Blue Prince and its inspiration, Christopher Manson's MAZE
Rolled credits on the main story in Blue Prince a bit ago and learned that one of the minds behind it was Christopher Manson, artist of one of my favorite, and most disturbing, childhood books, MAZE. Part of an '80s trend pairing book-long puzzles in the form of children's books with real-life treasure hunts and contests, MAZE's haunting black-and-white imagery straight out of German expressionism ensured it a shelf life beyond its initial prize hunt.
The book presented the tale of a group of wide-eyed visitors to a labyrinth, accompanied by a guide who may not have their best interests at heart. Each illustration presented one room of the maze, decorated with cryptic visual hints - rebuses, codes, literary allusions - and presenting several numbered doorways. Readers turned to the page number of the door they wished to take and were encouraged to find the shortest route to the center of the maze, Room 45, then out again. Those who sent in this shortest route, as well as the solution to Room 45's visual puzzle, were entered in a contest to win $10,000.
Fair enough, but this maze had a life of its own, and not in the welcoming sense. Devils performing in a play pop out of stage trap doors while spectators turn and shush you; blindfolded statues, beckoning with pained expressions to doorways beneath their feet, cast consuming shadows on the walls. The maze is a melange of classical architecture, denoting something timeless, far older than the alleged slight diversion initially presented - something so transcending culture and time there has to be a greater, unspoken power behind it. The rebuses and codes boldly, almost maliciously, announce themselves on the walls, proud not to make sense. Rooms are fashioned after living-room baseboards drilled with mouse holes, dwarfed by the claw-foot furniture, or modeled on rat cages in scientific experiments. Doorways would often yield a glimpse of the leg of a denizen departing on unknown business, or furnishings and indistinct shapes in the room beyond. Things were going on in the corners that you didn't understand, that didn't want you to understand them.
The ongoing story doesn't help. The visitors, initially out for a lark in the opening, quickly become lost, hapless, and distracted, uttering non sequitirs that make sense only to themselves. The "guide" clearly knows what's going on but doesn't feel inclined to share, amused at his overmatched charges' distress. Make the wrong choices, and the visitors can find themselves in an inescapable loop - or cast into a dark, doorless pit, populated only with numerous pairs of eyes staring up out of the darkness. There was mystery and intrigue in the labyrinth, yes, but also: bad things happened here. The overwhelming vibe of MAZE, the element that earned it immortality, was the subtle, underlying but unrelenting sense of malevolence, lurking just out of sight - until it's too late.
(There are, as of this writing, scans of the book up at archive.org, though one of them has the corresponding story pages out of step by one page with the illustrations.)
Decades later, an obsessed megafan of MAZE took it upon himself to post an image-by-image dissection of the book - a thorough page-by-page solution, currently up at intotheabyss dot net. The achievement was monumental, even including an architecturally-coherent, multi-level map of the maze based on room connections, and it was really neat to see what the book's riddles were trying to convey - if not always successfully. Some puzzles wowed me, such as the collection of three-dimensional shapes, depicted side-on, that spelled out the correct door to take if envisioned from above. Others…impressed less, such as the one where the right door is allegedly indicated by the tree branches kind of pointing at it. (Hey, the branches are also pointing at the other doors; why aren't they the solution? Because shut up.) Seeing (almost) everything hidden in the book that enthralled me as a child laid out was extremely satisfying after all those years - but it underlined how the real triumph of MAZE, the element that gave it its longevity, was not the craftsmanship of its puzzles but its imagery, the atmosphere it created.
I'm glad to see Manson credited in Blue Prince, to see new work from an old friend from childhood after so many decades - and, though it did not hit me in the same way, I'm also glad that someone built upon their experiences with MAZE to create an expansive puzzle of their own that's won a good deal of popular acclaim. Odd, though, that Blue Prince, while claiming inspiration from Manson in other ways, presents a setting and story so remarkably sterile and inert - a shadowless, glassy world of dull blue and slate gray; a cast of stuffy, lifeless aristocrats who never become more than abstract entries on an archived genealogy. For all their tutelage at the feet of MAZE, the creators of Blue Prince didn't quite learn that the vibes you send are often more important than the collection of information you present.
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