Sucker Punch may have just released the highly acclaimed Ghost of Tsushima, but footage of another project has just leaked out. This title, called Prophecy, never saw the light of day except for the 11 or so minutes of footage that hit the internet. While early, Prophecy looks like somewhat of a mix between The Order: 1886, Ghost of Tsushima, and the original Assassin’s Creed. We have reached out to Sony for any comment of clarification.
As discovered by ResetEra, the video starts out somewhere in Europe following a character named Abel as he speaks of some treasure he is after. However, he’s also a wanted man, making his treasure-seeking job a lot harder. Shortly after his internal monologue, he gets found out and must escape the many armored men on his trail.
The demo is a highly scripted chase scene with some peaks and valleys, but appears to be more than a proof of concept, given how good it looks. These aren’t just gray stick figures slashing gray clubs at each other in gray rooms; it’s a detailed game that probably took some time to put together. Not everything looks completely finished — the facial animation is a little on the stiff side — but it is more developed than you might initially think.
But given that it never came out, it likely didn’t come together the way Ghost of Tsushima did for one reason or another. Sucker Punch probably developed this demo some time after inFamous Second Son and inFamous First Light, which both came out in 2014. The studio was fairly quiet until Ghost of Tsushima‘s announcement at E3 2018 and that large gap would naturally allow for a bit of experimentation.
Sucker Punch was also fairly open about how it searched for a title to make after inFamous. In a blog post right before Ghost of Tsushima‘s launch, Co-founder Brian Fleming talked about how they threw around multiple ideas for potential games including pirates, the Three Musketeers, and even Scottish outlaw Rob Roy (who Liam Neeson portrayed in the 1995 film). Even though Prophecy doesn’t tick any of these boxes, it shows how the team was willing to search around before finally setting on the open-world title set in Feudal Japan.