Hades 2 burst forth from the bloody river Styx into a ‘surprise’ early access last week, immediately throwing its weight around with over 100,000 concurrent players and—as you might’ve noticed—causing several indie developers to go on red alert.
One such developer is Evil Empire, the offspring of Dead Cells creator Motion Twin, which is currently in the process of crafting The Rogue Prince of Persia. Similar to Dead Cells, it’s a 2D, platformer roguelike that was also planning on releasing into Early Access May 14. It’s not anymore.
As per the studio’s Twitter account, The Rogue Prince of Persia will still wallrun into early access this month, with a proper date to be announced on Monday next week.
“Seeing as everyone and their mum is playing that game (including our entire team… and their mums), we have decided to let people have their fun with it,” states the announcement, adding: “It’s not every day that a game in the same genre as you, which is one of the most anticipated upcoming games of 2024, will release into Early Access a week before you plan to do the same. We are not prideful enough to ignore the implications of that.”
It’s not all to avoid Supergiant’s colossal release, though—The Rogue Prince of Persia is making good use of the extra time to polish things up: “The Day 1 patch was getting pretty hefty, so gaining more time to test it and add more stuff before launch day has considerably lowered the stress levels of our producer and the game director already!”
Evil Empire certainly isn’t alone in wanting to dodge Hades 2’s mammoth release, with the studios behind Aggro Crab, Crow Country, and more offering both commiserations and lamenting the sudden arrival of one of this year’s biggest Early Access titles.
Some even took issue with the decision, as HeadwareGames notes: “Shadow dropping an indie game of this weight feels a bit off to me when so many smaller indie studios are carefully planning and dodging big releases every week this year,” later adding: “They’ve earned this success and hype but maybe a lil fair warning would have been nice.”
In fairness, Hades 2 didn’t come exactly out of the blue. When the technical test ended, Supergiant promised that Hades 2 would release “relatively soon after”—but we’re talking game development time here, where “soon™” is a meme. There’s a tightrope to walk between letting your devs stay agile and trespassing unspoken indie dev etiquette—which I think Supergiant walked just fine, all told.
Anyway—The Rogue Prince of Persia looks great, but since I’ve somehow sunk 14 hours into Hades 2 already (and I’m still stumbling into new mechanics) I’m more than glad for the respite. Especially since the game’s already so feature-complete you’d hardly notice it’s in early access for hours, bar the absence of a true ending, a couple of walls, and some fun sketchy character art I want an options menu toggle for.