Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (2024)

Gameplay is fun and addicting, environments are beautiful with great environmental storytelling.

But it seemed like big parts of the story are straight up missing.

Spoiler:

We never learn why the queen had her son kidnapped and taken to this place, which is literally what set this entire story in motion. The actual bad guy's plan required coming here, but it turns out he's not the one that led them there. I kept expecting Anahita to reveal what the queen's plan was but instead she just dies.

Its also heavily hinted in the Prophecy sidequest and that hermit that you meet that Sargon is the actual Prince and he and Ghassan were switched at birth.....but why? It never comes up in the main story, so I guess that got cut while the sidequests just awkwardly mention it and Sargon never has a reaction to finding this out about himself.

The most blatant example is how Radjen just disappears after the early game and never comes back, then at the end she's just listed with the other dead characters, so that was clearly a boss fight that got cut.

Also the cutscenes towards the end suddenly drop in production quality, being awkwardly silent with some dialogue missing.

The first game in the Prince of Persia series was released in the late 80’s. It was one of the first games I’ve ever played. Released on the old Apple computer system. We thought it was awesome way back! Since then I have only played one game from this series, from the first XBOX era. The Lost Crown is the first new game from the series since 2010 what I understand.

I’ve heard great things about this new game from Ubisoft. It was released last year 2024 and been thinking of buying it for a while. Last month it become included in the PS+ subscription so it was a no-brainer to test it out!

I must say that this has been one of the best Metroidvania I’ve played. It blends fast-paced combat, precise platforming and deep exploration on a big map.

I really like some mechanics they have implemented which is a bit new to the genre. One feature is that you can take photos when you come to a place where you can’t explore more until you unlock new abilities. That photo is marked on the map, so you don’t need to memorise it all in your head. I would love to see this as an option in every Metroidvania in the future. I usually get lost and running back and forth to find where to go next 😄🤷🏻‍♂️

The Lost Crown is a rock-solid game. Well worth a try if you like these kind of games! I thought it was a it long but still it had me entertained for the entire time!

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲🌲+

After decades being lost to the sands of time (heh), Prince of Persia is BACK! The Lost Crown simultaneously revives the long-beleaguered IP and delivers one of the best Metroidvanias in recent memory, albeit with some issues.

Pros:

• A spectacular game - Literally. The game delivers a sense of spectacle that is often absent from the genre. The boss fights are grand, the combat animations are flashy, and the cutscenes that play at certain points, such as when you parry a boss, leave you feeling like a badass hero ripped from your favorite anime. The athra will DEFINITELY remind you of Dragon Ball Z.

• Time is on your side - The abilities the game affords to you are unique and allow you to develop your own fighting style. The time-rewinding mechanic in particular offers a very high skill ceiling and room for creativity. It also allows the developers to create inventive and unique puzzles and traversal challenges, which are a highlight.

• A Life of Quality - This game introduces some fantastic quality of life features to the genre, and I hope other devs are paying attention. The ability to take a screenshot of an area, which is then pinned to your map, is such an elegant solution to a longstanding pain point of the genre that it's hard to believe it took us this long to get it. Being able to see not just the areas you haven't explored, but why you couldn't explore them, saves you so much needless backtracking. The option for a more informative and guided map, which lets you know what areas are closed off to you even before you've gone to them, is also great.

Cons:

• The Soundtrack, or lack thereof - As a game drawing from the rich history and influences of Persia, the opportunity was ripe for a stellar, energetic and memorable soundtrack (eg: Rogue Prince of Persia's killer beats). This game delivers none of that. I genuinely wouldn't be able to recognize a single track from the game. Most of the time, there's really no soundtrack to speak of. You're just running through awkward silence, except for the occasional grunting of Sargon or the ambient noise of the environment. Such a missed opportunity.

• A storytelling fake-out - This might be more of a matter of taste, but I was intrigued by the opening couple of hours of the game, in which it introduces its characters and lays the groundwork for its setting. This opening creates the expectation for a more story-focused, narrative-led experience---a rarity in a genre typically built on lore. I was fully onboard for a fresh take on what a metroidvania can be. But after this opening, the game casts aside the story until the very end. Another missed opportunity.

This game has managed to strike the right balance for me of Metroidvanias. There are enough places to search and areas to explore to gain rewards even before you have acquired all the powers. Once you have acquired all the traversal powers it makes some, but not all, of the challenges easier to get through. I repeatedly backtracked to a number of areas after getting a singular upgrade and was usually rewarded in a handful of cases of being able to finally get the small treasure that was inaccessible before.

