I may be slightly obsessed with Blue Prince, developer Dogubomb's recently released adventure/puzzle/mystery game that sees players drafting rooms in a massive, surreal manor, teasing out clues with each action and each day. It offers a potent blend of escape room-style puzzles (with math, logic, spatial reasoning, and other flavors), strategic room-drafting action straight out of the tabletop sensation Betrayal at House on the Hill, and a personal favorite game paradigm: the player and player character attain knowledge and ply it at close to a 1:1 ratio. It's ostensibly a single player game, but I think it has even longer legs as an unofficial "co-op" experience.Like Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, or Asemblance: Oversight, more emphasis is placed on the knowledge you gain by playing and exploring (access to secrets, methods, and rules about the way the world works) more so than an in-fiction leveling system (like XP in an RPG) or similar. While there are more standard elements (a general roguelike run-based structure, some permanent upgrades to your kit and abilities, rng), what feels most important is what you, the player are absorbing, experimenting with, and putting to the test in your actions.What's even more important? When two people—or even more—absorb that information.Related:Putting together a good run sometimes feels like science: you start formulating theories as you observe, and test them out as best you can. Even when those theories are disproven (or you were looking at the wrong variables), you learned something that day, and you take that lesson with you. Seeing those theories proven and disproven may explain why the game is doing so well.Co-op play in Blue PrinceI'm enjoying the game a great deal on my own, but here's a second (and perhaps just as powerful) factor at work here: like a great escape room, it's even more fun with another person. The way my partner and I are tearing through, you wouldn't know it was a single player game: we'll pass the controller back and forth (sometimes for puzzles one of us is naturally better at, sometimes because it's simply dinner time), the non-player grasping my graphing notebook (yes, graphing paper, we are that serious), taking down notes, drawing charts, and offering suggestions and solutions as we draft and puzzle through. The first notes were kind of a mess, but we have that aspect down to a science now, about 30 hours into the mystery.It doesn't hurt that we happen to have complementary puzzle preferences—she's easily ten times better and faster at the parlor rooms, while I've been playing 3D games longer and have spatial reasoning tasks more front of mind—so we very rarely get stuck and generally have a good flow going. We're certainly not the only ones playing this way, of the approximately 12k players on Steam right now (plus players on the Xbox consoles and PS5). A cursory glance at Twitch reveals plenty of streamers playing with their communities (some without explicit "backseating," albeit with various degrees of clue acceptance from chat.)Related:We've had several "holy crap!" moments in our time with the game so far—when a wanton observation about room decorations was "confirmed" in a more definitive clue (and led us to break out the graph paper). Once we figured out the sequence required to take full advantage of the garage, we just about leapt off the couch in excitement. And lets not forget this little nugget: I've been so obsessed with solving one series of puzzles (in the gallery room, IYKYK) that last night, from a bus, I started texting my partner possible solutions (and full justifications for them) to try while I was out of the house.Dogubomb may not have explicitly designed the game for this kind of social play, but it suits Blue Prince's style like a perfect little key to a mysterious lock.Related:Designers wanting to play with this magic, take heed: some element of this comes with the territory whenever you construct so many different types of puzzles. Without giving too much away here, Blue Prince offers many flavors of puzzle and strategy that it naturally lends itself to the escape room logic of "many brains make light work:" just like my partner and I, certain types of players are attracted to (or repelled by) certain kinds of problem solving. It's wildly satisfying (for us and players like us) to collaborate and play this as a team sport and essentially share in the glory.You can support this as a developer by offering that variety, at a high standard of quality. Serve up a tasty buffet of puzzle types, and players like us will team up and happily scour every imaginable inch of the game.