I Am Looking For My Father In Blue Prince’s Spiral Of Stars

This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of Blue Prince.

Blue Prince does not have a clear, clean-cut ending. It has a number of stopping places where one can choose to walk away, such as when the player finds Room 46 or when they discover the secret will of Baroness Auravei. But no single one of those moments constitutes what I’d call an “ending,” because even when every room is unlocked, every clue examined, every blueprint drafted, Blue Prince still taunts you with unsolved mysteries. What is the Spiral of Stars? What happened to the eighth red envelope? What does SWNSNG mean? What about the cryptic note in the Clocktower?

What happened to Mary Jones?

Simon, the game’s player character, is a silent protagonist, and with no one for him to interact with it’s very difficult to understand what his own, personal feelings toward the mysteries of Mount Holly must be. But one must imagine that from the start, even before the player knows his history, he’s entering the manor hoping to find some trace of his lost mother. Throughout his drafting adventures, Simon finds pieces of her. He finds the children’s book she wrote for him, clues to her heritage, leftover remnants of her political resistance and suggestions that she hoped he would take up the mantle after her. We learn that she fled Orinda Ares, but the trail goes cold from there. She never reappears in the story. There’s no happy ending, no answer for Simon, or for us, as to whether Mary is even alive or dead.

Even after I’d seen all there was to see I persisted in playing Blue Prince for hours, hoping there might be one last secret I was missing, some resolution I had not yet come to that would answer the question of Mary’s fate. How could a game all about finding answers end with no answer to one of its most pressing questions? I scoured every clue that hadn’t unlocked something yet. I joined Discords, read forums, did absurd drafting experiments, looked for hidden letters in the walls. I pored over the game’s mysterious spirals, the note left by Lady Clara: “Does it never end?” I wanted it to, because I like games with satisfying conclusions. A tearful reunion, or an outpouring of grief perhaps. This was neither of those. It surely could not be the end of the journey. I could not leave Simon with a giant, gaping hole where Mary Jones had once stood, and no way to ever know whether she lived, died, or even still cared for him.

When I played Blue Prince, I didn’t think of it as a story about grief. Spelling it out like this, it seems stupidly obvious. I didn’t even consider it until I accidentally used it as a metaphor to explain my feelings about my father’s death to my therapist. I was explaining to her the long process I’ve undergone over the last year of trying to unravel the mystery of my father: who he was, why he was the way he was, and why he died in the sad, stupid way that he did. The answers I was finding were boring, unhelpful, depressing, or nonexistent. I wanted there to be more—I wanted there to be some deeper explanation, some tidy sentence or two with which I could explain my father to myself that would wrap it all up in a bow and allow me to get this whole “grieving” thing over with. Of course, there is not, and never will be. But what if I just kept looking a little bit longer?

My dad’s story wasn’t a happy one. I didn’t realize just how unhappy it all was until after his death, because he literally never talked about himself, his family, his history, or his internal life. He lost his father to suicide as a teenager, both of his sisters too young to complications of substance abuse, and had a deeply unpleasant relationship with my mother. He was good to me, mostly. My fuzzy childhood memories of him are, I think, normal, even pleasant. He took me to baseball games, made up silly songs for me, helped me with math homework, surprised me with sweets. But sometime after I moved out of the house, he began to change.

Mental health troubles ran in his family, and he came from an era when such things were rarely acknowledged. Maybe he had always been like this and just good at hiding it, or maybe something happened to him that he never shared. He started lying often, telling absurd tales with dead seriousness, and would become frustrated when we didn’t believe him. He would say deliberately shocking things that he knew would provoke anger, and then laugh at us when we reacted. When I wasn’t around, he told mom there were “Nazis” in the walls, speaking to him, breaking into his house at night, watching from the skylight, setting off the fire alarm, stealing his money, making him do things. He bought unusual things online: ten sets of cheap earbuds, three air mattresses, fake jewelry, then claimed it was the Nazis who were sending him these things. Thousands of dollars disappeared from my parents’ joint bank account; of course, the Nazis stole it.

My father became increasingly isolated in the ensuing years as whatever psychosis he had got worse. He and my mom divorced. She took the house and most everything in it. He took a suitcase and moved into a hotel. He pushed away any friends he had remaining until I was the only person he spoke to regularly. His physical health declined. I begged him to go to therapy, to go to a doctor, to tell some professional about all the things that were happening to him. He refused: the doctors were all Nazis. He died last May, alone in a hotel room, at age 70.

It’s been left to me to dive into the wreck of my father’s life and understand what the hell happened that turned a troubled but acceptable father into a paranoid whorl of chaotic thoughts and decisions. What I end up doing resembles not so much settling someone’s estate—there’s nothing to settle, despite my mom’s conviction that he still had the vanished thousands of dollars hidden somewhere—so much as it looks like Blue Prince. I comb over every innocuous item, every email, every scribbled note, hoping to find something that clears up the mystery of who my dad was and what happened to him. There’s very little to go on. I looked in his car: spotless. In his hotel room, I found clothes and snacks, his wallet and ID cards, toiletries. Almost nothing. Wadded up in the deepest part of his suitcase I found a plastic bag of fake necklaces and rings, all cheap plastic. He had a laptop and a cell phone, and I solved word and number puzzles to break into both. I scoured his emails, bookmarks, and Facebook messages, trying to understand. When did he go crazy? Why? I found a Temu account showing he’d paid hundreds of dollars for the cheap plastic jewelry. I found texts to various strangers about nothing, fumbling attempts to buy real estate, scam emails answered and seemingly followed up on. Can I connect the dots between Facebook posts and text messages? Did he secretly have some genius plan we didn’t understand to turn his life around? I received a box of some old personal stuff of his from my mom. Are there answers engraved in his old scouting knife? Does this stupid hoodie he bought explain anything? Was there some trigger, some cause for all this that we could have prevented? How sick was he, really? What did he even die of? I cross-reference dates to strange things he did with what was going on in reality at the time: what wild, rambling emails was he sending the same month that he stopped taking his medication? Which of these sticky notes tell the truth, and which are lies?

I have been doing this, off and on, for over a year now. There are fragments, but mostly, there is nothing. There is just one answer, which is obvious to everyone including me: my father was a deeply mentally and physically ill man for much of his life who hid it well for a while until he could hide it no more, and when it became obvious he continued to deny that anything was wrong until the wrongness killed him. This is not a satisfying answer. There are still too many clues I haven’t used yet, too many questions I don’t have answers for. The spiral spins out, endlessly. Does it never end? This cannot be the end.

Eventually, I had to put Blue Prince down. I had other games to play. I have come to accept, even love Blue Prince’s ending-that-isn’t-an-ending: sometimes there are no answers. Sometimes people disappear, their memories fade, their histories scatter into bits of documents and photos, and there’s nothing we can do but let our curiosity and pain spiral, or accept the newly emptied space they’ve created, and move on.

That’s a nice, easy moral to apply to a video game. My father was a real person. Accepting that he is gone, and that the trail of answers to him has run cold isn’t as simple as leaving a Discord or uninstalling a game. Even now, I’m thinking of pulling his laptop out of the drawer and searching for a new clue, a missing piece that will blow the whole puzzle of my father wide open and make the pieces of who he was click together for me at last. I know, firmly and with conviction, that such a clue does not exist. It remains difficult not to wander into the spiral of possibility that it does.