No, no, no – that’s not the way it happened
Developer Publisher Format Origin Release Evil Empire Ubisoft PC France Out now (Early Access)
Few long-running videogame protagonists seem quite as well suited to starring in a Roguelike as the Prince Of Persia. The variations of the character point to a legend told and retold, the details changing a little each time: we surely needn’t elaborate why this makes him a comfortable fit for the genre in a narrative sense. And his temporal powers – not present in Jordan Mechner’s original vision but long since established as part of the deal – handily dovetail with the live-dierepeat structure of the Roguelike.
Evil Empire, the development team set up by Motion Twin to take custody of Dead Cells so it could pursue other projects, clearly thought so, too. As game director Lucie Dewagnier tells it, at a GDC party, one member of the team got talking to someone at Ubisoft. “They said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to use what we learned on Dead Cells and use it to make a Prince Of Persia game?’ Then, after some time, the contract to make this game ended up on our desk.” We sense she may be eliding a few key details here, but either way she says it’s been a fruitful collaboration between the two parties.
And why wouldn’t it be? Evil Empire has, after all, spent several years working on a game whose own protagonist moves with the kind of responsiveness, grace and agility we’ve long associated with the Prince. From the first time we take control of this particular version, as he sets out to save his country from the invading Huns (in an amusing piece of lampshading after our first death, he wonders why his bola didn’t take him back before they arrived instead of three days after) it’s apparent that a Roguelike Prince Of Persia from a team that worked on Dead Cells is going to feel pretty much exactly how you would imagine it to. Which means you have a dynamic character who is a joy to control from the first moment. It means he climbs nimbly up ladders and mantles effortlessly over low walls. It means combining swift melee blows at close quarters with ranged combat – in the early game, via a bow that deals devastating damage but can only be fired when you’ve accumulated enough energy. It means a swift dodge-vault and a stun kick. It means environments that are almost as tall as they are wide, with vertical as well as horizontal movement. It means sub-areas with tricky platforming challenges and rewards that lie beyond them. It means shops at which you can upgrade your primary and secondary weapons. It means portals to warp between if, say, you need to return to said store now that you’ve defeated a dozen more enemies and stuffed your pockets with the gold they dropped.
There’s a distinct if-it-ain’t-broke-don’tfix it feel to the whole enterprise, then, but why should a studio that has,
