Mostly Normal Monthly #0015, March 2024
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown starts 2024 with a Bang
Chris Reviews Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Developed by Ubisoft Montpellier; Published by Ubisoft
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch
Score: ****/****
If the game was a song: That! Feels! Good! By Jessie Ware
Liked:
Best in class platforming and combat
Excellent character designs and vibes
It reminded me of Dark Souls
Persian language voice acting option!
Soundtrack is GOOOOOOD
Sargon is a hottie
There’s a Demo available, try it today!
Disliked:
Pacing of earning new abilities is a bit sluggish
Bad luck with triggering a glitch lost me access to an ability
Ubisoft’s customer support ticketing system
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a generous game that won me over from the word go (or even earlier thanks to the free demo). In Crown you’ll play as Sargon, one of the Seven Immortals who serve at the behest of the queen of Persia. When her son, the titular Prince, is kidnapped you venture into Mount Quaf to find that time is broken. The bird-god The Simurgh has abandoned Persia and its royal family, blowing up time and space. The art direction of Crown makes great use of these time troubles to show monuments frozen mid-collapse. The narrative trappings of Prince of Persia are operatic, with twists and turns, well-drawn characters, and the emotional stakes of a Shonen anime. Every emotion is big, and you’ll FIGHT through those feelings.
Did I mention fighting? Crown’s combat system goes deep and allows for player expressivity, reminding me of great fighting games. Sargon’s toolset includes a dodge, parry, dual blades, and a ranged attack (combination bow and arrow and Chakram throwing disc). The game rewards air-juggling, combos, and the right balance of aggression and patience. Perfect parries of certain attacks open enemies for exciting and over-the-top finishing moves. Sargon can even infinitely parry back his own Chakram attacks at enemies until they’re shredded to bits. All throughout combat, you’ll earn energy for your Athra meter, giving you devastating super moves to turn the tide in combat.
As you unlock Sargon’s traversal abilities, they layer over the baseline combat, adding further complexity and opportunities to do some truly heinous shit. Double up on a charge attack by travelling back to your shadow self. Extend air and ground combos even further by dashing to chase down enemies after they’re knocked back. Turn into Scorpion from Mortal Kombat by grappling enemies back to you mid flurry with your grappling tether ability.
The foes you confront in Mount Quaf are no joke, and even the standard enemies will punish you for getting over eager or flubbing your parry timing. This sense of danger and even-footing further contributes to the fighting game essence. Crown’s array of interesting bosses pushed me to my limit, but the game respects the player’s time by letting you choose to retry any boss fight if you die without any punishment.
As a game in the Metroidvania lineage, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown has a number of treasure chests dotting its enormous map, titillating you to return once you can just jump a bit higher or further. The game features a memory system where players can attach a screenshot to an exact location on the map, providing a helpful reminder to return to a previous area once you have the right ability unlocked. The most exciting rewards in the game are upgrade materials to strengthen your blades or bow, as these upgrades make a significant impact on your damage output. You’ll also find Charms, which provide powerful modifying effects to Sargon’s combat abilities. By the middle of the game I had enough charms and slots to playfully mix and match them, creating distinct character builds that developed their own playstyles – one setup emphasized parrying, while another turned me into a ranged threat, spraying flaming arrows all over the screen.
The game’s platforming sections will shred even the most skilled gaming acrobats to bits. Crown is a Prince of Persia game after all, and no Prince of Persia would be complete without its traps. There are some truly punishing platforming sequences throughout the entire game full of spikes and spinning blades. I spent a solid 45 minutes on one optional sequence that pushed my dexterity, timing, and understanding of the game’s mechanics and Sargon’s abilities to my limit. In fact, there are at least 3 such sections that come to my mind. All of them were a pleasure to overcome.
The demanding platforming sequences act as their own type of puzzle, that keeps with the games fast pace, but the game is not afraid to ask you to slow down as well. Thought provoking puzzles and riddles litter the map and provide some of the most interesting challenges in the game. The exploration truly sings when the designers marry the puzzle solving to the fluid platforming, pushing your agility and ability to think on your feet simultaneously.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown brings the long running series out of retirement and back to the side-scrolling roots of its innovative origins. In doing so, Crown’s designers at Ubisoft Montpellier have set a new high-water mark for the Metroidvania genre with a robust and rewarding combat system, precise and demanding platforming, thought provoking puzzles, and flashy presentation.