Fat Princess : Fistful of Cake

Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake is a 2010 action-strategy game for PlayStation Portable, developed by SuperVillain Studios and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It adapts the 2009 PlayStation 3 game Fat Princess for Sony’s handheld while expanding it with PSP-specific material. Set in a colourful fantasy kingdom, it turns a capture-the-flag contest into a battle over rival royal prisoners: each side must recover its own princess from the enemy castle while guarding the captive in its care.

Cake is the game’s defining tactical wrinkle. Players collect and deliver slices to the opposing team’s imprisoned princess, increasing her weight and making the eventual rescue more difficult. That simple rule gives every skirmish two connected goals: press into hostile territory to bring the princess home, and delay the other side by feeding its captive. The result is a contest in which combat, escorting, defending routes and castle pressure all serve the same objective.

A hat system lets a player change role during a match rather than committing to one character class from the start. The available jobs include close-range warriors, ranged fighters, magic users, priests and workers, each contributing differently to an attack or defence. Workers gather materials and use them to improve a team’s facilities and build battlefield equipment, while the combat-oriented roles protect allies, contest objectives and break through enemy lines. Swords, firearms and magic sit alongside a deliberately cartoonish presentation, creating an energetic contrast between the cheerful medieval art direction and its boisterous clashes.

Fistful of Cake offers a single-player campaign, Legend of the Fat Princess, as well as multiplayer play. SuperVillain Studios carried over the original game’s content and added six maps, an extended story mode and four new modes: Demolition, Dilapidation, Grim Reaper and Jailbreak. Dilapidation changes the early rhythm of a match by requiring teams to repair their hat machines before they can use them. The additional modes are also incorporated into the expanded campaign, giving the handheld version its own structure beyond a straight conversion.

The PSP edition was designed around both local ad hoc and online infrastructure multiplayer, with support for up to eight users in either connection type. To make the game fit the system, the developers remodelled and resized maps and characters, adjusted the interface and effects, and reworked the audio while retaining the series’ readable, stylised look. Available on UMD and as a download, Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake stands as the portable entry in the Fat Princess series: a version built around team roles, changing battlefield priorities and the unusual problem of carrying a princess made heavier by cake.