The Dead Prince Reviews

The Dead Prince's most obvious points of comparison are Hitman Go (and its follow-ups Lara Croft Go and Deus Ex Go) and Thief: The Dark Project; the former for the actual mechanism of play, the latter for the larger-scale strategic movement patterns it evokes. Unfortunately, despite this sounding good on paper, The Dead Prince also encourages tedious and repetitious play, something that its inspirations did not suffer from. Chief among these is the decision to have each 'level' actually be a series of three in sequence. While the game does provide a lives system, giving you three retries before starting over from the first stage each time, this feels to me more like a bandage over the problem of having such marathon puzzles to begin with. The other big change relative to the Go series is the introduction of abilities for the player character that can be fired off in accordance with both a recharging mana bar and a counter of how many enemies you've killed so far in the current level. Combined, these changes cause The Dead Prince, in my opinion, to feel less like the tightly-wound puzzle dioramas of its inspirations, and more like it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. The worst offender is the 'Skip Turn' button -- in Hitman Go, you're required to make a move on every turn, and being able to change the timing of the guards' paths is a precious opportunity afforded only by certain pickups. In this game, if there doesn't seem to be an obvious path forward, you can simply wait most of the patrol route out. The fallout of this decision becomes obvious, as levels have turn count objectives that stretch past 150 turns, and later stages are filled with enemies to the point where the obvious solution is often to just find one safe spot, pass five turns, and then pick them off in sequence. While there are some more inspired moments, usually near the ending of individual stages, where the level design shows the promise of requiring creative ability use, most of the time I spend about as many turns waiting around as actually doing anything, which is the worst part of any stealth game. On a less severe note, the art is very charming, and the music serviceable (although I would have also liked to hear more than one track in-level, especially as the stages wind throughout several different areas), and the flip side of my criticism above is that the game should not be particularly *difficult* to complete, although perfect scores are an often infuriating exercise in replaying 100+ moves from scratch due to a msiclick. If you must have more grid-based stealth puzzles in your life, you should play The Dead Prince; but I can't recommend it in a vacuum.

i really enjoy playing this game. it has great tactical depth, and each level is a puzzle that can take less than a half hour to solve- so play sessions fit well in my busy calendar.

Great game full of puzzles that really work the mind. Pretty fun and has a thought-provoking story as well. Some bug fixes may be needed, and the layout of the game, imo, should be swapped a little bit. Would recommend

This is a very fun and challenging strategy puzzle tag game. The graphics are retro and cool. The story is interesting and the gameplay gets more complicated the further you progress. My wife also really liked the game. We would definitely recommend it to others.