Reviews from

in the past


Even without considering the technical feats achieved by Jordan Mechner in Prince of Persia (please watch the Ars Technica video if you are interested) this is still a masterpiece by design alone.

I love how you are left alone to figure out what to do - there's so many mechanics and how you interact with your environment/enemies is a lot more than "walk here" or "slash this enemy". The 60 minute time limit is perfect to give you a sense of urgency - it fits the narrative considering your hot Persian girlfriend is in danger.

To be able to beat this not only your puzzle-solving skills have to be on point but also your execution which is the perfect harmony for me. A very dangerous place, you need to tread lightly as death is always around the corner but at the same time you only have so much time so you need to have a sense of balance when it comes to how much time you have left and how likely you are to die if you rush into something. In any case you will die a lot - the 60-minute timer will finish a lot of times before you are able to beat this but to do so is incredibly rewarding.

Then you also have the fluid animations and beautiful minimalistic aesthetic of the Apple II version or DOS/Amiga ports.

Incredibly surprised by Prince of Persia - it has everything I love in video games.

A disclaimer before I start this review: I finished the SNES port, which has around 10 extra levels including ones in a heavily welcome practice mode to get the controls downpat, as well as much more colours, a new soundtrack, and so forth. No doubt it is the version I rec, but I would heavily advise playing it on BSNES with 2 frames of runahead if your rig can handle it. This is about the only game I can think of offhand (barring rhythm games) where I really felt like I needed it to play the game.

Prince of Persia is one of the most legendary and immersive games of all time. The passion project of a kiddo who grew up loving film and comics, he set out to make a game that could really make the most of his love for their worlds, as well as his love for animation and immersion. It really shows in the visual department, which is what I will be covering first.

Prince of Persia was a real triumph in overcoming hardware limitations, as detailed in depth here: https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54
Essentially, Mechner in a pre-Photoshop world traced footage of his brother wearing all white clothing to rotoscope highly fluid animations such that they could be abstract enough to fit in an Arabian Nights-inspired world.

I am pleased to report that this port was very true to the aesthetic Mechner aimed for. The dungeons are still insanely oppressive, ranging from cracked dusty blue-gray walls with no semblance of lighting beyond torches to clean royal palace interiors lined with red carpet after red carpet to suggest the sheer sense of royalty. The character designs are also much more fitting to create a sense of immersion in the setting than the minimalist original sprites, as if this was the world Mechner envisioned in his mind. Truly one of the most visually impressive portjobs in an era where one could not simply transfer source code from one device to another due to the sheer difference in capabilities and programming approaches between different systems on the market.

To boot, it was given an OST facelift that truly created a sense of mystery and danger to epic degrees. I appreciate how the OST for opening levels feels like a calm before the storm, while later levels have music with instruments harsh enough to strike one with fear as everything on screen is stained bloodred in the hellish inferno.
https://youtu.be/1hSDOPmjojE?list=PLAs1Kha_R9dJHE0nwiK_y6VoT6b89BNgl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ_PBUNAjWY&list=PLAs1Kha_R9dJHE0nwiK_y6VoT6b89BNgl&index=8

I will admit the OST is not particularly something I would listen to outside of the game itself, but damn while it's there it truly gets the job done and sticks in one's head for a while. I do wish there was a wider variety of grunt noises for the battles, however since it can be jarring over the game's span.

The story is very minimalist in its approach, but it is integrated so well with the gameplay. Seeing Shadow Man steal Prince's potions, and therefore extending his health bar, really helps to sell that this asshole is your mirror reflection. And to defeat him, one does not swordfight him to the death, but rather... fuse with him and become one, gaining all the potions he stole in the process. The Shadow Man was created from the Prince's own inner demons and reflected through a mirror, so the Prince defeats him by having the courage to face his inner demons. Without a single word of dialogue, Mechner brilliantly created what was perhaps the first true rival figure in a video game and created one of the most genius story moments in the medium without a single cutscene. I was absolutely flabbergasted to experience something like this in a mid-80s game.

