Eventually through boredom or curiosity, the young wife opens the forbidden door and discovers the corpses of the previous wives, whom she soon joins when Bluebeard returns.

[3] Players do not play an individual character, but a specific piece of the Bride's personality: Animus (hostility), Fatale (seduction), Mother (selflessness), Virgin (vulnerability), and Witch (deception).

[4][5] As RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "Each room is a psychological ordeal for the Bride to confront, and the players must struggle to find different ways to cope.

Bluebeard's Bride was designed by Whitney "Strix" Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and following a successful Kickstarter campaign,[6] it was published by Magpie Games in 2017 as a 112-page book with cover art by Rebecca Yanovskaya and interior art by Yanovskaya, Kring Demetrio, Miguel Ángel Espinoza, Tawny Fritzinger, Juan Ochoa, and Mirco Paganessi.

[10] Rachel Beck for Dread Central writes, "The story itself has the elegant simplicity of a fairytale," and it "is an explicitly feminine horror piece, and at its heart it's a game about systemic social and physical violence towards women.