Overall, I think the platforming is the strongest element for me. The mini-challenges with instant death if you make a mistake were greatly rewarding even when I didn’t make it through. I actually wish the game did more with the timed, challenges where you had to setup ghost runs of yourself to activate all the switches or pressure plates you needed to get to the end.

Having a ton of fun with the exploration and platforming. Most of the platform sequences are extremely difficult but the respawns are quick and feel like it is just a limitation of your own abilities. The parry and dodge system combining with chained combos are fantastic and so fun to take out an enemy before he touches the ground again. All of this reminds me a lot of Guacamelee, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

My big gripe is with the mid to late game bosses. They are just cheese and trash design to beat down the player. Mechanically enemies begin to have nothing but unblockable moves eliminating the extremely satisfying parry mechanic that allows you a better sense of control and getting in hits. Worse yet is they give them attacks that take up the entire screen and then proceed to have 5 second cutscene animations to rub in the fact that you messed up the torturous sequence of moves to dodge the thing. They rarely have any counterable moves to give you a satisfying moment of stunning the boss. Lastly, after two of the boss fights, Orod and Azdaha, they just simply shrug it off and basically say “I was just testing you.” This extremely lame story beat undercuts the satisfaction of a hard fought win.

That being said, I still like the game and will see it thru.

Although I agree with the premise of the article that we need AAA studios taking risks on smaller well designed games that aren’t GAAS, I do find it hard to shed any tears for Ubisoft, over anything.

Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Feels Like A Repeat Of Guardians Of The Galaxy

What those of us celebrating The Lost Crown's genius didn't realize, however, is we were singing its praises inside of a bubble, and a pretty small bubble at that. The newest Prince of Persia sold just 300,000 copies out of the gate.

What gets me about sites like The Gamer is that if they really care about smaller well made games, maybe they should focus on publishing reviews for games like Ultros, a Metroidvania that runs circles around The Lost Crown both thematically and mechanically, and boosting indies to their audiences rather than focusing all their attention on AAA games and worrying quite so much about studios that regularly crunch and abuse their employees. I get that we want change at the top, but maybe it’s time to shift the message away from a discourse almost exclusively about the big players.

An excellent, tough-as-nails Metroidvania. One of the best in the genre, though also the longest I can remember. It's not perfect; fast travel points are unforgiving at times, and backtracking without all your powers can be arduous.

Early on, it is exceedingly difficult even on the default difficulty. Regular enemies wiped my health in a few hits. Without navigation guides on, it was tricky to navigate the world.

However, once I got my bearings, I had a ton of fun with this game. By far the best part is the platforming and new abilities. Each new move feels meaningful and completely opens up the way you address the challenges and obstacles. Combat becomes more palatable and boss fights are fair and fun. I eventually loved covering every corner of the map and even though I clocked in at 23 hours, I could've gone for more.

Overall, better than Hollow Knight, Outland and both Guacamelees, though not as good as Axiom Verge or both Oris.

I'll start this one with a disclaimer.

• I don't like metroidvanias. I've tried many games, but Super Metroid was the only one that got me. Much more for its atmosphere
  than its core design.
• I love the Prince of Persia franchise. The PS2 trilogy and
  POP 2008 were some of my favorite games.

I had to try this new take on the series, and I'm fairly surprised with how good it is!

The most impressive thing about Lost Crown is just how well they managed to get the soul of its gameplay mechanics. Everything works nearly perfectly. Combat, traversal and skills, they're all very tight.

• Controlling Sargon through each of the rooms and its challenges feels great, even when you have to be PERFECT to get it just right. They can be frustrating at first, but the satisfaction of finishing some of Lost Crown's puzzles is amazing!
• Fighting is extremely satisfying! Tricky at times, but fast and challenging to the right degree. Enemy variety and placement helps a lot, as well. Not to mention how incredible EVERY boss in this game is.
• The skills you get are also insane! Not all of them are always super useful, but they keep throwing new things at you all the time. It keeps the pacing fresh! The double jump, for example, brought a whole new life to the second half of the game.

Lost Crown is definitely good for a metroidvania as well. I hate the sense of feeling lost, aggressive backtracking and progression gatekeeping that comes with the genre, but the map here is VERY useful. Props to the design team. Neat level design brings things to another level! Oh, and the skins you unlock are amazing! I played with the Warrior Within outfit through the whole game.

A few things kept pushing this game back from being as great as it seems, though. The problem is that this doesn't feel like POP. I'm not sure if it's just its metroidvania cloak, but I feel like, although this can bring newcomers to the franchise, it also does little to excite old ones.

