Inside Tonda Ros's Philosophy — Put It Out There, and That's the Game

Who is Tonda Ros, and why won't he confirm the answers?

Tonda Ros is the designer who spent eight years building Blue Prince almost entirely by himself. Blue Prince is a meta-puzzle game released by Dogubomb in 2025, in which you draft rooms one at a time to assemble a mansion and unravel its mysteries.

Lining up his interviews, I see one stubborn thread. He insists on handing the game over as a finished object — and once it is handed over, he goes quiet. In November 2025 he said he would "probably never fully acknowledge whether or not everything has been solved" (PC Gamer, 2025 source ↗).

This piece reads across seven interviews, from the April 2025 launch to March 2026, following his own words through philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences.Blue Prince (from the Steam store)

What path led Tonda Ros to making games?

He started in film. He says he "moved out to Hollywood to make movies," then "realized I was making stuff for other people" (VICE, 2025 source ↗).

According to Wikipedia, the documentary Indie Game: The Movie pushed him toward games. During development he supported himself with a commercial development job and a Magic: The Gathering website he ran (Wikipedia ↗, as of 2026-09).

The prototype began around 2016, with a planned timeline of six months (ibid.). Davide Pellino joined around year two as art director. After release the game won design awards at the D.I.C.E. Awards and the BAFTA Games Awards (ibid., as of 2026-09).

What does Tonda Ros value most in a puzzle?

The clearest principle is refusing to hold your hand. "I'm just not a fan of handholding. Drop me in a world. Let me figure the rest out" (Thinky Games, 2025 source ↗). In the same interview he says "some amount of ambiguity is needed" when player discovery is the driving force.

His taste in puzzles is consistent too: he loves challenges that allow creativity, "that allow for sequence breaking, or alternate solutions" (ibid.). To MAZECAST he described valuing discovery-based games built on observation, finding clues and drawing your own conclusions, as opposed to trivia-centric puzzles like crosswords (MAZECAST, 2025 source ↗).

And he keeps saying he made it for himself: "I was first and foremost making a game for myself and the way I wanted it," and "I never had an intention to create this experience with everyone in mind" (Inverse, 2025 source ↗). To VICE: "I wanted to create the game I wanted to play" (VICE, 2025 source ↗).

A man who felt he was "making stuff for other people" in film now says flatly that he makes games for himself. I read those two statements as one continuous line.

Where did the skeleton of Blue Prince come from?

The skeleton comes from tabletop games, not video games. By his account the project began "as a concept for a physical tabletop game involving drawing cards and drafting rooms," alongside a separate idea for "a first-person puzzle game set in a large mansion of many doors" (Thinky Games, 2025 source ↗).

He says outright that "the mechanical core of Blue Prince comes entirely from the world of tabletop and card games" (ibid.). He told VICE he had been toying with board game ideas, "including one based on the word 'drafting'" (VICE, 2025 source ↗).

His other obsession is following through. "If an idea sounds cool, I will follow through with it. Even though an idea might cost me three years" (VICE, 2025 source ↗). He describes the theme as "a game about people making assumptions, and having expectations, and finding out over time that their assumptions are wrong, and then their expectations are surpassed" (Inverse, 2025 source ↗).Blue Prince (from the Steam store)

After eight years, what does Tonda Ros admit went wrong?

What he openly admits is the way he worked. In February 2026 he said: "I was working, I think, 80 hours a week for eight years straight" (Aftermath, 2026 source ↗).

Looking back, he says "it wasn't worth the crunch" (ibid.). Some cinematics he wanted at launch didn't make it and arrived in a later update: "There'll be a couple more cinematics because I didn't have time to do all the cinematics I planned" (ibid.).

On his next game: "Blue Prince will likely be the most ambitious game I ever make, because I don't think I physically can do this again." It may take as long, but he won't work the same way. "It's a young man's game" (ibid.).

The way through, as he describes it, was drawing a line: rather than keep crunching, he chose to "focus on bugs and catch up on my own time afterwards" (ibid., paraphrased around the quote).

What did he struggle with between "ship it complete" and "keep building"?

He has a strong wish to ship everything at once. "I really wanted to get it all in for launch, and I feel like that was my ultimate desire, because I really like the old-school games where they put it out there, and that's the game" (Aftermath, 2026 source ↗). Asked about DLC in April 2025, he said eight years had given him "enough time … to include everything I wanted up front" (Inverse, 2025 source ↗).

But building has no natural end. He told VICE: "The game was fully playable in year one... it easily could have been shipped six years ago" (VICE, 2025 source ↗). Playable, yet unreleased, while he kept adding depth and secrets — and the price was the 80-hour weeks above.

