Being a traditionally parkour-heavy series with a main character who often has a complicated relationship with death, a roguelike Prince of Persia game feels like a concept that was simply waiting for an execution. The Rogue Prince of Persia makes heavy use of the Prince’s favorite modern tool, walls, and designs an entire 2D sidescroller around it by allowing him to run and jump off of most surfaces in the plane behind him. This allows a lot of creative freedom with switching between vertical paths in the level design with skilled platforming, but also forces the Prince to adapt when those walls suddenly become windows. Of course, it’s currently in Early Access, so there’s a strong argument that it is still worth waiting for the developers at Evil Empire to build more content atop this strong but barebones foundation before wall-jumping in.
As a series, The Prince of Persia has ridden the winds of popular sentiment in recent months with not one, but two 2D side-scrolling revivals. The first, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, was roundly praised for its inventive platforming this past January, which leaves The Rogue Prince of Persia to justify its bonafides through its developer (known for bringing renowned roguelite platformer Dead Cells to life) and how it lives up to the Prince of Persia name that’s been hung around its neck. The initial and easiest comparisons would be to assume it is either The Lost Crown with roguelite elements or Dead Cells with an emphasis on parkour movement, and yet neither of those descriptions wholly encompasses how it actually plays.
Without losing its roguelite concept, this new go-round for the Prince puts more of an emphasis on his fighting capabilities across myriad weapons. Enemies come in many shapes and forms, with both shielded and unshielded varieties, and require every technique at your disposal to get through each fight unscathed. Every charge attack, drop attack, or vault over an enemy helps keep your health bar pristine until an inevitable boss fight.
One of the most important lessons I learned is that discretion is the better part of valor. While it is tempting – and often rewarding – to fight every enemy in the way, preserving your health matters far more than anything else. You cannot skip every enemy, but it defeats the purpose to engage every large warrior who swings a spear in omnidirectional strike zones unless you are entirely sure you can emerge unscathed. Combat is so involved that it can end up feeling overwhelming at times, so it is simply not worth it to take down a group of five enemies if it means dying to a saw blade in the wall a few steps farther into the level.
This being a roguelite with randomly arranged levels, though, avoiding danger is the greatest – and sometimes the most frustrating – challenge. An unlucky fall into a group of enemies can be devastating to your life total, and even a good plan to destroy enemy shields can fall apart when there are too many grouped up to discern which one an attack will hit. It can be a bit of a bummer when taking two or three hits could completely decimate a run, as it occasionally makes me too wary of danger to really engage with the combat.
That’s a shame, because The Prince has various weapons available to unlock and wield, each using a different fighting style. The Royal Sword ended up being my favorite due to its good balance of speed and reach, while the Whirling Spear’s long wind-up times frustrated my hit-and-run style of play. With nine currently available, there is definitely enough weapon variety to make runs feel different, but not enough that I was routinely feeling over the moon at having found another one I clicked with.
Those weapons are crafted and upgraded using the not-particularly-expansive system of bringing the single resource you gather on runs to an iron forge back at your base. That can get expensive when you’re handing it over in often double-digit numbers and an average run only nets you around 30, though those new weapons and improvements are then permanently unlocked for future runs. And this, right here, is the source of one of my largest annoyances with The Rogue Prince of Persia in its current incarnation: I would sometimes forge items from the list, but they would not be marked off as unlocked in my collection despite disappearing from the forge. This can only be a glitch, but it is an annoying one, because I do not know if something has been forged and I have not organically found it again or if it just never got unlocked and is lost to the sands of time.
Another wrinkle is the charm system – essentially buffs and modifiers added to your combat skills that commingle to effectively level you up between runs. A fully-kitted out character with accordant powers like oil slicks and fire will be taking enemies out before they know what hit them, but relying on a few level-ones without a proper build will barely improve your capabilities. The handful of charms available now largely do not seem to make a huge difference to your runs on their own, but a Prince with leveled-up charms will certainly have an easier time dealing with the unexpected than one barely scraping by on an early run. The process of unlocking them always left me fearing that a similar glitch to what I experienced at the forge would present itself, leaving me with fewer glimmers and no charms to show for it, but so far that’s worked as expected.
