Practically blue steel
It's dangerous to fetishize stories of success, but Tonda Ros's is irresistible, a hidden gem in the mundane mud of late-capitalist bravado. He's one of many artists who did a little bit of everything: a short film here, a music video there, a commercial for this brand, an animated logo for that, all that jazz. The career dispersion to which the 21st century condemns us, with all the uncertainties multiplied by living in Los Angeles, one of the most abusive cities on the planet if you're young , have more than one talent, and don't respect your sleep. The fact is that in 2016, he made a decision that wouldn't be out of place on a calendar of saints: to dedicate a total of eight years full-time to developing a project that doesn't take a contemporary hit as a reference point or follow any recognizable trend, but neither does it seek to vampirize the nostalgia of a classic. In other words, a marketing department's nightmare, a device doomed to remain niche, a term well known to cultural journalists and those working in the funeral industry. Today, Blue Prince , Tonda Ros's debut as a video game creator, is a phenomenon that transcends the usual boundaries of indie success. Predictions place it as a possible winner of Best Game of the Year at industry awards, and it's common to read articles that consider it one of the best titles of all time.
The current Blue Prince phenomenon could be compared to that of Pulp Fiction in 1994. In other words, a work that is born broken and builds its identity from there. It's now easy to recognize the virtues of Tarantino's second feature film, but let's keep in mind that upon its release, it was a collection of arbitrarily arranged situations without a dramatic core or a common theme, full of technically dispensable dialogue and only five minutes of action in two and a half hours. Well, Blue Prince is, to put it simply, an escape room impossible to solve because every half hour you have to leave, and when you return, everything is unrecognizable. In other words, it's a network of puzzles and riddles that breaks a rule so basic we hadn't even noticed it: the permanence of the system. How is it possible that the jewelry box that hid the key to the basement yesterday is empty today? Or that the jewelry box has disappeared? Or that the basement no longer exists?
There's a catch to this, of course, but it's the first of many. To this day, the curtain hasn't been fully lifted. At first, it seemed that the title of Blue Prince alluded to the fairy tale archetype, but soon the double meaning became clear from the phonetic similarity with blueprint. There's a third meaning, and it's hidden in this column.
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