Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown reviewDeveloper: Ubisoft Montpelier, UbisoftPublisher: UbisoftPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out 18th January on PC (Ubisoft, Epic), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
There’s something about a magic door. Who could resist them? I can’t. I don’t know anyone who can.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a lot of things. It’s the latest game in a beloved series whose lineage stretches all the way back to the glory days of home computing. It’s a metroidvania so beautifully put together it almost feels like a Plantonic example of the form. It’s a promising sign that Ubisoft is starting to let a series’ soul dictate the ultimate structure of a game, rather than pouring its molten life into the same open-world mould. And it’s a game that really knows the value and impact of a magic door.
To wit: I’m in a kind of hub area, done up like a breezy Persian marketplace. There are people nearby I can talk to for various kinds of upgrades and trinkets, for a bit of training on the nuances of combat, and even for a bit of story background. But there’s also this wall, and when I walk past the wall, a shape emerges, warmly picked out in gold. It looks like a door, but it’s a door that would take me deeper into the world, into its third dimension, and this game is largely a 2D side-scrolling affair. Is it a door? Is it just a quirk of the lighting? What’s going on here?
The Lost Crown is filled with moments like this. Like I said: venerable series, and a venerable genre, but prepare yourself for lovely instances of invention, of craft, moments that can genuinely make your heart skip a beat.
I have long since lost track of the threads of the Prince of Persia games, but this latest feels like a bit of a reimagining. You play as Sargon, a member of a crew of immortals who are on a quest to rescue a prince who’s been spirited away to a cursed mountain. Things quickly go wrong, as they tend to when cursed mountains enter the frame. Time and space start to malfunction, monsters prowl and flap through the air on nasty wings, and boom, we’re in metroidvania territory.
Suddenly, then, we’re exploring a platforming world that stretches in all directions, with doors and passageways that require specific skills to be acquired before they can be opened. This is a game that threads combat and traversal through a complex space, asking players to commit to the architectural confusion, and to the need to remember promising threads that cannot currently be taken up but might prove interesting a few hours from now.