Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

This review contains spoilers.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is an ambitious project that succeeds in revitalizing the franchise and bringing it back to its 2D roots: with great synergy between its combat and platform challenges, and brilliant art direction, the game only falters when it comes to its half-baked story, which seems almost unfinished.

We play as Sargon, the youngest member of an elite force of Persian warriors called the Immortals. The introduction focuses on their battle prowess, showing them repelling an invasion force and reversing the course of a lost battle almost on their own. The Immortals will appear often during the fight to assist Sargon, making us witness their abilities firsthand. The Persians win the battle, but the festivities are interrupted when the Queen’s son, the prince of Persia, is kidnapped by a trusted general: Sargon’s own mentor, Anahita.

They all chase Anahita to Mount Qaf, a place of magic, where a hidden citadel lies. The general is first introduced as a sensible person, who scolds Sargon for getting too cocky after receiving a reward from the Queen. She reminds him to never get carried away by his accomplishments and always remember what he is fighting for. This creates a mystery surrounding her betrayal: what is her reason for kidnapping the prince and bringing him to the mountain?

The true standout in The Lost Crown is Mount Qaf itself, the lair of a mythical creature called Simurgh, whose death left a scar in time, making it pass differently for those who venture into the citadel. Qaf is a vertical labyrinth full of death traps and lost souls, a prison that traps people in time: we encounter soldiers who still believe they are fighting ancient wars, unaware that everyone they know and care about is long dead.

Mount Qaf is a great Prince of Persia setting, playing with time and reality: one of the first new pieces of equipment Sargon finds is lying beside his own dead body, showing Sargon an ominous possibility, a reality where he falls by the hands of a trusted friend. Qaf is quick to humble Sargon, as he may be a hero in Persia, one of the Immortals, but in the citadel, he’s just one more lost soul surrounded by things beyond his comprehension. There’s a kid who often chuckles at Sargon’s title, repeating it ironically just to tease him. A blacksmith scoffs at it too, as unlike Sargon, she’s a goddess that possesses true unfathomable powers.

Just like the first Dark Souls, there’s a verticality to the design of Mount Qaf so that the deeper we go, the less civilized the scenery becomes. At the top of the mountain, we have lush gardens, vast halls, and the Archives, a repository of knowledge and mad scholars. At the bottom, after crossing the sewers where quest givers can’t be fully trusted and merchants have twisted bodies with more limbs than usual, we reach the Catacombs and are enveloped by darkness and hunted by Alien-like creatures, while trying to avoid curses and poison: it feels like we have reached the bowels of the earth, as even the ground itself looks like half-digested meat. And beneath the Catacombs, the game subverts expectations, presenting a beautiful prison of sand that lies outside time itself.

The Lost Crown succeeds in making each area stand out not only through distinct art direction and unique enemies but also through particular mechanics and set pieces. The Archives, for instance, has moving stairs that make it look like the corridors at Hogwarts, vanishing ghostly platforms that are activated by hitting a distant bell, and an immortal warden that haunts Sargon down if he hears the warrior making noise in that immense library. Meanwhile, the Depths are filled with poisonous lakes and waterfalls, prowled by deformed monsters that may even spawn insects when they die, and have a labyrinthine design that is made even more pronounced by the handicap the game puts on navigation right after we arrive there, removing our access to the map. And the deeper Sargon ventures into the Depths the more grotesque the creatures become: in the Catacombs, even the doors are dangerous nightmarish abominations.

The logic of the challenges changes as well, so to make each local feel unique: while most areas have a boss fight right before Sargon acquires a new power, the Archives, with its many books and lore items, actually has a particularly inventive puzzle in store for Sargon, challenging his knowledge instead of his battle prowess. This is a puzzle that plays with the concept of time, creating ghosts that perform our previous actions in that room while we perform new ones, taking the ghost into consideration. For example, we must stand on a button to open a distant door that we can’t reach (since we’re standing on the button) because our future selves will be able to pass through it while the ghost stands on the button, repeating our previous actions. With a timer and more and more ghosts getting added to the mix with each puzzle, this sequence makes for a brilliant climax to the Archives area, requiring a lot of planning to time things just right.

But, true to its roots, The Lost Crown’s focus lies more on platform challenges than proper exploration or puzzle-solving. Mount Qaf is littered with rotating blades and moving walls decorated with spikes, making parkour as important here as it is in the Sands of Time trilogy: there are long stretches without enemies where we are supposed to overcome a series of challenges using the powers at Sargon’s disposal.

One of these powers is the ability to create an image of Sargon, crystalizing what he was doing at the time. With the press of a button, we can return to that image and continue to perform that action. So, there will be moments where we can’t reach a platform because there’s a moving scythe or spike that hits Sargon halfway there, but with this power, we can now form Sargon’s image in the middle of a jump, fall back to safe ground, wait for the scythe to pass through it and then teleport back to that image to continue the jump to reach the intended platform. It’s an ability that requires planning, as we must take into consideration Sargon’s action and momentum when activating the image but also the path and speed of the moving hazard to time things just right. The difficulty, then, comes when we are expected to plan everything very quickly, such as when we are locked inside a room very similar to Resident Evil’s famous laser scene.

