The Rogue Prince of Persia is Bringing Dead Cells Back to Life

10.04.2024 - 18:01 / ign.com

The Prince of Persia has gone rogue! No, I don’t mean that he’s married a Hollywood actress, moved to California, and spilled the royal tea in a tell-all interview with Oprah. I mean he’s starring in his first 2D roguelite. Hot off the heels of the series’ excellent return to form in January’s The Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, his sword-swinging highness is stepping away from the Metroidvania structure and into the procedurally generated, live, die, repeat mold of Dead Cells, in The Rogue Prince of Persia. While I’ve only had a very short amount of hands-on time with the upcoming adventure, the early signs suggest that this could well be the second dazzling jewel added to the Prince’s crown in less than the space of a year.

The Rogue Prince of Persia may not look exactly like Dead Cells – it swaps the latter’s 16-bit sprites for a stylised sheen more befitting a Saturday morning cartoon – but it certainly plays like Dead Cells. This should come as no surprise given that it’s being crafted by developer Evil Empire, the team behind the superb Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania and Dead Cells: The Queen and the Sea expansions. (Evil Empire splintered off original Dead Cells developer, Motion Twin). The basic structure is the same; during each run you explore randomly generated 2D slices of thematically distinct regions – in the case of my hands-on, a sprawling village area and the slippery surfaces of an Aqueduct – slaughtering enemies for gold and hunting for the deadliest weapon upgrades along the way. There are even portal gates to activate as you progress, allowing you to quickly blink back and forth around the ever expanding 2D map in order to uncover any secrets you may have missed.

The initial enemy types also seem familiar, particularly the bolt-blasting archers and bomb-hurling grenadiers which are palette-swapped versions of the foes found in Dead Cells’ opening dungeon areas, and the weapons you’re given to dispatch them with are similar too. I began my first run in The Rogue Prince of Persia with a primary pair of twin blades for close-up attacks and a secondary compound bow for ranged assaults, and subsequently got my hands on a variety of swords, javelins, and bladed flying discs to use in order to spectacularly tear through the angry hordes that stood in my path, accompanied by a propulsive Arabic electro beat.

There are some key differences, though, at least in terms of movement. The Prince is far more acrobatic than The Beheaded from Dead Cells, and with a squeeze of the left trigger he’s able to wall-run in both horizontal and vertical directions. It’s a classic steep-surface sprinting style that’s straight out of The Sands of Time series, and it serves multiple purposes. Not only is