The Changing Face of Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown releases today. I’ve long been a fan of the series (one of the neatest Christmas gifts I got this year was a copy of Jordan Mechner’s journals from the time he developed the very first game), and while I’ve been looking forward to this game, I’ve also been a little hesitant about it.

My first memories with the series are playing the original game on the Apple IIe computers in the middle school computer lab. I'm not sure what things look like today, but back during my middle school years when students arrived at the building before classes started, we were allowed to have free time on the computers. There were a handful of games available to us. Oregon Trail and Lode Runner were popular, but my personal favorite was Prince of Persia. It wasn’t at all complex by today’s standards, but it was unique. Players took control of the titular Prince, who had been thrown into the dungeon by the evil vizier Jaffar. Players had a one-hour time limit to escape the dungeon and reach Jaffar before he either married the Princess, or she died.

There was a little combat, but the vast majority of the game consisted of exploring and puzzling out how to reach the next area while avoiding numerous death traps – all done as quickly as possible, thanks to the ticking clock. Mastering the game took a while, and I never managed to do it in that school computer lab. But I regularly returned to the title, hoping to get a little further, to go a little faster each time.

I played a little bit of the sequel, and even less of the third game, which was one of the earliest games to make the leap to 3D (that transition didn’t go so well....). For whatever reason, they just didn’t capture my imagination in the same way, and the series quietly faded away in my mind.

That changed in 2003 when Ubisoft released Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, in partnership with Mechner once again. The developers at Ubisoft had crafted a beautiful game that captured the isolation of traversing the dungeons, the exotic feeling of the setting, and the fluid animation that set the first game apart from the rest of the industry. The story had evolved a bit, this time having the prince partner, in part, with the princess in order to save the world, with the entire game being presented as a narrative told by the Prince himself. (A favorite bit early on was, when the player had died, the Prince saying “No, no, no. That didn’t happen.”) Yuri Lowenthal was excellently cast as the Prince, and his voiceovers throughout were endearing and entertaining. The game as a whole was so well done that it’s the first - and only, thus far - that I started again immediately after beating it.

Sands of Time was followed by two more games that followed this same Prince, although with varying degrees of success and critical reception. Warrior Within (2004) took a hard turn into edgy, bleak territory, embracing the trend of the time. Where Sands was ethereal, Warrior was grungy. Where Sands had featured adventure and swashbuckling, Warrior was vulgar and brutal. The story of Warrior Within, arguably, justified the tonal shift, as the Prince spent much of the game running for his life from a very Terminator-esque enemy. But it was so jarring to me that I only ever finished the game once, and only then because I kept hoping it would redeem itself in the end. (It didn’t.) This was followed by The Two Thrones (2005), which sought to appease audiences of both games by returning somewhat to the more fantastical and lighthearted tone of Sands, while not fulling divesting itself of the more rough nature of Warrior. I remember enjoying it far more than Warrior, but little beyond that. I wonder if trying to be a game that both audiences wanted didn’t water it down to the point where it was simply not all that memorable.

The series took a break after that, with the next game being entirely disconnected from the Sands of Time trilogy. Titled simply Prince of Persia, it released in 2008 with what was described as a painterly art style, and a significant departure from the previous games in terms of difficulty and combat. I enjoyed it immensely, thanks to an increased emphasis on story, puzzling out how to traverse the world, and a very forgiving approach to gameplay that made it unlikely for players to be too frustrated for any length of time. While perhaps my second favorite game in the series, it was different enough from the previous games and not enough of a challenge for many that it sadly didn’t meet sales expectations. This resulted in Ubisoft trying to go back to the more familiar Sands of Time trilogy style of gameplay with The Forgotten Sands (2010), but this too didn’t set the world on fire, and the franchise was put on ice for a time.

The series has had its ups and downs. There have been changes upon changes, and I’m not sure that someone who played that first game back in the 80s would recognize the franchise today. It was a relatively simple 2D platformer with some light combat and puzzles. Then it was 3D, but not very good. Then it was 3D and really good, with a lot more combat. Then it had an emo phase. Then it mostly grew out of that but wasn’t very unique. Then it was definitely unique, but also definitely very easy. Then it was less easy (again), but kind of forgettable (again).

Then last year in June, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was announced, and all kinds of changes were apparent from the first moment. Back to playing on a 2D plane, with an emphasis on combat, but also traversal, but you’re also not actually playing as the Prince that we know or any prince at all. While the game looked good, it didn’t feel very much like the Prince of Persia I was familiar with. Until I began to write this, that is, and recalled that this franchise has been in a state of change nearly from one game to the next from the very beginning. I was initially concerned that the game just had the Prince of Persia name on it in order to sell copies, and it wouldn’t be anything like the previous entries in the series. I was initially put off by the idea of not playing as a Prince, even though now I realize we’ve already done that with the 2008 entry. I kept looking for constants, for references or callbacks to previous games. I kept hoping that the game might come to look or feel more like the Prince of Persia that I was familiar with because I really love this series. Turns out it’s more like the previous games than I recognized at first glance, simply because change has been the constant in the Prince of Persia games as much as anything else. Having recognized that, it’s easier to accept that this new Prince of Persia looks and plays differently than I initially hoped for. And while I’ll always have a soft spot for Sands of Time (here’s hoping the remake actually happens and it retains the charm of the original), if the reviews for the new one are accurate it seems like we’re in for a treat with the latest game.

I wonder what will change next.