This article is part of Run, Die, Repeat, Polygon’s week-long series exploring roguelikes.
Sometimes it takes a whole lot of words to explain a video game adequately. Other times, it just takes seven: Prince of Persia but it’s Dead Cells.
That succinct elevator pitch tells you almost everything you need to know about The Rogue Prince of Persia. The 2D action game, which surprise-launched in 1.0 this week after an early access run of a bit more than a year, isn’t so much trying to evolve the roguelite genre so much as it’s using a proven formula to give the Prince of Persia series a reliable hit. It accomplishes that mission by simply taking all the pieces that made Dead Cells such a genre staple and peppering in an extra platforming twist that captures the spirit of Ubisoft’s series – plus some killer tunes.
As well as the acrobatic mash-up works from moment to moment, The Rogue Prince of Persia never quite climbs to its inspiration’s heights. It’s a reminder that action roguelikes are a fragile genre: You can hit all the right notes, but one key misstep could make or break your run.
The adventure kicks off when the Huns attack the Persian Palace and their leader, Nogai, commandeers the throne. That inciting siege is all it takes to set the titular Prince into action. To reach Nogai, he must travel through labyrinthian biomes and take down a couple of interstitial bosses guarding the path to the throne room. In traditional rogue fashion, the goal of each run is to amass better weapons, passive perks via medallions, and health upgrades to piece together a build strong enough to beat the Huns.
It plays exactly like Dead Cells, right down to a meta-progression system where Soul Cinders can be collected and spent to add more weapons and secondary tools to the item pool. The similarity is no accident. The Rogue Prince of Persia is developed by Evil Empire, the studio that took over Dead Cells development duty from Motion Twin in 2019. While the studio didn’t create that game, it has become intimately familiar with it through years of maintenance and work on standout DLCs like Return to Castlevania. The hack-and-slash action is fast-paced, the level design is sufficiently maze-like, and there are plenty of risks to weigh as you poke around every corner of a biome for valuable treasure.
Evil Empire does try to put its own stamp on a reliable format. To better represent the series it’s working with, The Rogue Prince of Persia adds a bit more platforming to the mix. The Prince can run up the 2D backdrop’s walls to reach higher areas and stick onto footholds. It’s imperfect, as I often find myself sticking onto walls harder than I expect or magnetizing to a foothold when evading enemy attacks mid-battle. Even with those quirks, it’s still a smart way to pay tribute to Prince of Persia’s roots, and it keeps movement as quick and fluid as combat.
There’s an emphasis on story too, as there are sub-missions to complete across multiple attempts. Those are linked together by a feature called Mind Map, where any collected lore or information is splayed out on a web that slowly unravels the story and how its characters are connected. Though the story comes off as white noise between bouts of thrilling action, it does help the adventure stand out from countless games that follow the Dead Cells formula to a T. Pair that with an illustrative art style and some terrific grooves, and you should have all you need for a strong roguelite.
But as I played, something felt ever so slightly off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first; after all, I was playing a game that was structurally identical to one I love. The root problem, I found, is that runs in The Rogue Prince of Persia are too stagnant. The biome layouts change (though some are more static than others), but my attempts never feel all that different from one another. I’m always funneled towards the same bosses who have the same telegraphed attacks. I always have to do the same platforming gauntlets to unlock new item blueprints. Runs start to feel stale within a few hours, even after I’ve unlocked branching paths that let me explore new biomes in a run.
Even combat suffers from that, as the core hacking-and-slashing rarely feels too different from weapon to weapon. In one run, I traded a pair of poison daggers for a set of fists. When I started attacking, I thought I’d accidentally requipped the daggers. They just felt that similar. Secondary items like bows and saws add a little variety, but I felt like I never needed to change my play style to fit the cards I was dealt — that is, until around five hours in, when I unlocked extra medallions with utilities beyond simply raising my attack power. I finally found a groove at that point, as one run let me shape my character around stunning enemies and getting extra damage on them. The build potential was there, but I had to work for it.
That’s the delicate design challenge that any roguelite has to contend with. You want to give players a good reason to keep coming back for another run. But you also don’t want to make it feel like your first attempts are a total wash no matter what your skill level is. The Rogue Prince of Persia gets tripped up during that tightrope act. At times, I was left feeling that the point of my runs was simply to amass enough skill points to give me more healing potions so I could survive long enough to unlock more exciting medallions. I could see the invisible grind behind my hopeless attempts a little too clearly.
You could levy the same criticism against beloved games like Hades or even Dead Cells that hinge on slow-burn progression, but both games are large enough in scope to make the grind feel like a secondary perk. Hades especially solves for this with combat that radically changes from run to run depending on what boon you choose. The draw is the excitement that comes from starting over with a blank slate each time. The Rogue Prince of Persia takes hours just to arrive at understated variety, which puts the hunt for progress boosters at center stage. The levels just don’t have enough mystery on their own.
Those quirks aren’t enough to spoil a good time. Even if runs don’t feel as propulsive as those in Dead Cells, the acrobatic twist on the formula has kept me coming back. That’s where The Rogue Prince of Persia leaves its mark, even if it never fully transcends its straightforward pitch. Wallrunning can be frustrating to get the hang of, but there’s a satisfaction in slowly mastering it until you’re able to fluidly cut through a biome without stopping for air. It’s the one skill that I don’t need to unlock.
