There's a lot to be excited about with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Sands of Time and POP2008 were very important games to me growing up, but outside of a mostly warm replay of the former a couple years ago I haven't seen or really even thought much about the franchise since. Ubisoft has been on nothing short of a legendary downward spiral for the past decade or so, with the truly good and interesting games coming out of that giant being so few and far between that you'd be forgiven for thinking they were mirages. The Lost Crown is one of those, and most importantly it succeeds not just at being a great Metroidvania in its own right, but for bringing me back to the things I loved about these games as a kid.
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!
It's not the story or the setting, which are both on the weaker side here. Mount Qaf is large and the actual level design is mostly strong - we'll get to that later - but it lacks a sense of place. It feels like a series of disconnected video game rooms stuck together mostly at random. They look nice and are fun to move through, but the game goes to great lengths to impress upon the player the history and legacy of Mount Qaf and the people who once inhabited it, and none of it worked for me. I tried, I read a lot of the early lore pickups and was intrigued by the friendship between Sargon and his cohorts and their grander relationship with Persia and its folklore. But nothing stuck, and by the midpoint I was more than happy to skip through text boxes barely skimming their contents.
It's fortunate, then, that these areas are a lot of fun to explore. Even fairly early in the game you come to grips with controlling Sargon and it feels good. Platforming in this game at its most basic is fluid, fast, and fun. As your moveset expands and you get abilities both familiar and unfamiliar to the genre, the game successfully settles into the late-game "fly through every room while backtracking" flow that all the greats do. Special shoutout to the sound effect while walljumping, which is very reminiscent to the hand-clapping sound effect from Sands of Time and made me smile almost every time I heard it. But good-feeling platforming isn't much fun if there's not much jumping to be done. Thankfully, The Lost Crown has plenty of platforming challenges, both in main progression and in optional gauntlets. Every 30 minutes in this game you're running into a mini Path of Pain, and I loved it. Some of these things had my hands sweating like the final level of Mario Wonder, the only bummer for me being that the game's final challenges are entirely combat focused. The game has some very good hidden platforming challenges but when it comes time to wrap up and really test your knowledge, they hold back - presumably so that players less versed in platforming are able to see the game through. It's a bummer.
Combat is good though, much better than in Hollow Knight, the game's closest contemporary. Silksong has its work cut out for it to match this. The Lost Crown frequently feels like they took some of Devil May Cry's stylish launcher-focused combat and put it into 2D and it works extremely well. Closest comparison I can think of is Dishwasher Dead Samurai, if you know you know.
The game looks nice and runs mostly well. I played on Switch, because I hate myself, and I'd say the portability was well worth the trade off. I had a few hitches when things got super crazy, but they were very few and far between in a game I spent 20 hours in. Not a dealbreaker at all. A bigger issue for me were the bugs, which by the end of the game were popping up very frequently. Multiple hardcrashes, loading zones breaking, even old cutscenes playing when crossing a trigger that should've been deleted. It's hard to say whether or not any of that is Switch specific or if the game just launched hot, and none of it was a serious issue, but it definitely gave me the feeling that the game was falling apart the further in I was getting.
Pacing is probably the game's biggest single issue. The game's actual structure is pretty good, smartly laying out mandatory questlines that take you all over its enormous map and dotting it with fun sidequests. A lot of these sidequests take the form of finding specific collectables on the world map, and it always feels awesome to be exploring an area and stumble across one of these items and check them off the list. I finished the game with 97% completion, only missing 3 items. The memory shard feature that lets you take in-game screenshots on the map of areas to come back to is fantastic and I can't imagine a future game in this genre without it, but it's a shame the game doesn't mark uncollected (or even collected) items on your map by the end of the game. Some of these areas are so huge and their traversal such a chore that the prospect of combing them all again for the final few trinkets was too daunting to bear. A lot of individual rooms in the game are fun to go through, but they're all made to be a challenge in a certain way. This means going through the same challenge tens of times while backtracking and looking for secrets, which gets old fast. Fast travel points are few and the distance between them can vary from two rooms apart to sometimes 20 rooms apart. The size and layout of The Lost Crown makes cleanup a much bigger chore than recent standouts like Metroid Dread, and that's ultimately the game's biggest fault.
Still, for all its issues, this is still a very good Metroidvania. Memory Shards are one of the greatest advances in Metroidvania game design in ages, and many of the individual boss fights, puzzles, and platforming challenges are very fun to go through. But when you're running through the same platform challenge for the 15th time on the off-chance that there might be a boring lore item that you missed, the sheen wears off. Here's hoping the team gets another crack at a game like this, because at its brightest The Lost Crown is full of sequences so good that I'll be remembering them when it comes time to put together my year-end list.
Oh, I forgot to mention the music. That should tell you all you need to know. And I really liked Dread's OST!