Blue Prince has become a bonding and learning experience for my family

I’ve always been the player in the family. When my son was born about 11 years ago, gaming was one of the things I looked forward to sharing with him. He would pull up a chair next to me and watch me play Sea of ​​Thieves With friends, he often wears a headset larger than his head to talk to them and show me where to go. Now instead of watching me play Lighting and illuminationI’m sitting next to him as he fights Calamity Ganon Breath of the wild. His true passion has been gaming for years Minecraft – He appreciates rules and order, as well as the calm environment of creative mode. He also likes to precisely collect as many TNT blocks as possible and watch them explode.

What I didn’t expect was the gaming connection my wife made with my son. I made the effort with Minecraft She joins his worlds from time to time, although it is not her favourite. But she loves puzzles and stories, so when a friend suggests it Blue Princewas recently released on Switch 2, for her and our son, and she bought it immediately. They’ve been bashing their way through every chance they get together — and they’ve actually gotten over our friend who suggested it a long time ago.

Blue Prince It’s a puzzle-solving roguelike where you have to explore a 45-room mansion from day to day and reach the mysterious 46th room in order to earn your inheritance. But the rooms rearrange themselves at the beginning of each day, requiring detailed thinking and the ability to piece together a big story. That’s why my wife and son playing together works so well: they complement each other in their thinking and abilities. Our son has incredibly high spatial intelligence. He is able to remember directions to things easily and accurately (and corrects my wife when she’s headed in the wrong direction); He can quickly solve puzzles where pieces must be arranged, a series of switches must be flipped in a specific order, or he knows the exact place where they should stand. She often hands him the controller so he can solve the puzzle because it takes much less time than trying to explain it to her. Also, the way he notices subtle changes in the room instantly is amazing. This goes back years when we would bring him to preschool, and he would take a moment to point out how the space had changed since the day before, adjust to the differences, and then feel comfortable again.

My wife is great at the big picture and at piecing together the themes of a story. Word-based puzzles – especially those with symbolism – are easy for her while they frustrate my son greatly (either because of his age or because his brain thinks literally instead of metaphorically). Blue Prince She brings up teachable moments where she can expand her thinking and explain the thinking process she uses to solve these logic puzzles.

But the best part of all was the excitement that the combination of game design and storytelling instilled in him every minute of the day. His mind is constantly thinking about how to connect things in the story. Despite some of his learning challenges in reading and writing, he compiled his own notebook to catalog their discoveries and even… Write it! The drive to discover the story through problem solving overcame his fear and reticence in writing down ideas. This may seem simple to some, but as a parent who has watched their child struggle to put the thoughts in their brain down on paper, it makes me very proud and emotional.

Games, and Blue Prince In particular, it’s not just a distraction for him, but instead a way to expand how his brain processes information and logics its way through problems. It’s something he can take with him, providing him with strategies he can use during his daily life. Does he generally spend more time on screen than he should? Yes, probably (we’re working on it). But the interaction he and my wife enjoyed during this adventure, and the way his sheer enthusiasm helped push him past his natural limits, deserves extra screen time.