Fat Princess

A bizarre blend of strategy, platforming action, and team-based multiplayer fun cast players as soldiers trying to kidnap the enemy princess while feeding her cake along the way, gradually making her bigger and harder for the opposing team to carry back. Titan Studios created a playful, brightly colored world inspired by fairy-tale aesthetics, where teams of up to thirty-two players clashed in chaotic battles combining a class system of soldiers, mages, archers, and workers with base-defense elements.

The whole system is designed so that anyone can grasp it within the first minute. Roles don't change through any menu, but simply by putting on a hat at a station near your own castle, so a player can jump between healer, archer, and knight several times within a single match depending on what the team currently needs. Workers chop down trees and gather resources used to upgrade your own stations and unlock stronger class variants, while catapults can launch teammates across the entire map straight into the enemy line. The result is mayhem in which an organized team was obvious at a glance, since without cooperation between workers, healers, and an attacking wave, there was simply no way to carry the princess out of the enemy dungeon.

The concept originally began as a smaller independent project, and Sony helped bring it to completion as a full-fledged multiplayer game distributed through PlayStation Network, making it an example of a successful collaboration between a smaller studio and the publishing power of the platform. Critics praised the originality of the concept and the fun of team cooperation, which helped the game build a loyal community despite its satirically exaggerated central idea. The later expansion Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake for the PSP showed Sony's ambition to build smaller, imaginative titles as a complement to its major exclusive franchises.