The story, for example, might be the worst thing about Lost Crown. It tries to thrill with a couple of fair plot twists, but they felt predictable. The writing is nothing more than dull and I didn't like a single character. Not even Sargon. I miss the Prince! The conclusion felt kinda ineffective as well. It doesn't help that I did not gel with how the game looks and how generic its OST sounds.

And although I LOVE the core gameplay, it was frustrating to deal with some of its new aspects. One thing that kept popping up in my head was how BRUTAL this game can be! Not every reward is actually "rewarding", I didn't enjoy the amulet mechanic, some challenge rooms take longer than they should, which can get very annoying (especially optional ones, and I'm looking straight at that goddamn room with 2 xerxes coins!), lore collectibles suck, I miss the "darker" nature of past entries, and checkpoint placement didn't always seem smart.

Prince of Persia Lost Crown is a GOOD game! For real! It's the second metroidvania that made me want to see it to the end. I highly recommend this, especially if you're a fan of the genre.

Now, as a Prince of Persia fan, I hope this isn't the direction they're going with. At least not the only direction. It can be fun, but I prefer this as a spin-off, rather than a mainline entry.

Ok, putting my issues aside and accepting that the moment-to-moment action can be fun, I’m still struggling with some of the takes on this game. I was just reading an article arguing that The Lost Crown does something unique with the way it implements the double jump.

One of my favorite things about Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is that up until I unlocked the double jump, I didn’t know that was going to be one of the game’s upgrades. Part of me expected it, because it's such a staple of the genre, but it comes so late in the game, and I had accomplished so much without it, that I didn’t think I actually needed it. The brilliance of the way The Lost Crown buries the double jump is the way it convinces you that it’s unecessary, but then quickly reveals how important it is once you have it.

This made me scratch my head a bit because during the opening tutorial sections of the game, when the game demonstrates the photo function of the map, the tutorial specifically highlights a chest that you can’t reach without a double jump. My very first thought was precisely the opposite of this author’s. I knew I’d need a double jump and that it was being foreshadowed.

The article goes on to say:

You get the double jump, called Gravity Wings, after defeating a snake boss called Azdaha in the Pit of Eternal Sands. This is the lowest biome in Mount Qaf, and it's no accident that this is where you earn the double jump ability. As you exit the pit and travel up the tall corridor that connects it to the Sunken Harbor, you’ll find yourself in one of the main thoroughfares that you’ve traveled through many times while collecting the keys to access Azdaha. There isn’t anywhere new to go here - the next step is to explore the four corners of the map with your new power - but as you exit the pit you’ll feel the power of the double jump immediately.

It was very clever of Montpellier to make the air dash the first upgrade you find, because it satisfies the need for an early mobility upgrade, and makes you forget all about the double jump until you finally find it much later. The combination of air dash and double jump is also where the platforming in The Lost Crown hits its peak, and the game gives you plenty of time to get comfortable with air dashing before introducing the more complicated relationship between the two abilities.

Again, scratching my head, I couldn’t help but think “gee, all of that sounds familiar.” And maybe it’s because I just played Hollow Knight and maybe I’m attributing too much to similarities but let’s lay this out:

The Lost Crown has a double jump received late in the game (but not last among the abilities) called Gravity Wings. You earn them at the lowest spots on the game map and when you receive them they trivialize the trek back up the mountain that was previously perilous.

Hollow Knight has a double jump received late in the game (but not last among the abilities) called Moth Wings. You earn it at one of the lowest spots on the game map and when you receive them they trivialize the trek back from the Ancient Basin that was previously perilous.

The air dash is the first traversal skill you receive in The Lost Crown which serves as a mobility upgrade that makes the double jump less necessary until later in the game.

The air dash, or Mothwing Cloak, is the first traversal skill you receive in Hollow Knight serves as a mobility upgrade that makes the double jump less necessary until later in the game.

The article concludes with an argument that the game’s final upgrade is fairly conventional, which makes the Gravity Wings standout even more as something clever that Montpellier did and closes out, saying

There are a lot of wrong ways to do the double jump, but luckily, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown does it right.

That could very well be, but I think a lot of design originality is being attributed to a game that clearly borrows ideas directly from other Metroidvanias. That’s not a bad thing, games don’t have to be completely original to be fun. And I think it’s fair to give this game credit for feeling polished and fluid. But originality is not something that it impressed on me throughout the sections I played so far, despite what this article seems to want readers to believe.

Big points for allowing me to play in Farsi.

But then the game commits the number one faux pas for a 2D platformer: no d-pad control movement control. I guess that could be remapped on PC, but since I won’t give Ubisoft money I won’t be buying a digital copy. Used physical is my only option. Shame about the poor control choice and lack of customizability on console.

I don’t love the art design. It has that same sterile plastic look of games like Fortnite.