The Rogue Prince of Persia is now out in Early Access, from the makers of Dead Cells

It hasn’t taken long for the Dead Cells developer, Evil Empire, to settle on an exciting new project. Its title? Prince of Persia! But not any regular old Prince of Persia; This is The Rogue Prince of Persia, and it’s pretty easy to tell what makes it special.

Notably, Evil Empire and Ubisoft have launched the first Steam Early Access build of the Rogue Prince of Persia, and though it is still early to say whether it’s a slam dunk, it sure is a whole lot of fun. There are some really interesting tidbits about this game, mind: firstly, even though it is being published by Ubisoft, Rogue Prince does not necessitate a Ubisoft Connect login. Secondly, the game both is, and is not, reminiscent of the classic Dead Cells, which results in a fresh and exciting gameplay loop, even this early in its development.

Evil Empire’s Rogue Prince of Persia is off to a good start

With just under 200 reviews written at the time of writing, and a “Mostly Positive” review rating, Rogue Prince of Persia already enjoys some amount of acclaim. The game itself is a relatively straightforward acrobatic platformer that doesn’t even try to hide its Dead Cells pedigree.

On top of delightfully rotoscoped animations and character models, albeit delivered in a slightly different style than what we saw with Dead Cells, Rogue Prince‘s core gameplay loop consists of basically the same elements. A few tweaks here and there, granted, but anyone who’s spent any amount of time with Dead Cells will feel right at home here.

Once again, players need to collect resources dropped by enemies to research new gear and gadgets. The Prince does so by repeatedly attempting to wall-run his way through hordes of magic-infused Huns, with the familiar choice of levels coming up every so often. The current build of the game has two boss encounters in tow and about half a dozen unique levels, which all comes together into a lovely proof-of-concept for what’s to come in the future.

“We plan to be in Early Access for around a year, probably a little bit longer,” says Evil Empire on the game’s Steam page. “We plan to add all the good stuff – more levels, weapons, features, enemies, bosses, story acts and meta progression. Along the way we want to find out if there’s anything we can add to the core gameplay too. In fact, our plan is to double the amount of content from Early Access launch to 1.0.”

A solid plan, then. Given Evil Twin’s track record and what’s already on show with the The Rogue Prince of Persia, I can say I’m very much looking forward to what comes next. And don’t forget: if you’re not a fan of Early Access, there’s that other, equally delightful version of Prince of Persia that launched earlier this year.