One of the best things about The Lost Crown is how powers and equipment serve more than one purpose. This ability, for example, is very useful in combat as well, both offensively and defensively. We can charge an attack, form the image, release the attack, and immediately go back to the image to unleash it a second time immediately, without the need to charge it again. Or we can use the image to teleport to a safe spot after a boss unleashes a powerful attack that hits a huge area. Or we can use it to teleport Sargon right above where the boss is standing, avoiding their attacks, and giving us a huge opening to attack them from the air. All this, of course, encourages us to study enemy attack and movement patterns: the power, then, rewards us with the opportunity to punish enemies if we can predict them.

The same goes for equipment. The bow, for instance, can activate faraway devices but also be used in the middle of an air combo to slow Sargon’s fall and allow more hits to land. The bow can be turned into a chakram as well, a sort of boomerang that has more distinct applications, as it stays on the faraway device that is activating until we call it back. So, we can throw it to activate a lever to move a platform to where we are, and then call the chakram back to move the platform back to where we must go. As the game progresses, we are expected to use this move in midair while taking into consideration Sargon’s powers as well. And in combat, when we throw the chakram at enemies, we can parry it on the way back so that it goes again one more time (and keep doing this).

There’s a risk-reward dynamic with the parry, too. Depending on the amulets we equip on Sargon (they are the usual the reward for exploration or completing quests) a single parry can do wonders besides deflecting enemy attacks, such as healing Sargon or increasing his special gauge. However, if we mess up the timing of the parry, enemies will deal increased damage on Sargon and, depending on the difficulty option selected, their hits pack quite a punch. In the Depths, there’s even one creature that will curse Sargon if we mess the parry, shrinking his health permanently… until we reach a bonfire-style checkpoint, that is.

The Lost Crown gets collectibles right, too, making them either relevant to Sargon or engaging to collect. As is typical in the Metroidvania genre, after obtaining new powers, we can return to previous spots on the map (which are now reachable) to acquire hidden items. These are usually amulets that either grant special attributes to Sargon or increase his stats, but we can also find more amulet slots, some lore items (a few are quite useless, but there are important pieces of information scattered throughout), and even parts of a prophecy, which reveals a plot twist about Sargon’s true nature.

To assist us during backtracking, the game introduces a great mechanic that lets us take pictures of rooms, which will then be added to the map. This prevents us from forgetting the room’s layout, letting us quickly assess if our newly acquired power or equipment will be useful in that room. This allows us to properly plan our trips, which is especially important in The Lost Crow, since the focus on platforming challenges sometimes make the process of backtracking tiresome, requiring us to pass through long stretches of parkour just to get that new amulet or coin.

There are collectibles focused on parkour as well: special coins (used to upgrade weapons and amulets) that are always in hard-to-reach places. And the thing is that reaching these coins is not enough to collect them, as we must safely reach the ground without getting hit, too: we must plan not only how to make to the coin, avoiding the many hazards in the way, but also how to make it back to where we started after getting it. The only issue with the coins is a small one: there’s no sound effect when we collect them, which is a strange oversight.

Finally, there are also some brilliant puzzle rooms scattered throughout Mount Qaf that require us to pay attention to our surroundings, analyzing what the statues in a room are depicting, what an NPC is doing, or if there’s any pattern hidden in the walls: what makes them work is the fact that they are secrets, the game doesn’t alert us to their existence until very late in the game, so we can even pass through a puzzle room without realizing that the puzzle was there.

It’s unfortunate, then, to witness The Lost Crown stumble in its last hours with its story, which feels truly unfinished. One of the Immortals, named Radjen, for instance, simply disappears without explanation, even though there’s a lore item building up a confrontation with her, depicting the warrior as the only one who truly cares about the antagonist. But we never get to fight Radjen and no one ever even addresses what happened to her.

Even more problematic is the fact that the game’s very inciting incident, the mystery surrounding Inahita kidnapping the prince, is left unanswered as well: we discover who told her to bring him to Qaf but not why, which is the most important element, especially since the “who” is counterintuitive: if it was the Queen herself who ordered the kidnapping, the motivation doesn’t make sense without a proper, even if probably convoluted explanation.

True to form, the huge plot twist related to Sargon’s true nature, which is teased by the prophecy and confirmed by another sidequest, has huge gaps in it as well: it relies on the fact that the Queen’s babies were swapped one day, but it again forgets to tell us why. The twist has no consequence at all, too, (it’s a sidequest that reveals it, after all), so it’s supposed to just add dramatic irony to the proceedings. The problem is that we are, theoretically, discovering the truth alongside Sargon, so it doesn’t make sense for him to remain silent about it during the climax.

In the end, it’s a testament to the great foundation of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown that, even with its very problematic story, the game still manages to impress us with its inventive level design and engaging gameplay.

April 07, 2024.