Just as Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima starts to top the charts on PlayStation 4, a vertical slice from a canceled past work of theirs called Prophecy has surfaced online. Starting life all the way back in 1997, Sucker Punch developed the popular PlayStation hits Sly Cooper and Infamous, as well as their most recent open-world samurai romp.
With their last games shipping in 2014 around the time of the PlayStation 4 launch, many wondered what the Infamous studio was working on throughout the PlayStation 4 generation. Sucker Punch was a common name thrown out for unknown E3 reveals, and it became more and more likely as the years went on. Finally, Ghost of Tsushima made its debut at Paris Games Week in October 2017, the 20th anniversary of the studio's founding. It turns out, in addition to their historical epic, there was some length of the time where Sucker Punch was exploring a more magical setting for their next adventure.
The 15-minute gameplay demo for Prophecy (which was first discovered on ResetEra) has viewers following a lone drifter wandering the streets of a gray city. He seeks to invade a hidden chamber deep underground, but his plans are interrupted by the city's guard. Our protagonist is branded a thief and identified by a particularly well-armored soldier as Abel Taboura. Abel bluffs the guard into heating his sword with fire and then uses alchemic magic to create a flashbang effect and escape. Abel dashes through the alleyways, giving viewers an opportunity to sample the game's combat. Abel wields a short dagger countering moves until he can get close for the kill.
Later, Abel tackles a guard off a balcony from a stealth position, taking out another guard below in the process. After a brief section crawling through the sewers and dodging blades from above, Abel shows another sample of his combustible alchemy and retreats back into the shadows. Abel fights his way through a few more guards, climbs to the rooftops, and then takes an arrow right above the knee. He tumbles into a building, warning a shopkeeper to keep his presence a secret if he values his life. The merchant doesn't listen and Abel listens to his slaying outside the front door.
After particularly violent gameplay involving pulling the arrow out of his leg, Abel hobbles on one leg and knocks a bookcase aside in order to blockade the entrance. He then busts through a window and faces a heavily armored foe. Rather than fight directly, a fistful of powder burns his armor clean off, giving him an opening to stab through the shoulder and defeat him. Clearly in pain, Abel runs over a wooden bridge and burns it behind him. The demo ends with a shot of a single soldier who survived the collapse charging for him for a clash of blades.
Those who were able to catch a glimpse of the demo while it was online compared the game to Assassin's Creed, much in the same way that many are drawing comparisons between that franchise and Ghost of Tsushima. While most will never know what the rest of the game looked like, the Japanese setting of Sucker Punch's latest is certainly more original than the urban cityscape that Abel runs through in this Prophecy demo. Perhaps someone from the studio will be able to expand on the game that never was at some point in the future, but until then, players have a brief window into Prophecy's forsaken world.
Source: Kenzodielocke/ResetEra