The puzzle solving and difficulty are a mixed bag. There are cool moments to be had such as the otherworldly space warps towards the end of the game, or allowing the mouse friend to save the Prince from the cage to signify to the player that the Prince isn't some wish fulfillment badass who can always take care of himself without any help, but rather an underdog. The battles can be rather repetitive, but damn it's always fun when there are opportunities to kill enemies more easily with traps such as making them get decapitated by guillotines. To say nothing of the hilarious gravity glitch I exploited during the boss rush https://gyazo.com/c4c884dacd0e515bd72a54c88c5c522a

Unfortunately, the jumping, even with the runahead, feels too delayed at times especially given the strictness of some jumps. The Prince also doesn't always have the best handling with turns, and the straightup sword battles can get rather dull by the end. I think if there were a few more bosses with gimmicks to them like the 4 armed motherfucker just creating earthquakes with every jump, I would have felt more positively about the battles overall.

That all being said though, Prince of Persia is a real history lesson of a game and holds up stunningly well being one of the first of its kind, especially with the QOL and aesthetic enhancements on the system. Its influence is felt very strongly in countless later cinematic platformers such as Flashback, Another World, and the Oddworld games. Nothing but respect for this classic masterpiece. If you're a masochist like me who has the utmost love for uber challenging games, and enjoys going through influential games as history lessons of sorts, this is the game for you. Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with admiring it from a distance.

EVERY Prince of Persia is "The Sands of Time" when you're playing on an emulator, baby!

It’s easy to point to the late 90s and early 2000s as the collective “moment” when videogames truly began harboring cinematic ambitions. That third dimension brought with it a whole new bag of tricks, and no one was shy about dumping them out. We might be tempted to blame that generation for some modern triple-A trends, but of course, this desire is about as old as videogames themselves. Even if we don’t count the evocative text adventures of the 70s and 80s, the parser-based adventure games pioneered by Sierra and the then-titled “LucasFilm Games,” early CRPGs, game adaptations of movie scenes like The Empire Strikes Back on Atari, and ventures like the barely interactive Dragon’s Lair all sought to marry the theatrical qualities of more prestigious media with games’ unique ability to put you in the driver’s seat. Some of these efforts paid off in fulfilling their own respective goals, but what they couldn’t and often still rarely accomplish is a cinematic cadence and consistency. Playing The Secret of Monkey Island, it’s impossible to truly feel that everything happening at all times carries real dramatic weight. Action games are almost always predicated on a fundamental asymmetry between the player character and everything else — goombas can’t interact with fire flowers — or otherwise bespoke elements whose rules don’t apply to the rest of the game world — Ocarina of Time’s eye switches are only affected by arrows, and cannot interfere or be interfered with by any other means. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of design, I’ve singled out a couple of the greats to make that as clear as possible, but it’s this general lack of internal consistency across the medium which makes 1989’s Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia stand out.

Whether or not you feel that developing a “dramatic game system” is a reasonable or misguided goal, or if “verisimilitude” and “internal consistency” are necessary in achieving it, there’s a level of cohesion to the game’s storytelling and mechanics which I can only describe in these terms. Prince of Persia doesn’t have an incredibly substantive plot (escape the dungeon and save the princess), but the confidence with which it (mostly) wordlessly conveys and provokes the player to experience that story still impresses. It’s in the way the game doesn’t waver in its visual perspective, always presenting the world in profile even during cutscenes, never showing anything which doesn’t have direct gameplay implications. The consistency of its visual language in and outside of playable moments gives weight and narrative credibility to the time spent playing, there is no strict divide between “story” and “gameplay” moments. There are only two truly notable caveats to Prince of Persia’s otherwise spotless coherence, but both are purposeful and arguably necessary for the game to function (respawning after death, and switching between the modes of general movement and combat). Its more widely lauded successor, Eric Chahi’s Another World, though great, is stitched out of setpieces whose solutions have no bearing on the rest of the game, but Prince of Persia never introduces any rule that won’t become relevant or useful ever again. Each space is a system of interlocking parts, where the drama emerges directly from the fact that you’re given almost perfect information about the consequences of engaging with those parts.

