Insider Gaming has an incredible new rumor for fans who enjoyed The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, as well as Dead Cells.
They report that one of Dead Cells’ co-developers, Evil Empire, has been working on a The Prince of Persia game for Ubisoft, for the last four years.
While most fans associate Dead Cells with Motion Twin, Evil Empire has also been helping make their game, alongside working on this project with Ubisoft on the down low. While they are not the same studio as Motion Twin of course, they discreetly earned the experience working on that game while they made this one.
Evil Empire’s next title is supposedly called The Rogue Prince of Persia, and fittingly enough, like Dead Cells, it will be a roguelite. It will be launching on Steam this year in Early Access. Notably, that makes it Ubisoft’s first day one release on Steam since 2019, but given they want it to go through Early Access, it makes sense for Ubisoft to bring it to the platform instead of keeping it on Ubisoft Connect.
Now, for those who don’t know, roguelites are a slight variation on roguelikes, that have become popular in recent years. Both genre variants are inspired by 1980s computer game Rogue, which introduced the elements of procedural generation and permadeath.
Roguelikes copy Rogue to a tee; when your character dies, you start over in having to traverse a completely newly generated game world from start to finish. Roguelites add a gameplay element that makes everything easier, and makes it even feel more rewarding: permanent upgrades. You can gain permanent upgrades in this game, either in the course of finding them in gameplay, or after you die, as something you can buy.
Dead Cells is a roguelite, but it’s also a Metroidvania. So, you have all these different gameplay ideas coming together to bring you a gameplay experience where you want to keep finding upgrades to build a better character, but also understand that you only get to keep some of those upgrades if you die.
With all that in mind, The Rogue Prince of Persia promises to be a completely different experience from The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. That Early Access period also promises that the community will get to be part of the process.
Ubisoft may have planned for that from the start, but it certainly looks like involving the community will be key in making sure this game doesn’t get ignored and forgotten like The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was. That’s certainly a sad thing to say about one of this year’s first GOTY worthy titles, so while waiting for this rumored game to become real, it wouldn’t hurt if you checked this other game out now as well.
