One of the highlights of the so-called Triple-I Initiative event which happened last April 10th, was a new Prince of Persia game that came out of the blue; developed by Evil Empire, the people behind Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, I was mostly attracted to its visual style and procedural content generation premise. Their animated reveal trailer is a thing of beauty.
Last week they announced they’d put out a demo for streamers and content creators; I submitted by youtube and twitch channel and wound up being selected in a very timely manner (April 1st, a holiday in my country), so could get my hands on it the first day and play a bit.
I split my experience in two parts; on the first one I explain a bit about the game, go through the tutorial stage, and start experiencing the game.
The game is an action platformer with “acrobatic combat” and the levels are linear, with their procedural content amounting to smartly stitching “big” predesigned segments together (and probably assigning some variations to them). The animations are super smooth and clear and the combat feels very good, with each weapon providing a different combat style.
The game is not easy, it really punishes for your mistakes and rewards mastery of the combat system, you will find yourself dying a lot as you would in a roguelike.
For the second part of my stream I jumped straight into game play and was able to reach the end of the demo (I think, tho I didn’t beat the boss, I just got too nervous and lost my cool).
Overall I really enjoyed the game and the way they are treating meta-progression is interesting (if I got it right, I’m still not sure). Instead of giving the player advantages for subsequent runs, they just open up possibilities of better/different weapons and powerups to be found inside the game, so in a sense the game starts “incomplete” and you have to build it up by playing.
I know they might not be the first to try that approach, but I find it much more acceptable than just rewarding the players for their time invested with easier runs, so (if that’s how it works) I applaud it.
Make sure to wishlist the game and keep track of it if you liked what you saw!