Sounds like a pretty clear-cut platforming videogame, but there are some important distinctions to keep in mind. In the shoes of our rotoscoped hero, even the simplest geometric level design must be approached as though it were a real space. if you want to descend a platform, you must step carefully to the edge so as to avoid falling off, turn around, lower yourself down using your hands, and let go of the ledge to drop to your feet. If you want to leap further than the width of a single tile, you’re gonna need a running start to do it. Spike traps can be tiptoed across, but running or jumping will create the force needed for them to pierce through. Failing to take into account the weight and durability of your fragile human body will always result in a gruesome death, but you’re not the only one for whom that applies. Guards litter the hallways of the castle, and all of them are susceptible to the same grisly horrors as the player character. The imposing guillotines, pressure plates and falling tiles can all be used against your adversaries, they’re even as vulnerable to fall damage as you are. Prince of Persia’s environments are built out of only a handful of elements, but each one is an unalienable fact of the setting, and must be treated as such. It’s not the layouts of these levels which create that all-important sense of verisimilitude, fun as they can be to explore and find new routes around, but the consistency and believability of their laws.

The sheer amount of danger lurking around every corner and crevice coupled with the level of commitment required of the player’s inputs means it’s tempting to take a very slow and methodical approach to Prince of Persia, but we can’t have that. For it to succeed as a dramatic game, every moment has to carry a degree of real importance. To reference the canon Mechner was drawing from, one of Indiana Jones’ most prominent filmmaking techniques is “the ticking clock.” Rewatch any of those movies, and you’ll find that there’s almost always some manner of time bomb or closing door in the background of an action scene, which applies an underlying layer of tension to every fist-swinging, heart-pounding moment of struggle. It’s no less effective in an interactive setting. The game is filled with both short and long-term ticking clocks, whether it takes the form of a pressure plate which opens a gate just long enough to slip by after a death-defying leap, or the Grand Vizier’s massive hourglass which contextualizes the time limit looming over the whole game. These push the player to be bold in their performance, encouraging them to take risks in places they otherwise wouldn’t. They heighten the threat of obstacles and draw the player even more deeply into every moment of committed action. Win or lose, they’ll only have one hour to reach the end. That in itself also contributes to the game’s “cinematic” sensibility, its length makes it as digestible as a short film, and the level design is as tightly paced as any action movie. The designs of its stages are clearly considered with an eye for that hour-long playtime — their battles and sizes grow longest in the middle before becoming a triumphant string of victories leading to the final confrontation. It helps that there are no menus or extraneous elements involved. Instead, each area transitions directly into the next. Once mastered, the performance of that arc becomes a thing of beauty.

The game comes together to form an experience almost as nail-biting to spectate as it is to play, but that can’t be attributed to its adherence to these design principles alone. Rather, it’s the way it plays with the expectations those rules create which elevates Prince of Persia beyond its successors in the “cinematic platformer” genre. The game’s heart lies in the recurring “Shadow Man” who disrupts and undermines the player’s efforts at every turn, stepping on pressure plates to shut doors and stealing potions which are meant to increase the player’s maximum health. It lies in the surprise skeleton battle, the magic mirror, the levitation potion, and a penultimate encounter that had to have inspired Final Fantasy IV. It takes every opportunity to use its established rules for dramatic purposes, and never deviates from that goal. As Noah Caldwell-Gervais recently said of Sekiro, Prince of Persia is “cinematic in a way that cutscene-driven games have only ever gestured towards,” and it rallied every ounce of the Apple II to do it.

Gorgeous. Addictive. Infuriatingly difficult.

Note: I honestly don't know why anyone would prefer any of the other versions to the original Apple II one or to the initial DOS / Amiga ports (which polishes up the original while maintaining the simplicity and flatness). People talk about the SNES version having "better" graphics. Yeah, I guess if you like a bunch of pointless detail being added that makes it look like lots of other platformers from the era. The beauty of the original game is its striking minimalism (which, incidentally, helps the smoothness of the rotoscoping shine).


my mom sewed me a little stuffed mouse because we both loved the mouse that comes to push the pressure plate and rescue you. first game i ever played all the way to the end.

(a bit of background: I'd seen my friend play this when I was a kid, but didn't really know much about it until I picked it up recently)

I find it pretty amusing that when I played Deep Space Nine: The Crossroads of Time recently, my first thought was "what kind of Prince of Persia-inspired game would control like ass and throw tons of timed missions at you?" And I guess now that I've played this, I know the answer to that question is Prince of Persia. Because this does control like ass, and the entire game is a timed mission. The fact that the timer is actually very unforgiving and you can save and load your progress means that you're encouraged to repeatedly savescum, playing the same stage again and again until you get a speedrun-worthy time.

