Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a slick action-adventure game squashed into two dimensions.
As soon as you wrap up Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’s tutorial and get into the magical mountain where the meat of the game takes place, you’ll be hooked. This first hour or so is all movement, bouncing around to take the fight to the scores of undead that uneasily stride into your path in each room, and it’s hard not to fall in love with it.
This is the new Prince of Persia, the same as the old Prince of Persia. The Lost Crown is a two-dimensional side-scrolling action game that takes that 1989 idea of the original Prince of Persia and infuses it with metroidvania sensibilities. The end result has the same intensity as its genre stablemates Dead Cells and Metroid Dread, but The Lost Crown is its own beast, with a kineticism that outstrips any other metroidvania I’ve ever played.
New hero Sargon pinballs around The Lost Crown’s open world as equal parts acrobat and dancer. Fights will often involve springing into a diving attack from a wall jump, knocking enemies up from the flagstones below, or parrying attacks with ease.
Honestly, though, The Lost Crown is better in movement but flails a bit when it asks you to get stuck in with the combat. Luckily, you spend most of the time holding down the right trigger to sprint around, barely stopping to brutalize the infinitely respawning enemies dotted around the map.
While there is some awkward friction, it’s hard not to see Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as a bold and thoughtful blueprint for reinventing a franchise. While it’s not for this review to talk about the state of AAA game development, and I can’t claim to know how much Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown cost to make, it feels like it’s blazing a trail for a world where more experimental visions of your favorite games can be tried out, instead of rote retreading of games everyone is, secretly, a little bit bored of.
