From the Archives: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown
Waq on, waq off
Notice
I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those, like this one, that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a sidescrolling Metroidvania focused on platforming and melee combat. You play as Sargon, one of the Immortals of Persia, an elite squad of diverse Iron Age superheroes who are sent to the mythological citadel of Mount Qaf to rescue their country’s abducted Prince. Upon reaching the legendary land, they find that time itself is being warped in the vicinity, and split up to find their quarry. Sargon starts with a very limited power set, but as he explores, solves puzzles, and fights bosses, he slowly acquires new abilities that aid him in combat, improve his chances of survival, and open up new paths.
The game features a lot of combat, and although it’s rare that you’ll actually get locked into encounters, you still have to stay on your toes when moving through screens even if you don’t stop to kill everything. The melee is fast, tight, and very satisfying without being overwhelming – you mix together a three-hit combo, uppercuts, sliding kicks, and more with just a combination of one button and your movement, then layer on parries, dodges, your bow, and all of your new abilities as well.
Many new elements even give you cool flashy tricks to pull out as you get more comfortable, like the ability to create a decoy that you can at any time rewind to, letting you charge up a strong swing that sends out a ranged shockwave, copying it, releasing the attack, and then rewinding yourself back into the stance to double it. Another lets you create a rift to a pocket dimension, so you can capture enemy projectiles or explosives from the environment and hurl them back out… or do the same with many enemies, summoning them as temporarily mind-controlled allies.
The real heart of the fighting is the parry system, which by default has just about the perfect amount of leeway, feeds into the Burst meter, and also just looks and feels cool to pull off. Many strong enemies will attempt to break out of stunlocks, and getting a feel for the rhythm with which to deflect or dodge their retaliation without dropping your flow feels a bit like a 2D version of Sekiro. In addition to unparryable attacks, most enemies also have ‘reckless’ attacks, reflected by a yellow glow on their weapon, and like the attacks called out by kanji in Sekiro, they usually are devastating to tank, but extremely rewarding to deflect instead of avoiding, giving you a unique close-up animation and usually an instant kill on a normal enemy, or a massive chunk of health bar for a boss as a reward for taking the risk.
As you land hits and deflect attacks, you also build your Athra, which is a Burst type gauge that lets you unleash special moves. You can equip two Athra abilities at a time, and each consumes one to three full bars of the gauge, on top of having an individual cooldown. Some are just strong attacks or AoEs that give you some invulnerability and let you burn down minibosses quickly, but a few are genuinely special and develop into your chosen playstyle. One early move generates a small healing pool, which you can then try to stand in to top yourself off without wasting one of your Estus Flask style potions. Another gives you a short but extremely strong buff, altering your attacks into a new and faster combo, turning your dodge slide into a longer and faster blink, and improving your damage. My favorite is an empowered parry, that can counter even unblockable moves with a cinematic of you summoning a Stand and launching a retaliatory Kamehameha. Except when you fuck up and fire it the wrong way.
Aside from just more health, currency, and upgrade items, one of the most common rewards for exploration and side content are amulets, which function much like the badge system from Hollow Knight. Some of the amulets have pretty standard effects, like the introductory gift one you get that gives you an extra health bar that can’t be recovered except at save points. But many of the others are a little more interesting, and like the Athra moves, can be chosen to augment the playstyle you enjoy. One amulet generates a small bubble of slowed time whenever you parry, letting you lay down even more abuse on enemies as they recover, while another unlocks the ability to dodge in place, which staggers and damages enemies whose attacks you successfully avoid like that. Additionally, the amulets can be upgraded alongside your swords and bow, strengthening their effects or increasing their area.
There are also a lot of platforming challenges and puzzles, and these are similarly well done. The movement feels good, the requirements for side areas are challenging without becoming infuriating, and the puzzles require just enough lateral thinking to not feel like you’re slotting shapes into holes. With the later platforming sections especially, it started to remind me of Aeterna Noctis, although The Lost Crown never reaches AN’s levels of either exhausting repetition or jubilant accomplishment. The puzzles, especially for some optional chests, make clever use of environmental details, and I enjoyed looping back through zones with new moves more than in some similar games.
As far as Lost Crown’s merits as a Metroidvania go, it does a respectable job. You have a fairly well-defined intended route for most of the game, but poking around side branches or into ‘later game’ areas usually at least gives you a reward before you run into a dead end, and I never got totally stuck or lost without any guidance or obvious path. The game includes a lot of small quality-of-life features innovated by other titles – rest points are heralded with Grace-like wisps flowing in their direction, so you can prioritize hitting them and not worry with every fork in the road that you’re skipping a bonfire. Your limited arrow supply is restored along with your flasks with each rest, along with any arrow stands you might find to provide ammo near puzzles or progression that wants you to have a ranged option.
The map, if you opt for the full features, includes automatic icons for any one-way doors or paths you have only found the closed side of, as well as for any routes that are straightforwardly blocked until you gain a new ability. Finally, along with the ability to manually place pins on the map for free, you can find an improved type of pin, which attaches a screenshot of the screen where you place it, letting you actually see what it was you marked, remind yourself of environmental details, and even see the time and date you were first there.