There is also plenty this game gets right. The minimalist approach to the graphics and the music is very memorable; nothing is wasted, and every graphical detail and short musical jingle means something. The rotoscoping is impeccably done, ensuring that the game looks silky smooth (even if the controls don't always feel that way). The sword duels are a particular highlight!

I highly respect what this game did especially for its time; it's probably the best game I am totally okay with not returning to.

i have no idea honestly. i never imagined i'd enjoy this game in any capacity, but the truth is it does a lot right. there's a certain allure to it, much like a lot of the DOS catalogue, and i do totally feel the exciting aspect of the realistic/cinematic platforming this has going for it. it's well-known that it's really difficult, and usually with old games like this i don't quite experience it because of my constant savestate overuse, but since i wanted to experience the original DOS version and did not know anything about dosbox emulation, i didn't have that luxury and was forced to play it the legit way. i kinda enjoyed that! it was frustrating beyond belief, but it felt good to actually get through one of these old ass-clenchers without cheating. this game definitely has its issues and there's a lot i could complain about but it was for sure a worthwhile experience.

This game perfectly encapsulates what does it mean to work under pressure, while teaching you the mechanics and feeling with your own mistakes and experimentations.

eeeeyowch this game is quite difficult. It's one of those games where the keys to progression lie in mastery of the less-than-orthodox control scheme and memorization of the levels. Not super trial-and-errorcore but getting kinda up there. The first few hours of playing this were certainly frustrating as I didn't have a manual of any sort to help me understand the full extent of the controls, but once I figured it all out things actually somehow started to fall into place. This game also basically pioneered the "cinematic platformer" genre, so I have to respect the boundary pushing they were going for here in making a grounded, weighty, realistic 2D platformer. I tried out a bit of the ports before settling on the Sega CD version as it seemed to remain faithful to the original PC game while implementing some solid quality of life improvements. This version also added anime cutscenes with a funny bad dub but honestly it was hard to get anything out of said funny bad dub because the audio mixing was horrible and everyone was too quiet to hear. This game was certainly a little more on the painful side to play, but I eventually got the hang of it and can respect what it was going for.

It's not groundbreaking but it has amazing things, i never saw a atmosphere like of this game, the soundtrack is just awesome and the world the game takes place make it so mysterious.

But besides all this cool things, the gameplay can be repetitive and clunky. Personally, i like the clunky part because it's really easy to get used to and it ends up being part of the charm of the game but the repetitive part makes me never want to play again.

Basically, it's worth a try. I am happy just listening to the amazing Soundtrack and remembering the good memories i had with this one.

Que jogaço. Não dá pra acreditar que esse jogo é de 89, muito a frente do seu tempo. Um dos melhores na minha opinião.

I respect the fuck out of this game, but was never able to get into it

Um jogo absurdamente minucioso que espera do jogador nada menos do que isso. Cada salto, ataque ou passo feito tem que ser consciente e deliberado, se não a morte é certa. Apenas uma performance digna de um príncipe guerreiro é o suficiente para vencer o jogo.

Time + geometry conspiring to put hair on your chest.

Prince of Persia has no age, a timeless game, a game ahead of its time.
A hardware and technical masterpiece for that time, the way they recorded the animations, the way some pixels on a screen expressed such an atmosphere and the way the 8bit soundtrack sounded so hypnotising.
I feel like its one of the games we all played at some point in our life.
Crazy to think that if this game didn't exist, neither would have Assassin's Creed existed.

I think we can all agree there's that one old game of our personal choice that we think people give too much praise due to novelty (presentative quality or gimmicks) and not due to design. You'll hear the term "ahead of its time" a lot in the case of other games, but Prince of Persia fits exactly within the timeframe it was released and yet games still have a lot to learn from it.

