handful of similar games together in recent years, and it’s gotten to the point that I now breeze right past the “single-player” descriptor on most puzzle titles. Here’s a shortlist of my household’s favorites:
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
The Talos Principle 2
The Sexy Brutale
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Return of the Obra Dinn
The Witness
Viewfinder
Storyteller
All of these games are officially single-player, but they’re as good, if not even better, when played with a loved one. On my couch, we’ve also enjoyed actual local co-op puzzlers like Escape Academy, so if your relationship can survive those games, it should be able to handle Lorelei, Talos or Blue Prince with ease.
While we’re waxing poetic about the intricacies of video game sub-genres (OK fine, just one of us is), Blue Prince falls into another one of my favorite categories, which I affectionately call “anti-GameFAQs puzzle games.” These are designed to be impossible to capture in a traditional walkthrough guide, and while the category isn’t large, it includes some of the best titles of this generation, like Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. These lean so heavily on the thing that makes video games unique as a media product — player autonomy — that they feel like a hostile attack on step-by-step explainers, and I absolutely love that. (These games also tend to remind me of House of Leaves, which could be another sub-genre on its own, but I’ll stop here. For now.)
Playing Blue Prince with my partner in 2025 reminds me of the specific lazy afternoon in the summer of 2008 when some friends and I discovered Braid on Xbox Live Arcade. We spent hours playing from my buddy’s dingy couch, passing the controller around, pointing at the screen and yelling out strategies, and just marveling at that little time-shifting toxic dude. Shared experiences like this generate a specific kind of warmth, and a great puzzle game can produce these moments over and over again.
Even if it’s technically single-player.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/every-puzzle-game-is-a-couch-co-op-game-actually-163024595.html?src=rss
Blue Prince is an incredible puzzle game. Set in a lonely mansion with impossible architecture, it’s layered in mysteries, conspiracies and family drama. The mansion, Mt. Holly, officially has 45 rooms, but in order to collect your inheritance, you have to find the 46th. Every day you’re given a set…