The story is unsurprising, but is decently well crafted for what it is. What makes it stand out is how well it fits with setting in general. Lore collectables and bits of exposition actually make the game feel, well, pretty Persian. References to sky-burial, the real names of local legendary creatures, and gorgeously detailed backgrounds and architecture give The Lost Crown a lot more soul than you might expect given the Saturday morning cartoon cast, and it gets even better when you swap the English voice-acting out for the “Persian” dub. Now, obviously, I wouldn’t be able to tell you definitively that it isn’t all ad-libbed gibberish like Aeterna Noctis’s pseudo-Spanish [which I liked], but apparently it’s actually a full Farsi dub of the script, and I liked the sound of it enough that I kept it on for most of the game. Also, I couldn’t stand the English VAs trying to give gravitas to lines where they said ‘Wak-wak.’
Naturally, the game has a few quirks and problems, and chief among them for me is the audio. Right off the bat I was struck by how bad the mixing was, with the music kind of stepping on the dialogue in the tutorial areas, so I turned that channel down a tiny bit. Then, later, I realized that I hadn’t heard any music for a long time. Apparently, there’s a somewhat widespread glitch that causes one of the sound channels to constantly lower itself until it’s basically muted – I’ve seen people complaining about losing vocals, sound effects, and, like me, music. Restarting the game seemed to bring it back, but I was never completely sure, because the game just seems to have slapdash sound mixing and levels on top of the glitch.
Speaking of budget problems, the UI is clearly cheap. It’s not so much that it’s BAD, it’s just cheap looking. Probably the most obvious thing is the Estus flask icon, which uses the most generic, mobile-game looking ‘health potion’ drawing imaginable. It’s Prince of Persia! That should be like an hourglass full of magic sand you smash on your face Blasphemous style to rewind time on your wounds or something! Again, it’s not like they’re that bad on their own, but they stand out really starkly against the otherwise great art and animation of the environments, characters, and enemies.
As I played through most of the game, I started getting the sense that it had a really bad case of inverse difficulty curve – if you’re thorough, your upgrades and max health expansion eventually renders most enemies and even bosses kind of underwhelming, as they struggle to do enough damage to you to discourage you from just face-tanking shit and DPS rushing. A little late, I remembered that the game opened with a difficulty selection, and luckily, you can freely change it at any time. The game has four difficulty settings presented to you, but each one is really just a preset, and you are actually given a ton of options for surprisingly granular tweaking. Not only can you shift the damage you take up in 10% increments, you can adjust it differently for damage from enemies and environmental hazards. You can do the same with enemy health and Athra gain, and there are even more toggles that let you adjust mechanics like parry and dodge timing windows.
Impressively, the ‘hard’ difficulty smartly keeps the enemy health standard, and just increases the threat they pose, so that’s what I went with, and for the last hours of the game, it finally felt just right, which is a relief, because those last couple bosses were genuinely epic, and I was no longer eating giant flashy attacks and brushing them off unfazed. Unfortunately, Lost Crown, like Ender Lilies, basically has no real penalty for death – you just respawn at your last save tree, and lose a trivial amount of currency, but get to keep any shortcut unlocks and items you got before perishing. They also went and added a bunch of ‘accessibility’ features, including a toggle that spawns a portal before any tough platforming segments, letting you just skip them outright if you don’t like that shit, with no penalty. Fair enough.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown seems to have released to fairly lukewarm reception, and the sense I get is that it’s a bit burdened by its status as an Ubisoft pile. To be clear, the developers are out of the Montpellier studio, primarily known for the Rayman games [which were also quite good] and so it seems perhaps a bit unfair to hold Lost Crown in judgement for the [many] sins of the parent company… or at least it would be, if Ubisoft didn’t insist on rubbing your face in it from the word go. The very first thing you’ll see when starting the game is a prompt to sign up for Ubisoft’s own online services, and no, it’s not to unlock your ~exclusive~ pre-order skins, their ~riveting~ social networking, or even access to cloud saves [wow! Cloud saves??? Is that even possible?]. To play the fucking game. To earn the right to START the game. On PS5. Off a physical disk.
As much as I’m sure the developers themselves had little to no say in this, it’s still an egregious and pointless imposition. It’s a real shame that this game has to be the testbed for another round of publishers greedily trying to wring their market shares dry and possibly leaving a fine game strung out in limbo as they shuffle to another hustle, shut down the new Ubisoft+ as quickly as CNN+ went under, and neglect to even patch the game to function without it. As many outlets noted, an Ubisoft executive was recently quoted that gamers need to ‘get comfortable’ not owning their games, promoting instead the subscription model, which can give publishers a steady drip of pure profit for work other people have done and been disposed of after. I have a better idea – maybe gamers need to get comfortable pirating games again.
Afterward
The Lost Crown received a short DLC platforming challenge expansion at some point, which I have not played but have heard is fine. As far as I know playing the game still requires an Ubisoft account and constant internet access regardless of platform. Ubisoft+ is still going strong as of early 2026, which is more than can be said of the company in general.
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown can be purchased on Steam, Switch, Playstation 5, and XBox Game Pass.
The Lost Crown was my 6th favorite game of 2024.