Hades2 plunged into "surprise" early access from the bloody River Styx last week, quickly throwing weight at over 100,000 concurrent players and, as you might have noticed, causing some indie developers to go on red alert.

One such developer is Evil Empire, a descendant of Dead Cells creator Motion Twin, who is currently creating Rogue Prince of Persia.1 Similar to Dead Cells, it was Roguelike, a 2D platformer, that was scheduled to be released to Early Access on 5/14. It is not anymore.

According to the studio's Twitter account, Rogue Prince of Persia will also start early access this month, with a suitable date to be announced next Monday.

"I see everyone and their mom playing that game (including our entire team... "It's not every day that a game of the same genre as you - one of the most anticipated games in 2024 - will be released to Early Access 1 week before you plan on doing the same thing. We are not proud enough to ignore the meaning of it."

But it's not all to avoid the huge release of Supergiant — The Rogue Prince of Persia makes good use of the extra time to hone things: "The Day1 Patch is pretty"

The Evil Empire certainly doesn't just want to dodge the mammoth release of Hades 2, the Mammoth release of Agus. In the studio behind Locani, Crow Country, And it offers more commiserations and laments the sudden arrival of one of the biggest early access titles of the year.

As HeadwareGames points out, some had problems with the decision: "When so many small indie studios are carefully planning and avoiding big releases every week this year, the shadows that cast this heavy indie game feel a bit bad to me," he later added: "I'm not sure what to do with it." They're getting this success and hype, but maybe the lil fair warning would have been good.

To be fair, Hades 2 did not exactly come out of the blue. When the tech test ended, Supergiant promised Hades2 would release "relatively soon" but here we're talking about game development time where "soon™" is a meme. There's a tightrope walking between letting your developers stay agile and trespassing on implicit indie developer etiquette - I think Supergiant walked well, all told.

Anyway — The rogue Prince of Persia looks great, but since I somehow sank 14 hours into Hades 2 (and I'm still stumbling into a new mechanism), I'm delighted for a rest. Especially since the game is already so functional, you'll hardly notice that it's in early access for hours, banning a true ending, a couple of walls, and some fun sketchy character art that I'd like an option menu toggle.