There's two core tricks Prince of Persia has up its sleeve that make the retroactive "cinematic platformer" label go from an implication of novelty to a legitimate stroke of design genius. The first is the timer; throughout the entire runtime of Prince of Persia you are constantly fighting the clock to do anything and the entire game was built around this. The reason for the style of movement games like Oddworld would later go on to adopt was not just for the sake of realism alone, but because it makes sense within the confines of needing slow, careful movement that you have to constantly weigh the actual value of applying due to it constantly wasting your time with even the slightest misstep. This drastically changes the game as even grabbing health upgrades could be seen as "too risky" in terms of wasting your time as opposed to just rushing through. The second trick is that Prince of Persia is a game of logical consistency and learning, and not a game of actual precision or high difficulty. Prince of Persia is brutal not because its systems are that hard to master but because what you do and don't know defines everything. The game doesn't give you a single scrap of information so learning what you can and can't do really shakes up how you play it. This is obvious when it comes to things like level layouts with the timer, but the game constantly toys around with how it feeds you information. In Stage 3, you fight your first skeleton, there are not many of these across the game but they serve to teach the lesson of environmental awareness; they must be killed via environmental hazard, thus reinforcing the idea that your realistic movement is a logical consistency and enemies can be killed with the environment due to realistic limitations too; a major factor in late-game time management as enemies start taking longer and longer to kill normally. In Stage 7, you must make a tile fall from the ceiling to reach a new part of the labyrinth. This requires jumping up to bring the tile down as you hit against it, but an observant player will note that every other flimsy tile in the room shakes too when you jump, thus meaning you can pre-emptively spot falling tiles via jumping before you enter a room. In Stage 8, there are several screens you'll enter twice, first from the bottom going right and afterwards from the top going left. As you do this, it'll become apparent there are several guards on the upper side of the screen as you're coming in from the lower sector, and during the process you'll notice the guards shift directions based on where you run. This can become frustrating as often guards will just immediately ambush you when you're going through the screens on the upper sector, but in actuality, this can be avoided by simply using any movement abilities that just don't make noise. An extremely basic game mechanic, but relevant in that anything that might at first seem overtly gamey or archaic ends up being mostly a realistic extension of the mechanics at play, and this focus on knowledge coupled with the time turns Prince of Persia into a very different experience to anything else.

Prince of Persia is a game that wants you exploring its dungeons not just as gamey constructs but as things you need to evaluate and carefully move around while the clock constantly ticks out of your favor. There is a constant consideration going on of what actually is relevant to you and what isn't given the circumstances that mean wasting even a single second is a big deal, as you know you'll probably die further on ahead anyways and be struggling with what would otherwise be a short game because you just don't know the fundamentals of what's coming. This takes Prince of Persia from merely being a platformer into being something... different, it's not just about learning to pull off the tricks, it takes the form of a game that requires genuine problem-solving in a still retroactively unique way. Prince of Persia is a slow-burn as it wants you being completely attentive, and it left me hooked by the end. In spite of how old it is, finally reaching the Princess at the last minute still manages to be one of the more cinematic and memorable moments I've had in a game, and for anyone who wants to have something they can genuinely sink their teeth into without feeling like it was all for nothing, this is the game to play.

played using SDLPoP thanks to the PoP Original Trilogy site

The original Prince Of Persia from 1989 is something I feel people know, but haven't played. Granted, this is in large part in it not having seen that many ports in a while, which like, I don't really know why considering how influential and historical it is to the gaming landscape, buuuuut there's been worse cases out and about...

Jordan Mechner was onto somethin with this one, on note of that. It being his second game following Karateka, he pooled a lot more influences - Raiders Of The Lost Ark, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and (obviously) the Arabian Nights for notable cases - and rotoscope tech when creating this, and while it wasn't an immediate success, it slowly but surely started to get the acclaim and appeal it has today thanks to ports and word of mouth. I recommend watching an interview he did for ArsTechnica back in 2020 for more detail and behind the scene processes, it's quite a fascinating thing to see unfold. It's no wonder this basically kickstarted the "cinematic platformer" subgenre, even if I think the terminology is a little corny.

And honestly? This still holds up pretty dang well, all things considered. Controls are heavy and clunky, sure, but considering the design and intent of the game it's w/e, plus you can get a feel and get used to how they handle pretty easily (well, maybe not the jumping, but even then it's fiiiine). Running/walking, jumping, swordfighting, it all feels and flows pretty well with one another, rarely did they get in the way of doing the basic tasks. What actually mangles that aspect, is the level design, which is something that definitely felt like was getting stretched thin as development went along. I hesitate to call it bad, cause it really isn't, but I do have to wonder if Mechner intended for it to become an errand of trail-and-error, getting everything done in a perfect shot or risk failing completely. Having to figure out you need to jump and hit specific platforms to fall in order to climb up and progress, with almost nothing telling you that, is A Moment for sure.