He also names the weight of placing puzzles inside a world: "it's a lot easier to design a puzzle when it doesn't have to exist or be part of the world." It is easy "to audition different amounts of gold that the Pantry grants you," he adds, but not to redesign "the interconnected house-wide electrical system" (Thinky Games, 2025 source ↗).Blue Prince (from the Steam store)

Which works does Tonda Ros acknowledge as influences?

His biggest influence is Christopher Manson's illustrated puzzle book MAZE. "MAZE became a full-blown obsession, which blossomed into a wellspring of creativity," he says. "It is still to this day my favorite work of art." "I see the world through the lens of MAZE" (MAZECAST, 2025 source ↗).

Yet he says he "never set out to make something that felt derivative." The house is "a tribute to MAZE, and the game is, in fact, dedicated to Christopher Manson" (ibid.). Manson himself designed illustrations and puzzles for the game, with full creative control over them (ibid.).

Among video games, it is Cyan Worlds' Myst and Riven: "I had always loved first-person games going back to Myst and Riven" (VICE, 2025 source ↗). In March 2026 he described Myst's atmosphere as "poetically calm, but there's a rich history there" — "environmental storytelling of a past that is just out of the player's reach" (Game Developer, 2026 source ↗).

Curiously, around the same time he said "I didn't look to any other video games for inspiration" (Thinky Games, 2025 source ↗). It looks like a contradiction, but the same article acknowledges his "longtime fascination with Myst and Riven," so "other" most naturally means other than those two. His process, he adds, is "to sequester myself and figure things out on my own, without research, reference, or tutorials" (ibid.).BLUE PRINCE: An Interview with Tonda Ros (YouTube / Myster Rogers)

Kizuki's reading — did Tonda Ros ship his game as a book?

From here on, this is my reading, not his words.

I read Tonda Ros as someone who published his game as a book. His favorite work of art is a book, and his mansion is dedicated to it. And rather than patching forever, he wanted the old-school way: "they put it out there, and that's the game."

A printed book cannot be rewritten, and its author does not sit beside readers checking their answers. His refusal to confirm whether everything is solved and his dislike of handholding both fit this "etiquette of the book." The eight years of 80-hour weeks, as I see it, were the time spent writing everything in before the one and only print run.

Where should you start to understand Tonda Ros?

Start by playing Blue Prince without a guide — being dropped into a world and left to think is exactly what he wanted. For the critical side, see the counter-review of Blue Prince; for the design of observation, the verb of noticing.

To trace his influences, go to Myst and Riven. Set it beside ANIMAL WELL, whose "has everything been found yet?" tracker he cited as a contrasting approach in the PC Gamer interview, and you can see how differently authors choose to confirm that discovery is complete. For another solitary maker, read our study of Hiroyuki Imabayashi.

Sources

Primary sources used in this article (all read in full):

・Thinky Games「Interview: How Myst, Riven, and tabletop games built the foundation of Blue Prince」(Dayten Rose, 2025-04-10) ↗ — no handholding, ambiguity, tabletop origins, no other video games as reference, difficulty of puzzles that exist in the world

・MAZECAST「Interview with Tonda Ros」(2025-04-07) ↗ — obsession with MAZE, dedication to and collaboration with Manson, discovery-based games

・Inverse「Blue Prince Was Not Made For Everyone, Creator Says」(Shannon Liao, 2025-04-12) ↗ — made for himself, not for everyone, the theme, no DLC

・VICE「My Interview With the Master of Mayhem Himself, Tonda Ros」(Anthony Franklin II, 2025-04-20) ↗ — Hollywood years, Myst and Riven, playable in year one, following ideas that cost three years

・PC Gamer「'I will probably never fully acknowledge whether or not everything has been solved'…」(Christopher Livingston, 2025-11-14) ↗ — refusing to confirm whether everything is solved

・Aftermath「After Working 80-Hour Weeks For Eight Years, Blue Prince Creator Says Next Game Probably Won't Be Quite As Ambitious」(Nathan Grayson, 2026-02-18) ↗ — 80-hour weeks, regret over crunch, shipping complete, the next game

・Game Developer「Blue Prince's somber tone was inspired by Myst, says creator」(Bryant Francis, 2026-03-04) ↗ — Myst's atmosphere and environmental storytelling

・Background and awards checked against Wikipedia: Blue Prince ↗ (as of 2026-09)

・Video: BLUE PRINCE: An Interview with Tonda Ros ↗ (YouTube / Myster Rogers) — thumbnail only; not quoted in the text

・Images: Blue Prince screenshots are official Steam store images. They could not be visually inspected in this environment, so captions give only the title.