The Rogue Prince of Persia

Ubisoft has spent years fumbling the Prince of Persia name, chasing prestige remakes and open-world ambitions that never quite landed. So here’s the irony: the most interesting thing to carry that title in a decade isn’t a Ubisoft studio at all. It’s Evil Empire, the team that spent years keeping Dead Cells alive with a relentless drip of post-launch content, finally handed the keys to their own project.

The Rogue Prince of Persia is a 2D action-platformer roguelite. You play an unnamed Prince armed with a magical bola, racing to push back a Hun army led by a shaman who has corrupted the kingdom. Die—and you will die, constantly—and you’re yanked back to the start to run it again, this time through procedurally arranged levels that keep the geography from ever calcifying into memorized muscle memory.

The pitch is familiar to anyone who has touched Hades or Dead Cells: run, die, unlock, run smarter. What separates this one is movement. Where most roguelites treat traversal as connective tissue between fights, Evil Empire built the entire combat language around it. Wall-running, vaulting, and rope-based parkour aren’t garnish—they’re the sentence structure.

Positioned squarely against genre heavyweights, it doesn’t try to reinvent the roguelite. It tries to out-feel it. And on the strength of its combat design alone, it largely succeeds. The console arrival on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 brings that responsiveness to handheld without gutting it—no small feat for a game this dependent on frame-tight inputs.

• Traversal-as-Combat: Wall-running and rope-swinging chain directly into attacks, turning every arena into a vertical playground rather than a flat brawl.
• The Bola: A magical throwing weapon that anchors your kit, giving ranged control and crowd management that most melee-locked roguelites lack.
• 100+ Weapons & Medallions: Deep build variety that rewards mid-run experimentation, letting you pivot strategies and hunt synergies instead of committing to one loadout.
• Persistent Hub Progression: Between runs you return to a story hub to meet characters, advance the narrative, and bank permanent unlocks that soften the roguelite grind.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is textbook roguelite, and that’s a compliment. You start a run, fight through procedurally arranged biomes, collect weapons and medallions that modify your abilities, and push toward a boss. Death resets your position but not your knowledge—or your permanent unlocks. What keeps the loop from feeling like a treadmill is how quickly the moment-to-moment combat is built to reward mastery.

Here’s where the game earns its price. Most roguelites ask you to learn enemy patterns and optimize a build. This one asks you to learn space. The Prince moves like a thought—he can be across a room, up a wall, and behind an archer before the animation of his last strike finishes. When it clicks, attacking and moving stop being separate verbs. You’re just flowing, and the enemies are obstacles in a line you’re drawing through the level.

Build Variety and Synergy

The 100+ weapons and medallions are the engine of replayability. Medallions modify weapon behavior and grant passive effects, and the joy is in the collisions—stacking a bleed effect against a weapon that hits fast, or building around aerial damage to reward your parkour habit. The game actively pushes you to adapt mid-run rather than lock in. Found a weapon that doesn’t suit your medallions? Adapt or swap.

That said, this is where Early Access honesty matters. The balance isn’t fully cooked. Some weapons wildly outclass others, and a handful of medallion combinations trivialize encounters while others read as dead weight. Evil Empire has a documented track record of patching this kind of thing into shape—it’s literally what they did for Dead Cells for years—but if you buy in today, you’re buying into a build economy that’s still being tuned.

Onboarding and Friction

The game is generous with its parkour tutorialization but stingy about explaining its deeper systems. Medallion synergies, in particular, are left for players to discover, which delights experimenters and frustrates everyone else. There’s a real onboarding friction here for players who don’t naturally reverse-engineer systems. And because the movement is so central, the difficulty spikes hard for anyone who hasn’t internalized the traversal—this is not a game you can button-mash your way through.

The hub structure does real work smoothing the edges. Returning to meet characters and advance the story gives each death a narrative pretext instead of a pure failure state. It’s not Hades-level writing—the characters don’t yet carry the same warmth—but it gives the grind somewhere to go.

The deeper issue at launch is content ceiling. The number of biomes is limited, and once you’ve seen the environments a few dozen times, the procedural arrangement can’t fully disguise the repetition. Runs stay mechanically fresh far longer than they stay visually fresh. That’s the single biggest asterisk on the experience.

The art direction is the loudest thing in the room, and it should be. The flat-shaded, boldly colored aesthetic gives the Prince a comic-book crispness—silhouettes read instantly, which matters enormously in a game this fast. Purples, oranges, and teals pop against each other with a confidence most indie roguelites can’t muster. This is a game that knows exactly what it looks like.

The Persian-inflected electronic soundtrack is the other half of the identity. It fuses regional instrumentation with driving synths, and it does the essential job of a roguelite score: it makes the hundredth run feel as urgent as the first.

The combat’s entire premise depends on low latency and locked frame timing, and the input design is built around that demand. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, which works in its favor on every platform. Where the visuals stumble is variety, not fidelity—the striking style can’t fully mask how few distinct environments you cycle through.

On Steam, this is the definitive way to play. Keyboard-and-mouse works, but a controller is the honest recommendation—the traversal chains want analog precision and dedicated face buttons, and mouse aim doesn’t meaningfully improve bola control. High refresh rates flatter the movement, and the PC build has been the lead platform for the studio’s ongoing patch cadence.

On Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, the port is the surprise. A game this input-sensitive had every reason to feel mushy in handheld, and the design holds up: the run structure fits short handheld sessions naturally, and the Switch 2 build gets the obvious benefits of stronger hardware—cleaner frame delivery, sharper presentation. Even the original Switch should hold the line on responsiveness, which is the metric that actually matters here.

The Rogue Prince of Persia is a movement game wearing a roguelite’s clothes, and that’s exactly why it stands out. Evil Empire understood the one thing a crowded genre lets you win on: feel. The instant a run clicks and you’re chaining a wall-run into a bola throw into a landing strike, the repetition and the balance quibbles fade into background noise.

But they don’t disappear. This is Early Access reaching toward a full launch, and you can see the reach. The content ceiling is low, the balance is a moving target, and the story hasn’t earned the emotional weight it’s aiming for. We recommend it to the right audience: buy it now if you want to grow with it and trust the studio’s patch record—which, on the evidence of Dead Cells, you should. Wait if you need your roguelites feature-complete. Either way, the foundation here is solid, and it’s already more compelling than most finished games in the genre.