And when The Rogue Prince of Persia flows, it flows extremely well. 2D action game aficionados and sickos alike will enjoy bouncing along walls and bopping enemies with different weapons as an act of fun in and of itself. After the latest patch, the battle system really does stand up on its own as both smoother than Dead Cells and far beyond the fighting in Prince of Persia games before it. At some point, you will be startled by how much you are improving at fighting enemies and how kinetic it can be to dispose of them quickly while moving.
The story, as of its Early Access launch, is an intriguing setup that has the Prince rushing out to save his kingdom from supernatural invaders, only to be continually yanked back in time by a magic bola, but beyond that initial concept it’s edging on non-existent. He is forever stuck in a loop where he may never truly have enough time to make it to his destination, which could be a great launching pad for more characters to be introduced and steal the show, but there’s too little to grab onto currently.
It is especially lacking during boss fights when compared to, say, Supergiant’s Hades series. Exchanging the same two or so lines with the boss gets old long before the Prince breaks the cycle and remarks he already knows what a boss is going to say, and even then they both keep repeating that same line forever. That makes the dialogue that’s supposed to poke fun at the repetition repetitive in and of itself. I have to imagine more lines will be added later, but later is not now.
A cast of characters supports the Prince along the way, but at this point, they have no variety and no depth. Azadeh, the leader of the village you set out from, feels vaguely nonsensical at the moment; she’s clearly waiting until she can either be reworked or given more lines to make what she currently has to say make sense in context. Other characters move to the Prince’s camp, which protects those individuals from losing their memory while rewinding time, but very little is made of or by this convenient contrivance. There is plenty of time and opportunity to expand all of this in future updates, but it is a bit of a bummer to start the adventure and feel very little motivation to do right by this merry troupe of one-dimensional misfits.
At this juncture, there is no voice acting to speak of for any of The Rogue Prince of Persia’s characters, including the Prince himself. This does not feel like a huge loss right now given how little there would be to say, but it doesn’t help the already flat characters feel any less paper-thin, and makes it that much easier to run past them without caring what they have to say.
At least The Rogue Prince of Persia is lovely to look at, styled like a Sasanian-era painting come to life. Smooth animations and bright colors meld into a satisfying aesthetic, even if things look best while in motion and a little awkward when standing still. The environments not only look pleasant, but read well with necessary immediacy as you sprint and fight, which is important considering not every background surface lets you run on it to your heart’s content. I am somewhat puzzled as to why every character has purple skin, but I assume that is more of a stylistic choice rather than a malicious one, given the historical weight that depiction can sometimes carry.
Level variety is on point, with each new area looking substantially different in color scheme and tone from the previous one. If only the enemy visual design was as bold as the environmental art, then areas would feel a lot more fresh. Instead, the theming grates a little when seeing an enemy from a previous area in a new one along with several similar-looking, mask-wearing mooks.
The music is often somewhat relaxed and in the background, never really taking focus away from the action. At other times, there is some dynamism in the soundtrack that had me tapping my toes along with the beat, but something about it feels ill-fitting with the action on the screen. The music seems tuned for someone who wants to run forward without stopping, which is not going to fit every playstyle an action roguelite can support. The opening theme is also incredible, but does evoke a similar alien feeling when considered as part of the whole.
However, all of the good and bad of specifics like that are largely a wash under the criticism that there is simply not enough at The Rogue Prince of Persia’s Early Access version to hold my attention very long. It does not take more than about five hours of crafting and leveling up gear to get strong enough to surmount the first major boss, and the encounters after that follow suit. There’s a little bit more to see, such as how the Prince can discover new information that can lead to unseen levels, though I’d have thought the story connection between what is discovered and what is unlocked would be a lot stronger. I genuinely had a fun time getting through the areas and fights that are currently available, but right now it’s hard to recommend for anyone who does not care about watching it take shape in real time. An update that came out during this review period did add a new level already, which is encouraging, but there’s a long road ahead.