I mean, there is truth to that anyway. You have a set timer of 60 minutes to complete the game, meaning you basically have to memorize (or uh, savescum, thanks to the aforementioned SDLPoP port) the level design in order to mitigate and work out the the best possible strat in order to have sufficient time leftover. In essence, it's training you to speedrun, which in hindsight is pretty funny. I'll say though, it definitely got me to figure out little optimizations, such as instead running from sword fights when necessary, or knowing the exact movement and jump pattern to bypass spikes, falling platforms, pits, and guillotines. On top of keeping task of all of this, there's also collectibles in the form of Mega Potions, of which there are 7 hidden, and lemme tell you getting all of them while still having enough time left over is no easy task. I barely managed to get to the end and defeat Jafar with just 3 minutes to spare, though I'd be lying if I said most of it wasn't a thrill.

There's also one last bit to share, and it's that there's a Shadow Prince that appears after jumping through a mirror in one of the levels halfway in. After doing so, he appears as sort of an obstacle and troll, stealing away an MP from you, forcing you down from the end of Level 6 onto Level 7, and culminating in a penultimate boss where to win you must... put away your sword, merge with it, and afterwards an entire row of platforms appear, letting you get to the exit and Jafar. Granted, by 1989, Zelda II was a thing that's existed for two years and had shown its take on the formula, but still, very cool thing to see done regardless, especially considering PoP89's story is just "rescue the girl".

PoP89 is far from a game I love - I'll sing praises to Sands Of Time either in a review retrospective or when I replay it again down the line - but it's definitely a game I admire and like all the same. Considering how short it is in the grand scheme, I might just keep the files on standby, in case I want to kill an afternoon's worth of time while doing something. There's also like, all those ports, but from the looks of it they really just fancy up the graphics and such. Did you know the Sega CD version has cutscenes and voice acting? I didn't until now! It's also boasting a little more blood, which is surprising to see. If I was to give any port a lookover, it'd probably be the SNES one considering that has 20 levels compared to the original's 12, and from what I've seen they're all vastly different and in some cases, harder. Also, the OST for it kinda bangs? I genuinely wasn't expecting that lmao.

One of the most intriguing games ever made imo, in part due to the inner workings and its many visibly different ports, but also the controls are junk, levels are completely trial and error, and also it secretly isn't a game and is actually just a slapstick comedy at the prince's expense

This game was hard as hell. My experience was identical to @JimTheSchoolGirl's; I'm pretty sure I never won the first swordfight. But I was obsessed with the graphics; they looked so much better than anything else at the time.

I'm mostly even writing this because this clip from the production of the game was just posted on social media and I want to archive it somewhere.

It really makes me feel lucky to have been born at a time when I pretty much got to see games grow up.

Absolutely beautiful game. Amazing gameplay, beautiful yet simple graphics (played PC DOS version), and a great story somehow integrated into a platformer without cutscenes. Infuriatingly addicting, yet never for the fault in the game, continuously motivating the player to try and try and try again. The controls take a little bit of time to get used to, especially if just coming off playing something Mario-like. But once you get used to them, there is nothing that could feel any better.

Absolutely deserving of its credit as a best of the best, especially in the time it came out. Especially beautiful as the game is dripping with Persian art influence. Well-deserving of its praise and acknowledged importance to video game history.

This is a little bit of a cop-out as while I don't know if I love this game, it's a lifetime achievement award for being completely punk rock in it's design and for how great its rotoscoping looks. I see this game vividly in my mind every time it's ever mentioned, and that's worth something.

Is it weird to say I really like this when I'm 80% sure I've never even finished the first level because I'm terrible at the swordfights and there's no checkpointing? I dunno, there's something about it being an eternal unknown to me that has somehow earned my admiration. I'm tired and I can't explain. It's good I think!

Firstly, I am aware that the SNES port of Prince of Persia is not a one to one translation, there are eight new levels, the levels that were already there have been remixed, and the game now gives a whole two hours to save the princess. But, from what I can tell, the original design and feel has been brought over gracefully; the weight in the prince's movement is still there, and the core design philosophy is intact, if not improved. But even with that, I understand if some consider this to be a wholly original entry in the Prince of Persia series; but for me, I am gonna treat this the same as the original, albeit slightly upgraded. Now with that out of the way, here is my review of the original Prince of Persia.

