Before playing this, I had very little exposure to Prince of Persia. I knew it was a series of action platformers. I knew there was a bad movie adaptation of it. I remember really wanting to play Warrior Within since the cover for the Gamecube version looked super cool and edgy, but my parents wouldn't let elementary school me buy it, so I ended up playing games like Chibi-Robo and Animal Crossing instead. I played maybe 20 minutes of the Wii version of Forgotten Sands a while back. That's about it. I only ended up playing this game now because I wanted to play at least one of the older Prince of Persia titles before diving into Lost Crown. Although I do think Sands of Time has some pretty big flaws, I do want to preface this by saying I had an absolutely great time playing it. This might be the recency bias talking, but this could easily be up there with something like the original Dragon's Dogma on my list of "best 7/10 games you'll ever play". A good two thirds of the game is made up of what would now be mockingly referred to as "uncharted climbing", there's a certain deliberateness to all of your actions that still makes it enjoyable. Most of the game's challenges boil down to having to figure out how to traverse a room or outdoor area, then actually timing things like pole swings and wall jumps to make it happen. Simply having to do things like press a button to raise yourself up or drop down a ledge, or not being able to stand up on a pole you can swing on and instead having to turn around, swing, then jump against the wall in order to get to a pole directly above you are satisfying enough to keep platforming interesting. Using the dagger to rewind time mostly seemed like a gimmick to me thanks to the fast load times and incredibly generous checkpointing of the PC release, but then I got to the point near the end of the game where you have to climb a large tower without it and I realized just how nice it was to be able to undo one bad jump or something without having to go through the whole sequence again.

The combat is rather simple, though not because of the Prince's moveset. You have a basic melee combo, a block and parry, several abilities tied to the Dagger of Time, and a few acrobatic moves such as a lunge that's performed by jumping against a wall or vaulting over an enemy to attack them from behind. I do quite like how most enemies don't actually die unless you stab them with the dagger while they're down ( a pretty clear inspiration for the systems used by games like Assasin's Creed or the Arkham series where you have to confirm takedowns) and the enemy variety is nice, but there are two things that hold the combat sections back. The first is that most enemies have one attack that's always the best way to deal with them. Use the lunge against the two-sided spearmen or the big guys with swords. Vault over the female enemies with two swords and the big hammer guys. You can vary this up, especially with the parry, but it always feels like you're just drawing out encounters in order to use cool moves that are weaker than the best option. The second issue is the encounter design itself. Fights are mostly limited to open spaces and enemies come at you in groups of three or four. Kill an enemy, and another one will spawn in to take its place. Repeat this 15 or 20 times. Now I get that that's probably due to hardware limitations, but it really makes fights feel like they're artificially dragged out when you just keep cutting down enemies and exact copies of them appear out of nowhere like there's a spectral clown car just driving around the arena. I also get that the development team didn't want the game to be like 90% platforming so they needed to put more combat encounters in the game, but doing something like putting some enemies in the mostly empty hallways of the palace, or even just putting some traps in the arenas and letting you use them on the enemies could have gone a long way.

As far as presentation goes, the game holds up pretty well. The art direction and the way that the Prince grows more disheveled as the game goes on really sell it, and Yuri Lowenthal's performance is easily a high point in his career. He manages to sell the Prince as both a cocky noble seeking glory and as someone who's in way over his head and who knows it. I particularly like the narration of the Prince retelling the story of the game to Farah and the parts where you fail and he goes "No no no, I jumped over the bridge" or things like that. The music was generally fine, but there were a few standout tracks. A lot of it is a kind of mix of metal music and stereotypically Arabian music. I really wish there were more tracks that leaned into using vocals like The Tower of Dawn or Discover the Royal Chambers, though. The story itself was decent enough, but I felt like Farah as a character was pretty bland and her romance with the Prince was forced to the point that I honestly couldn't tell if she was actually into him or just seduced him to steal the dagger near the end (it seems like she only did this because he hesitated the first time they got to the hourglass, but IDK). For like half of the game I couldn't even remember her name and just thought of her as the girl who pulled switches. I do like the overall story of the Prince letting his pride get the better of him and making a terrible mistake that he then has to try and fix, though. It's very much a tragic tale in the classical sense of the word.

The PC port was surprisingly stable considering this is just a game from 2003, but I did have two issues with it. First was that the fog effects are just fucked to the point of completely covering the screen in the stuff. Thankfully the fog can just be turned off, but I don't really know how much that impacts the atmosphere of the game since I played through the whole thing without any fog. Second was that a lot of the dialogue from Farah during gameplay was super quiet, almost to the point of being unintelligible. This seemed like some kind of positional audio thing, but I can't say for sure since there were times where I could barely hear even though she was like three feet away from the Prince. It was still pretty painless for an older title, though, since I didn't have to really mess with compatibility or fan patches or any of the other tinkering that you normally have to do to make a game like this run on modern hardware. Considering I mostly played this game on a whim and got it for like $2 in a Steam sale, I'm really glad I played it. I'm looking forward to playing the other PoP games in the future, particularly Warrior Within. I want to see if it's really as edgy as the box art suggests.

It's impressive how much the team got right on their first attempt, but there are still a few minor quirks and annoyances that make me prefer Aria to it. Mostly small things like how a lot of the platforms in the inverted castle are placed in such a way that they're barely out of reach of your double jump so you need to use the mist or bat forms to get past them, how the wolf form is kind of useless outside of running through the game's handful of straight enemy filled hallways faster, or how most of the bosses are complete pushovers when compared even to some of the tankier normal enemies. And even they were stupidly easy once I found out about the moon rod's special ability. I know that fully exploring the game didn't help this, but even then I only finished with a completion percentage of 192.6%, so there were probably a few things I missed.