A fantastic Metroidvania that took me half a year to beat, for some reason, highly recommended.
The Prince of Persia videogame series has an interesting history, and I am not too familiar with it. I have seen gameplay and screenshots of the first one, but I havenāt played it. Same goes for the 3D games, I know they have some similarities with todayās Assassinās Creed, another series I havenāt really played, except for the PSP spin-offāwhich was quite great I must say. And thereās also the Sands of Time movie, which I canāt really remember.
My point is, I donāt really have any nostalgia or background with this franchise when I decided to pick up this game. The only reason I even cared about it was because it showed up in my favorite gaming podcast Into The Aether where they said it was a Metroidvania, and an early GOTY contender. Thatās what got me interested.
A Metroidvania game once again! this year I have already finished Ori and the Blind Forest, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission. It is a genre I really enjoy, and seeing all the praise this game received, I decided to buy it. All of this happened in May, 2024. Yeah. I really took my time for this oneā¦
TL;DR: the game is amazing, a wonderful blend of exploration, combat and platforming, to traverse the lost cities of Mount Qaf, filled with secrets to find, enemies to defeat, and paths to uncover.
The game takes place in Mount Qaf, a place where the flow of time is different from the outside world. We find a lot of different environments and they are all super different and varied. Most areas are quite recognizable too and distinguishable from each other, making exploration really enjoyable and worthwhile.
The story itself is nothing too special, you are Sargon, part of a group of warriors called the Immortals, and your mission is to save the Prince of Persia, who has been kidnapped and taken hostage inside Mount Qaf, a mythological region frozen in time, filled with mysteries and dangers. Thereās a couple of plot twists, and by the end you have to save reality itself, or something like that. It has some good moments and great concepts, but the writing is not the best, and lots of seemingly important things or possibilities just never develop further.
It is a rather convoluted and disconnected plot, things happen just because, thereās underutilized characters with lost potential and, itās just a mess. If you are looking for a solid story that will hook you to see whatās next, this really aināt it.
There is a lot of mythology and lore to find which is somewhat interesting, related to myths and legends of Persian culture, I donāt know how much of it is taken from real life and how much is just part of the gameās worldbuilding, but it was still nice to collect and read some of the scrolls, poems and dialogues.
One of the defining traits of this game when compared to old and new games in the genre, is its quality of life features for backtracking and traversal. This game has a few welcome innovationsāand a couple of weird caveatsāwith plenty of save points and teleport stations, making traversal really easy, thereās a feature to teleport between save points later on, making late-game backtracking even more of a breeze.
The game is of course, a Metroidvania, you explore all of what you can, get stuck, find some upgrade or power-up, and go check all of the places you could not reach before, face a few bosses and unlock more upgrades, rinse and repeat until you reach the end!
All of the power-ups in this game are pretty good, usually related to time and space, and a all of them, like the eventual double jumpāis it really a spoiler if it is always there?āreally open up the map in new ways and getting them after facing the difficult bosses who guard them, was an incredibly rewarding feeling.
For some reason, the game lacks a mini-map. I found myself constantly opening up the map screen, which is at least very well designed and has a button mapped to it.
This game has an ace though, Memory Shards, an item to literally take a screenshot of your location and pin it on the map, is an incredible feature that I will miss in other Metroidvania games from now on. This makes the exploration much better and itās really hard to get lost!
The game letās you customize your playstyle with different amulets, each taking up slots in a necklace. They offer you different skills that will change the way you play, for example thereās an amulet to increase your attack damage, or to increase defense, or to refill your magic quicker, or to have extra combos and attacks, among many others, due to the limited amount you can wear, you can experiment and create your own builds.
The game puts a great highlight on the combat, what a parry system, a huge moveset revolving around sword fighting, and lots of mobility options to position yourself, create opportunities for combos, and deal with multiple enemies at once.
Unlike in Metroid Dread or Samus Returns, The Lost Crownās parry system is not a must, but it is rather useful. You can develop your playstyle around it, or avoid it for the most part. I was not the best at doing it, and it wasnāt as easy as Metroidās, but I could do it around two thirds of the time and it was always satisfying to land, both on regular enemies and of course, bosses.
There are also certain moves that will punish you if you try to parry them, which makes it so you canāt just go and parry everything, but you have to be quick between parrying and avoiding incoming attacks.
Thereās a few other weapons in your arsenal, used for combat and puzzle mechanics, such as arrows and other long range weapons, as well as special attacks and skills that are available after filling up a magic bar (known as Athra in this case), these are usually more flashy and strong attacks, or buffs to your health or damage.
The boss fights are on the more difficult side of the genre, similar to Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight with encounters that feature multiple attack patterns and phases that you need to learn and master in order to achieve victory. They are all quite challenging, and some of their attacks are harder to read. As a fan of Monster Hunter, getting to learn the behavior and attacks that enemies do is pretty important, most of the attacks are well telegraphed, but some come out of nowhere, itās all just part of the journey.
