I’ve always been the household gamer. When my son was born almost 11 years ago, one of the things I most looked forward to was sharing that part of my life with him. As a little kid, he would pull up a chair beside me while I played Sea of Thieves with friends, sometimes wearing a headset far too big for his head so he could talk to them and tell me where to sail next. These days, the roles have shifted. Instead of him watching me play through Clair Obscur, I’m the one sitting nearby as he takes on Calamity Ganon in Breath of the Wild. For years, though, his true gaming love has been Minecraft. He enjoys its structure, its rules and the soothing freedom of creative mode. He also takes great pleasure in carefully stacking as many TNT blocks as possible and setting off a spectacular explosion.
What I did not anticipate was the bond gaming would create between my wife and my son. She has tried to meet him where he is with Minecraft, joining his worlds from time to time, even if it is not exactly her game of choice. But she loves puzzles and strong storytelling, so when a friend recommended Blue Prince, newly released on the Switch 2, as something both she and our son might enjoy, she bought it right away. Since then, they have been playing together whenever they can — and they have already moved well beyond the friend who first suggested it.
Blue Prince is a puzzle-driven roguelike built around exploring a 45-room mansion across repeated days, with the goal of finding the mysterious Room 46 and claiming an inheritance. The challenge is that the mansion rearranges its rooms at the beginning of each new day, demanding close observation, careful planning and the ability to connect pieces of a larger narrative. That is exactly why my wife and son make such an effective team. Their strengths balance each other beautifully. My son has an extraordinary spatial intelligence. He can remember routes with remarkable precision — and does not hesitate to correct my wife when she turns the wrong way. He quickly works through puzzles that require pieces to align, switches to be flipped in a particular sequence or a character to stand in one exact spot. More than once, she has simply handed him the controller so he can solve something himself, because it is faster than having him try to explain it. His ability to detect tiny changes in a room almost instantly is astonishing. It reminds me of when he was in preschool and would pause each morning to point out what had changed in the classroom since the previous day, process the differences and then settle in comfortably.
My wife, meanwhile, excels at seeing the larger picture and making sense of the game’s story and themes. Word puzzles, particularly ones involving symbolism, come naturally to her, while they can be deeply frustrating for my son — whether because of his age or because he tends to think in a much more literal way. Blue Prince has created genuine teaching moments between them, giving her opportunities to broaden his perspective and walk him through the reasoning she uses to untangle those more abstract logic challenges.
The most rewarding part, however, has been watching how the game’s mix of design and storytelling has captured his imagination throughout the day. He is constantly thinking about how different details might connect within the larger mystery. And despite some learning challenges around reading and writing, he has started keeping his own notebook to organize their discoveries — and he is actually writing them down! The drive to uncover the story by solving problems has helped him push past his usual hesitation about putting ideas on paper. That may sound small to some people, but as a parent who has seen his child struggle to translate thoughts into writing, it is profoundly moving.
For him, gaming — and Blue Prince in particular — is not merely a distraction. It is a way to stretch how his mind organizes information, reasons through challenges and solves problems. Those are skills he can carry into everyday life. Does he probably spend more time in front of a screen than he should? Yes, probably — and we are working on that. But the experience he and my wife have shared through this adventure, and the way his enthusiasm has helped him move beyond his usual limits, make that extra screen time feel more than worthwhile.