There is a level of detail and precision that comes from a game designed by an individual person. In most modern, big budget releases it is highly likely that each aspect of a game is worked on by different teams of people who all have different concepts that they want to pursue, and when all these ideas are combined they can sometimes stagnant and conflict with each other, take a look at the modern Wolfenstein games if you want an example. Here, though, there is none of that; there is a consistent and coherent pacing that shows through every element of the game. Jumping starts out as just a means to get over a gap, but it soon evolves into tool for spacing; killing an enemy is introduced as a simple obstacle to get through, but it is later implemented into the puzzle solving by having the dead bodies land on switches to keep gates open; the trap floors that fall from away from under the player are used to negate obstacles that you otherwise couldn't pass by letting them fall on top of them. Hell, on a grander scale, the entire game revolves around time, specifically, wasting time. The reason the player stutters when he falls is not just to show the impact of the fall, but to also punish you for making a mistake by wasting your time; rewards like health vials are purposely place out of the way in order to make the player question if they want more time or more health; and sword duels aren't just there as a challenge, but to also stop the player in there tracks so that they lose more time. This type of interconnected, multilayered design can truly be achieved when one person is allowed to be creative and fully understand each and every facet of their ideas.

To close out, while I did really like the first Prince of Persia, I still have a few criticism. I think the combat can be a little cheap, like if your timing isn't perfect the opponent can get like four hits in and you just can't do a whole lot about it. The inputs had a bit of lag with them, like I would press forward and jump, and then after I competed the jump the prince would just run forward again, sometimes into a trap. I don't know if this was the games fault, the emulator, or my brain going faster than the game can process. Other than that I think it is a fantastic game that holds up very well. Highly recommend.

technically impressive, but the semi-isometric view and long windups for every animation make any movements feel like they have half a second of lag. when you get used to that it's just a sorta trial-and-error trap game. not bad though

I highly encourage everyone to try out the free SDLPoP port of this game. It has many optional bug fixes and enhancements while remaining faithful to the original.
I'm surprised (though maybe I shouldn't be) by some of the reviews on this page where people seemingly abandoned the game very quickly without even substantially trying to engage the game on its terms. When I put in some effort to learn it, I came away admiring the design of this thing immensely. There's a precision and an austerity here that really tickles my brain. People seem to be frustrated by some unfair deaths, but I believe the game is designed around that well to force the player the learn the levels thoroughly. The way combat plays out is very satisfying to me. Different enemies require different strategies to defeat. Some I could defeat by being aggressive, while others I had to be very patient or bait into attacking and then countering.
I don't put a ton of stock into awarding old games extra credit for being good relative to when they came out, but I am extremely impressed at how well this game holds up. Special mention should be given to the audio/visual design. The game still looks and sounds nice and has some cool cutscenes.


What a wonderful game. Truly an example of the phrase "less is more" with this one. Everything from the gameplay to the story and the sound design is done with the fewest possible pieces that result in a tightly wound 60 minute experience.

The platforming, puzzles and traps are introduced and then remixed throughout the game. The combat similarly only features a few enemies but each fight feels like a life or death ordeal rather than dispatching the 200th brainless guard, and every few levels it throws an extra twist at you, chief among them obviously being the creation of your doppelganger.

Visually the game is also limited to a few colors, but manages to create an imposing maze-like feel to the dungeons and the palace proper. Combined with the rotoscoped animations, it has a very distinctive look that also keeps the focus on the platforming and puzzle solving of each screen.

On the whole it's a very deftly put together experience that feels like one long action sequence that would go on to inspire a lot of other cinematic games.

I was playing this when I was like 5 o 7 years old, quite often, my sister and I were commiting suicide all the time in the game just on purpose because of how funny it was. Quite an addictive game but very difficult indeed, at least for some people. I never finished and later on was happy to play again in this world with the PS2 games.

played the whole game in one of those shitty psp clones, cool

Only play it with SDLPoP port with time limit disabled and quick saves. Deliberatly hostile to the player, which might been a neat design in 1989, but, unfortunately for the game, humanity already figured out how to make good sidescrollers by then. Intentionally made the most sluggish and unresponsive character in a history of videogames, which makes Simon Belmont look like a modern prince of persia in comparison. Besides novelty of controlling a character with debilitating physical disability game has nothing to offer: no music, all levels feel like randomly generated, laughable combat which tricks you into thinking that differently color coded enemies have different behaviour (which is a lie).