Evil Empire has made a call for alpha testers for The Rogue Prince of Persia.
Originally rumored at the start of this month, this is the next game from Evil Empire, the other developer who worked on Dead Cells. While Motion Twin was the original studio behind the game, Evil Empire made DLC for Dead Cells for five years.
The title was officially announced in this week’s Triple I Initiative Showcase, digital event which put the spotlight on smaller games that were made by independent video game studios, but published by the AAA companies. It is contradictory, of course, to refer to these games as “indie,” when you take a few minutes to think about the way these games are produced. But triple-i, or iii, may be a useful new term for the industry, to distinguish these games from AAA titles with AAA budgets, or completely independently produced titles.
Like Dead Cells, The Rogue Prince of Persia is a roguelite, but it’s less of a dungeon crawler, and more of a side scrolling platformer. Visually and gameplay wise, it also seems to take inspiration from Virgin Games’ 16-bit Disney’s Aladdin game, for the Sega Genesis.
In a recent tweet, Evil Empire said this:
“In case you missed our surprise announcement yesterday, we’ve made a Prince of Persia roguelite! We’re still not quite sure how we got here, but we’ll take it!
Throw yourself into a fast-paced fluid mix of platforming and combat when we launch into Steam Early Access on May 14th.”
Evil Empire also confirmed that even upon its Early Access launch, The Rogue Prince of Persia will be playable on the Steam Deck. By the nature of Early Access, of course, it can’t be Steam Deck Verified, but Evil Empire likely felt confident in confirming this since it won’t be a high demand 3D graphics title. It remains to be seen if future updates breaks and restores that Steam Deck compatibility.
Other things we don’t know yet is if The Rogue Prince of Persia will eventually require connecting to an Ubisoft account, even on Steam. If you were wondering, The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is not on Steam. It is on Ubisoft Connect, and on Epic Game Store, which also still requires connecting to Ubisoft.
In any case, this quick influx of 2D The Prince of Persia games seems to be intended to keep fans happy while Ubisoft works on their The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. The crazy thing is, it might actually work, especially with Ubisoft shelling out on promotion for this title. We’ll see how Evil Empire does after Dead Cells.
Interested in applying as an alpha tester? You can register here.