In general, the difficulty curve of the bosses can be pretty mixed, some are hard to grasp at first, but once you beat it once, you can do it over and over again, some other bosses were a little more luck based. The order of the bosses felt a little weird too, sometimes I faced a very hard boss that took me dozens of attempts and trying different strategies, and then the next one only took two or three tries to beat. I think the boss designs and patterns were all good, but some are better executed than others.
This is not a game where you can just mash buttons at random, the parry mechanics during boss fights are really good, thereās plenty of opportunities to take the risk and deal great damage, with great animations sequences to reward the player, however, if you fail, the boss will also execute some pretty strong attack with an equally cool animation to witness.
In some boss fights there can be some quick time events, requiring you to hit some buttons to execute a certain action sequence. However they are very forgiving and didnāt detract from my experience with the game, I never lost a fight because of one, but they can be disabled in the settings.
With so many options for traversal, the game is not afraid to challenge the player with multiple platforming segments being straight up obstacle courses one has to beat to unlock some side-quests and collectibles, and even to progress in the story.
There are multiple long sections filled with with spikes, multiple enemies, single-use platforms, death traps, homing missiles, bottomless pits and plenty of other things arranged in pretty complex patterns that will need you to do some quick button inputs, memorize where projectiles come from and to never trip or lose a beat in order to succeed.
If you have played Celeste before, or similar platformer games, you should be good to go. Most of the time those environmental danges will not make you return all the way back to a save point, but will reduce your life bit by bit if you die too many times.
Personally, I didnāt found any completely crazy or unfair challenge, but I was already used to Celeste, and I think Iām pretty decent at platforming in general, with some patience, no challenge is impossible to complete. With that said, if the shinespark puzzles in Metroid Dread were too much for you, this may prove difficult as well.
I found most of the soundtrack to work very well for me, it has that middle east feel to it, with pretty other-worldly voices and choirs, a great set of strings and other instruments that gave it a very mythological and ancient aura. I really enjoyed it and never took me out of the experience.
I will admit, I didnāt find it super memorable, it is mostly environmental and does not have many strong leit motifs that get stuck to my head. I am currently listening to it as writing this though, because it is fantastic. I can see myself reading or writing with it in the background more often.
The dub work was well done, I think the addition of Persian dub acting was great, the kind of thing I would not have expected Ubisoft to do, but they delivered. and I picked it for 60% of my playthrough. I selected Spanish for a few segments (from Spain, no Latin Spanish option sadly), and English for the rest.
I loved the aesthetics of the game, it has a similar style to Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series, or the Spideverse movies. It looks fantastic and will age very well in the future in my opinion, it has a bit of that cell-shaded look too, especially during boss fights and the coup de grĆ¢ce animations.
I played this game on my Switch in both portable and docked mode, and I did not have any trouble at any point of the game. There were some visual glitches during cutscenes, especially with shadows and rain. However, during gameplay, other than some slightly long loading times, I never had any significant slow downs or graphical issues.
The boss and character designs were great and the whole world manages to fit together, despite the variety of environments. All of the boss attacks and patterns have a ton of flare, their special movies were amazing to watch, I even let myself get hit a couple times, because they were so cool! It also made me want to try to parry their moves to get my own counter attack animations.
The in-game quality of life features are plenty, as previously mentioned, Memory Shards are great, the game lets you buy maps, kind of like in Hollow Knight, and after you get the map, you can also unlock the locations of secrets and collectibles, making completing the game viable for everyone, without the need of shooting at every corner of the map, although thereās some of that in some places.
Many of the amulets and surges can ease the difficulty and help you get through to the game, but sometimes they can be hard to obtain.
The game has multiple accessibility options in the menu, like letting you parry even if you arenāt facing the enemy, colorblind and high contrast modes, highlighting secrets, and even skipping difficult platforming sections, thereās plenty of awesome quality of life features that can be turned on and off as desired, and I think thatās not to be taken for granted, specially in a game of this style and difficulty.
If you want to find a game with similar difficulty to Hollow Knight, great fluidity of movement, boss battles like Metroid Dread, the smooth traversal of Ori and the Blind Forest, and the intense platforming of Celeste, I think you got a winner here.
Even though the story is nothing note-worthy, it gets the job done, and it still has some great moments. All the quests and objectives are clearly laid out and it is hard to get lost.
There are lots of secrets and passages to find, some side quests and extra boss fights or optional platforming segments that let you find collectibles and other things. Some of them were incredibly difficult and some of them didnāt have great prizes, but the pure challenge was pretty fun for me.
I took my time with this game, starting it in May and only finishing it until this month, I donāt know why I decided to wait so long, I even played two Metroid games in the middle of it all. However, returning was always easy, I could just look at the map, get a glance of where to go and figure out how to get there. The worst part was getting to the end of the game and literally avoiding the final boss fight for 3 hours, because I thought I still had lots to do.
In the end, I beat the game in 32 hours, and collected around 72% of the items, so, it is a bit of a journey, but very much worth it. I wish to go back to it at some point in the future.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is my Game of the Year.
This is day 92 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 7 of #WritingMonth
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